Lava bubble popping effect
polycounter lvl 5
Hello fellow Polycounters 
About one year ago, I read a very good article/post about a technique about how to make a cool lava bubble popping effect. I thought I read it either at Polycount or at Simon's Schreibt blog, but I couldn't find anything using the search engines of both sites. And now I'm trying to figure it out where did I find it, since I need to do a similar effect.
Does this ring a bell to any of you guys? Help would be much appreciated
Thank you in advance!
Juan Moraga.
About one year ago, I read a very good article/post about a technique about how to make a cool lava bubble popping effect. I thought I read it either at Polycount or at Simon's Schreibt blog, but I couldn't find anything using the search engines of both sites. And now I'm trying to figure it out where did I find it, since I need to do a similar effect.
Does this ring a bell to any of you guys? Help would be much appreciated
Thank you in advance!
Juan Moraga.
Replies
Scale and Translate: Pretty much self explanatory. Slowly scale and move it up, tremble it a bit, then quickly scale it down. As it pops if you squash it vertically and scale it horizontally you can get that dimple effect just before it pops and the lateral movement gives the impression that it popped.
This same idea can be done with morph targets also. Unreal has the static mesh morph target system, that bakes the vertex animation into 3 uv channels of the mesh. Because they are static meshes you can use them in the particle system. You can use it to make bird meshes shoot out of a particle emitter and flap their wings, or to distribute bubbles around lava ect... Lots of uses.
OR...
Animate the UV's with an opacity map: This is good for slower pops with thicker material. This one is pretty easy to set up in most engines.
Deconstructing this, it could be done in 3d using an alphatest shader on a hemisphere, plus a particle effect for the droplets, and another for the ripple.
https://stevencraeynest.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/easy-volumetric-explosion-in-unity3d/
@Eric Chadwick Thank you too Eric, for taking the time to look for it as well. Iirc it was something related to vertex paint, and it looked really nice. I hate when I can't find good articles that I read long ago. That volumetric explosion with the displacement method is nuts as well, really impressive!
Thank you both again!
https://realtimevfx.com/t/jordanov-sketch-17-wip/6207/6
I hate to necro, but it's crazy cause I remember the exact thread with Simon S you're talking about XD