Bubbledragon AOE Explosion
Cinematic Camera Angle
Moba Styled Camera Angle
- Concept by Marina Nechaeva – https://www.artstation.com/artwork/G8GBNN
I found this concept while browsing effects on Artstation and I loved it! I asked for permission to make a 3D version of it and got to work.
This project forced me to jump into what I would call some of my weaker sides such as Keyframe Animation and Vertex Displacement – after some time and feedback from the TGA Animators I achieved a result I am proud of and I even learned to love Keyframe animation and I feel as if that skill has now been added to my toolbox!
The Water Streams are powered by Niagaras Tube Ribbons,
The Circular ones that are creating the portal utilizing the “rotate around point” in Niagara, However for the one that goes around the arm I had to create a custom Niagara node in order to have the ribbon follow a spline, I played around with creating the motion of the Dragons with the same method, however, that gave me a quite unnatural result and I found that keyframe Animation was better – The trail for them are also Ribbons.
This Combined with some good-looking materials and Textures is the result! I was looking quite a lot at how TemTem does their water sprays for reference.
- Follow Spline Tube Ribbon (Slide One)
- Follow Spline Custom Scratch Pad (Slide Two)
- Bubbledragons Squash/Stretch and eye Open/Close through Vertex Displacement in Niagara (Slide One)
- BubbleDragon Material Graph (Slide Two)
For the Dragon’s motion, I animated their position in Niagara by keyframing each bounce, I played around with using other methods such as using Velocity which was harder to control, and having them follow splines which made it easy to control the motion but they looked very rigid.
Keyframe animation gave me the best result and It was really fun to learn!
For the Squash and Stretch, I used Vertex Displacement in the shader with parameters that I could control inside of Niagara. I had VertexColors to mask between the Head and the Eyes to separate them so that I could animate the eyes as shown in the concept – If I were to revisit this project in the future I would make a clearer distinction in the material so that this effect is shown clearly.
For the portal itself, I made a Parallax Shader with 3 different textures that rotate and blend together in order to get the feeling that there is depth and an opening to this bubbly water world that the Dragons come from! This shader has values exposed that I animated in Niagara to time with the wind-up effect!
- Portal to the world of the Bubbledragons! (Slide One)
- Vortex Shader Graph (Slide Two)
Main Niagara Systems
- BubbleDragons Niagara System(Slide One)
- Explosion Niagara System (Slide Two)
- Rings Wind up Niagara System (Slide Three)