Advanced sparks for Unreal Engine
First prototype 2021 There’s hardly a game without sparks. But how far are artists willing to go to make them look good? Obviously, a simple sphere mask on a billboard isn’t exactly what you’d want to see in a modern game. I want to talk about my attempts to solve this issue. I conducted many experiments, which resulted in a pipeline that balances visual quality and performance. Sparks pipeline After testing in gameplay conditions, it became clear that using eight sides for a spark and a few edges for distortion or ricochet effects is justified. Below is a table showing the approved topology for use: Below you can see an illustration of the ricochet algorithm. It turned out that there's no need for a large number of edges. A single additional edge is enough to handle one bounce effectively. Ricochets with two or more bounces were excluded from production. There is a fundamental principle in computer game development (and beyond) that can be roughly formulated as: A polygon should ...