Lotus Burst Effect
Here's a lotus burst effect I did! Did this over the course of two sittings, and is actually among my first personal pieces I've done from start to end. Wanted to see how much I can apply myself after spending most of my time in learning and doing small exercises and I'm pretty proud of this piece. Wanted to share some of the details of the effect!
A lot of the fun of this project was experimenting with how efficient I can be with materials and limiting my texture calls. For this whole system, I used 3 textures, 2 being fully channel packed and some extra textures that I didn't have space for. If I were to tackle this again I would make some changes, but here's what I was working with:
This is the first channel packed texture. I have a caustics map I got from a texture image pack some time ago, a hand-painted Flower map I made for the shockwave at the beginning, and a simple clouds texture I generated in Photoshop. This whole effect started with me experimenting with a UV technique I got from Shannon Berke's LoL Knowledge Share on realtimevfx.com. Her thread is such an indispensable resource for my growth in realtime VFX. She made this GIF that shows how she created this effect:
Here's the second texture. It includes a petal sprite sheet, and textures for the inner side and outer side of the petals. The reason why I included two of the petals was because I wanted both sides of the petals to have different colors and have inverted values going from the tip of the petal to the stem. I achieved this by duplicating the lotus model I made in Maya and reversing the normals:
It had a cool effect, but the angle that the viewer is going to be seeing the angle at, they wouldn't be able to see the underside of the petal, so it turned out to be pretty useless in the final result. Even still, I think a better way to optimize this is to create the petal to be more flat in value, and use a component mask to mask out a gradient on top of the petal. That way, I could've had a channel free for the last texture.
I painted a quick and dirty shock texture that shows up on a ring mesh renderer when the flower dematerializes at the end. Nothing crazy here. If I had the foresight, I would have added this to one of the other textures if I knew I wouldn't need one of the petals!
Another hand-painted texture for the anticipation ring at the beginning of the effect.
Here's the primary material that I used for the Niagara System. A simple additive blend material with some additional node setups that allow me to have some customizability in the UV tiling and offset via a dynamic parameter input, and Wind strength.
The Niagara setup (14 Emitters)
This setup can be broken up by 3 sections that include the anticipation shock ring, the bloom + shockwave, and light ray + petal burst as the lotus dematerializes.