Following the refocus back to the Semi-Wormhole project (name change pending), my first order of business was to begin fixing some of our more broken models. This involved going through our models and updating UV maps to fix various issues, and using Substance Painter to rebuild the textures. This has the added benefit of creating substance painter files that can be used to easily update textures in the future.
While my fellow artists started updating some of the less than satisfactory models, I dug into improving the particle systems I made for the generator turret. In the past this had simply been a texture applied to a sphere. Now, I wanted to make actual particle systems. I actually had started with particle systems for Timmy on the Toenail ship, but never got to implement that as that day we decided to drop the project. What I had made was a simple AOE effect to indicate the size of the AOE hammer attack.
With this basic foundation, I watched a few more tutorials on the particle editor and started work on a lightning effect. The basic process was taking a material, stretching it out, and proving points along the created beam that could jump around procedurally with a noise texture to create a lightning effect. Using the beam data type let me do all of this, as well assigning a start and end point for the beam so I could make an actual projectile with it.
This system worked fine, apart from a few issues with targeting parts of a blueprint, however there was one major issue I soon learned. I was using the Cascade particle system for all of these effects. In UE5, this system would be removed. So, I had to sit down and start over using the Niagara system. Thankfully many of the basic principles carried over, and after a day I could present a new lightning system that looked even better than before.
My goal moving forwards is to improve this system further and create a sort of electrical discharge or explosion to match the AOE attack of the turret.
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