Merry Christmas Eve everyone! Being on break has allowed me the time to continue to learn even more skills. There are so many things I want to continue learning: Unity, Character Modeling (I will make a post on that eventually), Animations with Characters, and the list goes on. What I have been also wanting to pick up on is VFX Creation.

Initially, when I only focused on learning Unreal Engine, I focused primarily on Blueprints and C++, essentially focused on how to program a game. The assets and animations utilized in Project R have all been grabbed from free assets. The issue with using free assets is two things:

1. If the assets are free or open sourced, anyone can use them. That means your game will inevitably look similar to another persons game if you both used the free assets. Uniqueness comes down.
2. Sometimes the assets you get aren’t exactly what you were looking for. Sure, they may get the job done, but maybe you had an idea for a move or animation but this just doesn’t hit exactly what you wanted.

These sort of things encouraged me to learn more about Character, Asset, and VFX creation. Not only could I become more familiar with the tools and skills used, but more power is given to me. Knowing this sort of stuff doesn’t give me any negatives, so why not?

I started off by wanting to make a sword slash. A regular, horizontal curve that would indicate a sword was swung in that direction. A sword slash is great, as I can make one asset for it, then create a bunch with different colours. I was also thinking I would be able to implement the ideas I had for powers I made I drew in the concept art, maybe a green energy slash or a dark energy slash. After going through tutorials on YouTube and getting myself more familiar on Blender, I was able to create the asset and give it a little animation:

Not too bad. It gives off the impression of an ice slash attack, with how jagged the asset is. If I wanted to give it a fire impression, perhaps I would manipulate the shape to give it off a more rounded and fluid like appearance. This is not a bad start, but there can be improvements. On the animation side of it, I used 4 key frames within 15 or so frames to give it the proper rotation. What I want to do next is to have a proper fade out effect, because when you see it implemented into the game, the animation looks like this:

The video quality looks blurry, but as you can see there are a few problems. First and most definitely noticeable, the slash looks really skinny in game. This is most likely due to scaling issues going from Blender to Unreal, since both use a different measurement which can be adjusted. Second of all, the slash simply rotates around the character, and then just randomly disappears. For a start this is okay, but I want it to have a fade out effect, where it slowly dissipates little by little when the slash is completed. When I continue to learn more about Blender, my VFX and Animating skills will improve. This model will change, and I will continue to update it as time goes on to more complex and fluid effects.

For now, that is all. Once again, Merry Christmas Eve everyone!