We at Tuatara had the pleasure to work on Counterplay Games' Godfall Fire & Darkness expansion. I was in charge of creating and populating the environment VFX alongside Kate Bernard, and given the vast expanse of the environment, we opted for mesh based effects, similar to our approach in the base game. We then built very versatile ash and smoke systems, that use the meshes' own bounding box to determine their motion, which allowed us to quickly cover a lot of ground and create a wide variety of looks and behaviors with the same base assets. Due to the fact that the motion is handled solely by the vertex shader, these effects have a much lower CPU cost than regular particle systems would.
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The fiery environment required a dense atmosphere, full of smoke and embers.
This smoke column blueprint can be easily customized by adjusting the actor's scale, which will determine the distance, trajectory and size of each sprite. Other parameters allow for fine tuning the amount of sprites, colors, softness etc.
A scene using a variety of mesh based effects.
The ground smoke blueprint creates smoke sprites in an ellipse. Their motion can be directional or chaotic, they can rise or sink, colors, density and velocity can be customized as well.
This blueprint creates a continuous falling ash effect inside a cylindrical volume. These were used in some parts of the environment that consist in enclosed areas with openings where ashes would fall through.
Some areas are wide open and covered in ash, thus required a different approach.
This falling ashes effect, instead of localized, tiles around the player's camera. Thus each open area only needs a single mesh for the effect to work, and its density scales down at the borders of the bounding box, creating a smooth transition.