Week 3 - Bonus Stage: The quest for fire

So to start, initially I wanted to see if the fire effect could be produced via a particle effect which I started to explore via tutorials online. Unfortunately a lot of the tutorials I had found were quite hard to grasp so I decided to seek help in a 3rd year who directed my attention to flipbook textures instead of studying particles as they claimed it would be much more efficient for the scene and easier to manage for both me and the level.

Whilst working with flipbook textures I had hit many roadblocks each with their own challenges to solve. This whole process taught me not only how to produce such a texture but also to embrace failing as failing lead me to make some cool stuff.

First attempt – Using this method I had noticed there was a lack of animation between each frame and that the texture obviously looked like a planar texture with a glow.

Second attempt – I had found from playing with constants and multiply nodes that not only can I increase the emissive quality of the texture to mimic a glow, I can overlay colour on these flames to not only mask the flatness of the plane but also push a much warmer glowing colour.

This was me just having fun. I don’t know why but I wanted to see how far I could push the texture and see if I could create a texture reminiscent of the Hadouken from the street fighter series. (Did I mention I was a massive fan?)

However through my pratting about I managed to stumble on a cool idea. How about mixing what I learnt about lighting with this flipbook texture; creating an animated emissive that actually is a light source in the scene. This has now resulted in this mess below.

Alright so it’s not too clearly illustrated in this image (bad past me) but I updated the texture of the flipbook to be more of a sprite sheet and thus have a coherent fluid animation.

Now if only this was the end of this battle………

The quest for fire – Boss battle

“Welcome to die” – Magneto Xmen Arcade

So I’ve managed to work out how to make fire and I’m feeling like a Neanderthal when he just discovered that x plus this equal fire which means cool opportunities but now I’ve got to work out how I’m going to place this cool trick on my Candlesticks.

As the quote above suggests I was ready to die. The process just to get my candles lit with candle light was one of the most stressful and problematic experiences I have had on the project but looking back I’ve learnt so much and with a result like that I could not have enjoyed it anymore.

My first attempt involved the adding planes to my candle sticks and applying the flame as an alpha. This didn’t work. I had found that as you moved around the candle you would run into either two situations. The first one would be if set on two sided the material would show two flames burning on the same plane. This simply put looked wrong and off putting whereas the second situation would be a result of unticking two sided which resolved the first problem but created a new one in the form of the Candle flame not being visible from certain angles.

I had no option to go to my tutors for help. Unfortunately none knew how to remedy this problem, the closest idea we had on how to resolve this was from a method one of my tutors knew of from watching a tutorial about an unrelated process to resolve a different problem. This resulted in a literal quest to firstly find the name of the process that will help me as well as finding how to do this so called secret Holy Grail technique. At the time it was not fun but on reflection it’s quite a nice memory to look back on.

After hours of trying and failing I was about to call it quits and decided to go for a wander in which I bumped into a 3rd year and asked them on the off chance if they knew what I was talking about and see if they could help me. As luck would have it they exactly knew what I was talking about and how to help me.

I introduce to you….. BILLBOARDS !?!?!?

yes as it turns out the method I needed to apply was a process called billboards a resultant of blueprints which causes the plane of the flames to always face the player not matter what the position. This method resolve my problem but brings a minor problem to its plate. It being if you are the look down at the flame from a bird’s eye view the flame will face you directly. This is such a small criticism since in the level itself one cannot actually achieve such a dead on bird’s eye view so hopefully it won’t be too noticeable. It’s not perfect but its miles a head of the previous problems I had faced with this texture.

This was my quest for fire and in the end I found more than fire, I found blueprints and billboards which I wish to push in the future because there are so many opportunities for cool stuff. I have to say although I’m not 3D’s biggest fan I’m starting to like engines possibilities and experimentation.