VFX GIG

So for this part i want to play about with Niagara for a bit but the final brief of grads in games, I think, is that you can only have 1 particle system that goes from idle, to powering up, to releasing of the power, to an Impact, then finally back to Idle.

so for that I'm going to just do Cascade as I'm fast and more knowledgeable about it and I'm under time constraints. 

Its similarities are reflected over Cascade and Niagara, and without a doubt Niagara is Superior, with the combination of Blueprints you can tell particles to spawn on the surface area of a mesh, just that was enough to blow my mind but I know there's a lot more that can be done.

But that took me all day to get right, for some reason when I was attaching the Niagara system to the animation it would play it twice, once after a short delay  (not intended) into the animation instead of being at the start and again when I landed ??? turns out I forgot to loop but that also took me a fair few minutes to find in Niagara.

so, I'm going to be continuing the rest of this brief in Cascade.

so hears the breakdown for this one.

Overview:

The reason I did this was because at the start of making this effect I thought the textures I had weren't central but I realized it was fine in the end, but with the custom rotator I had an idea, if I could switch out and this cool swirls pattern and replace it with this one without a rotation maybe it'll look decent.

secondly, I needed a ring of sorts to show energy has been charged and released into the idle stance, I tried a few prototype meshes. 

But because the meshes where just planes pushed out from the center it just look to strange so i remade them as smooth cylinders.

I have one like this with the UV Stretching filling the UV to manipulate the texture, and another with pieces cut out but the UV's overlapping to get the original shape of the texture, two textures for the price of one.

now that the meshes are made and material is done its time to work in cascade.

By using a dynamic parameter node I can now influence the rotation and 2 Textures marked T1 and T2, so at the beginning i have T2 appear and have the material as a whole rotate its self for exactly half of its life time, also the total life of the emitter itself is 5 seconds, this is done by setting the "In Val" to 0.5 < this being the life time and the "Out Val" to 5 < this being the total number of rotations to complete over the course of 2.5 seconds.

using the same values for "In Val" for the two switching textures will perfectly time the transition of rotation to no rotation when the textures fully switch.

this is the "In Val" and "Out Vals" for bringing T2 in for the start of the Effect and T1 is the same just timed at "In Val" 0.5

And finally, the rings of Light, the fully connected one was easy, not much needed to be done, the mesh gives a nice smooth gradient around the whole ring, the second however still looked strange.

I tried messing with the size by life at first to make the light taller from nothing back to 0.1 on the Z axis for the illusion of light, and some rotation rate, but it still didn't quite work but by spawning 3 with the combination of random rotation rate made a more interesting result.