FMP - week 16 - 17 - Night loop art assets and VFX

These weeks were all about creating all the necessary art assets for the night loop, from 3D models to visual effects. I focused on the following things:

• Castle

• Flags

• Fireball VFX start

• Firebreath VFX start

• Canyon environment

• Explosion VFX

• Preliminary testing

Time to dig in!

The castle

For the castle attack minigame we of course needed a castle (surprise). We had looked at some asset packs that we could potentially use but none of them seemed right to us, or they were not optimized for gameplay properly. After a bit of back and forth we decided that I will spend time on making custom castle assets. It would be an additional time investment that we hadn't anticipated for in the proposal, but we felt it was necessary for the project and worth the time. This is what contingency in planning is for right?

To make sure I would use my time as effectively as possible I tried to break down the castle into individual building blocks that I could use. Building blocks are smaller and take less time, and then I have full freedom in Unity to build a castle however I wanted to.

When I started with this, I noticed though that there are so many different types of castles! Before I could identify the building blocks I needed, I dove into the world of castle building. There was a lovely YouTube video I found which gave an overview of a bunch of different castle styles (Brooks 2019) and a video that gave a quick rundown of essential history around castles (Animated History 2017). These videos helped me understand that the type of castle I wanted to make was referred to as a Gothic revival castle or a Neo Gothic castle.

Now that I knew the right terminology I could find two great example castles that I could use for reference material. These are the Hohenzollern castle in Germany, and the Corvin castle in Romania, both are recognized as having gothic revival style architecture (Gers 1980; Rolandia 2023). Below you can see the resulting reference board I created.

I broke the castle down into the following parts:

- Tower

o Tower base (plain)

o Tower base (with holes)

o Tower top

- Gate house

- Wall

- Circular roof

- Rectangular roof

- Elongated window

- Circular window

This set of building blocks seemed to me like the minimum viable set for building a castle. I started simple in Blender and imported everything in to Unity to build a first version which you can see below.

I felt that the castle looked too clearly repetitive with the PBR materials I used. I also felt that the brick PBR material looked too “clean” and it didn’t give the atmosphere that I wanted. I dove back into Blender and adjusted UV maps to tackle the material repetition. I also swapped out materials and started setting up the lighting in the scene to get a better understanding of how the castle really looked. The resulting castle can be seen below.

To bring a bit more life to the castle I also created some flags and set up the clothing effect in Unity to make it move and drape like a proper flag.

Canyon environment

After wrapping up the castle, I moved on to the creation of a canyon environment for the animal chase minigame. Here the player will be flying through a canyon chasing birds.

I set up the environment to follow a rough 8 shape, to make the flight path endless. This would allow Rob to loop the player through the canyon without being limited in time.

I created the environment Unity Terrain tools. After the base shapes where in I continued to texturing and after I was happy with the textures I added in water and details like stones and plants.

I felt like the canyon needed something to bring it alive a bit more so I also added a simple waterfall particle system. For the waterfall I followed a tutorial by mr WASD (Mr WASD 2015).

Visual effects

As said, I also spent time on visual effects. The waterfall before was an example, and in addition I spent some time on VFX for the dragon specifically. I started with a fireball VFX. It began with a simple projectile and I built it up to something that looked like a proper fireball.

• First, I created a glowing orb with shadergraph. I displaced the vertices to create movement on the orb, and I used noise to create spots of high intensity and low intensity, mimicking something that is glowing hot.

• Then I added some swarm particles around it with VFX graph

• I added a “charging phase” where particles are sucked to a center before bursting out as a ball

• I added a smoke trail

It started to resemble a proper fireball! The last piece that was missing was an explosion on collision. Since we will need explosions in multiple parts of the game I decided to split out the explosion effect.

Making explosion effects that have aspects of realism really need quality texture flipbooks. Luckily, I found that Unity Technologies published a ton of flipbooks that are free to use (Iché 2016)! With that in hand I could set up an explosion effect in just half an hour. You can see the full fireball plus explosion effect demonstrated below.

After the fireball effect I moved on to the fire breath effect. I had already made a flamethrower effect for our 730 project so with some quick retexturing and recoloring I could easily set up the fire breath of the dragon.

List of references

ANIMATED HISTORY. 2017. ‘A Mini Guide to Medieval Castles | Animated History’. YouTube [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXXDThkJ3Ew [accessed 26 Feb 2023].

BROOKS, Shad M. 2019. ‘The Different Types of Medieval CASTLES’. [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv6Yl45g1y4&t=258s [accessed 26 Feb 2023].

GERS, Herbert. 1980. Burg Hohenzollern. 5th edn. Available at: https://books.google.nl/books/about/Burg_Hohenzollern.html?id=QuYHnwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y [accessed 26 Feb 2023].

ICHÉ, Thomas. 2016. ‘Free VFX Image Sequences and Flipbooks’. Unity Blog [online]. Available at: https://blog.unity.com/technology/free-vfx-image-sequences-flipbooks [accessed 26 Feb 2023].

MR WASD. 2015. ‘Unity3D Waterfall Tutorial’. YouTube [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhSp8nFLUi4&t=240s [accessed 26 Feb 2023].

ROLANDIA. 2023. ‘Corvin Castle (Hunyadi Castle) | One of the 7 Wonders of Romania’. rolandia.eu [online]. Available at: https://rolandia.eu/en/blog/places/the-corvin-castle [accessed 26 Feb 2023].