Stay in Line

screenshot

screenshot

screenshot

As I knew I would be using premade resource packs as a base for this project

I began by researching what was out there, and shortlisting things that appealed to me.

I selected two packs, that I used along side each other.

I chose the round shape because I wanted them to be unthreatening and curious.

Storyboard

I really wanted it to have a light trail that hung in the air after the drone itself had gone.

I wanted this to be the main VFX in this sequence.

To create the drone I used sub d modeling techniques in Maya.

I packed the Uvs to be similar to the texel density of the assets I had sourced.

The material for the drones light trail. Made of a greyscale stripe texture I made in Photoshop, animated using panners. I used two slightly offset from each other to create more movement and break up the pattern.

The water material, at the top there’s three copies of the normal texture, each one is panning a different direction to create a sense of irregularity, I don’t need much movement in this water so the speed is very low.

The water ripples material was a simplified version of my water material. I created the donut normal and opacity in substance painter, using an alpha.

For the water ripples particle system I used a box location to contain the sprites and in the render I used the
– custom facing vector setting –
with the set set sprite facing in particle spawn to make them all face up. To animate the ripple I used sc

I created a single cloud texture in Photoshop, in the material I applied a texture coordinate to duplicate the single cloud in to a grid of 64.

Over this I then applied a gradient from right to left, creating a flipbook with a gradient for the emitter.

I used UV animation to play the flipbook in the sprite material and I used scale colour on a curve to fade the particles in and out to prevent popping. In the particle system I exposed the velocity to a user parameter.