I used some of my free time the earlier weeks to watch tutorials as well as read helpful guides like the League of Legends VFX Style Guide and familiarise myself with visual effects in UE4. I wrote down ideas on what the effects could look like and how they could potentially work very early on in my project. Now that I had pretty much all of my base animations in engine, I went ahead and spent a few days on creating visual effects for each of the abilities. Since I never worked on vfx before I designated a little more than 2 weeks purely for this, which means that I am now about 2 weeks ahead of my project schedule.
- Most of the effects are created with particle systems with only one exception, which is the animated flower, since skeletal meshes can not be used with emitters.
- I used various kinds of emitters including meshes, beams, trails as well as standard sprite emitters although most of my vfx are using simple plane and cylinder meshes.
- My particles are spawned either at the root of the character or designated sockets in the skeleton
The only issue I ran into working on VFX was a random delay on some of the particle emitters that I could not figure out to get rid of yet, but I will be looking into it further!
Additionally to my visual effects work Christian Maund set up a dummy within the level that can be targeted with auto attacks. I will animate this attack the following weekend.