Today we will show you how we finished the volcano and we will talk about its parts.
But.. what are particles? That's a good question indeed!
A particle is an image (or mesh or point) generated by a system in big numbers who applies them a motion. You can control position, rotation, size, texture and color animation, forces, rendering, etc.
The first part is the lava zone at the foot of the volcano. We already showed it in an older post but we have been improving it. Now the lava texture is not so much tiled and the spots are way bigger. We implemented a new heat distortion effect based on special meshes in motion with a material. That material uses a shader who reads a normal map and distorts the image rendered behind. Now you can see a new steam/somke particle system increasing the heat effect. We created another particle system with meshes for the lava bubbles which grow and explode. The explosion is a particle sub-system with “billboard” particles (that means there are always looking at the camera). This sub-system begins when a mesh particle of the bubbles particle system dies.
The second part is the vulcano eruption. It has several parts. A complex particles system with sub-systems for the lava. It contains the pouring lava, the normal lava splatter and the high lava splatter. The high splatter has stretched billboard particles, which are deformed billboard particles influenced by the speed and orientation.
Another part is the system of small fireballs. It's made with a particle system with an animated tile sheet with 16 tiles. The eruption has a simple system for the smoke too. This smoke is only seen from a few spots so we kept it “cheap” for the rendering.
The big fireballs are made with another complex particle system. That system is an area which casts balls with an animated texture. Each ball has a sub-sytem which is always dropping fire particles with an animated texture and making a trail. The balls also have another sub-system for the smoke that works like the fire trail but starting later.
Finally there is an area surrounding the volcano with another particle system for the volcano ashes. There are small particles floating on air with a color-animated-by-the-system texture which goes from bright orange to gray in order to simulate burning ashes.
That's all for now. Next time we could talk about the visual effects of the characters' special skills or even about dragons.
