Grim The Gargoyle King
“Embark on a crystal treasure hunt as a gargoyle brought to life. Charge through the ruinous castle wards and find enough supporters to become the gargoyle king.”
A game project I was part of at The Game Assembly. The game was built using a proprietary engine developed by the programmers in our group. Elias Örn - Technical Art and I collaborated as technical artists on this project. All the shaders are written in HLSL. Particle effects are created with a custom-built particle system made by the programmers. My primary responsibility was creating character and environment VFX.
Cone Attack
The characters main ability. A spray of crystal-magic. The effect consists of scrolling textures on two seapreate meshes and a particlesystem.
Enemy Attack VFX
Impact effect with a large dust cloud and pages flying everywhere. Designed to enhance the feedback of the attack.
Breakables
I was responsible for creating a pipeline for breakable simulations from Houdini to the game engine. The simulation created in Houdini is imported into Unreal Engine, where the skeleton is generated. Then, the skeletal mesh and animation are exported separately and imported into Maya, where some adjustments are made to prepare the asset for the game engine. I had to overcome many issues with scale and rotation. Due to the limited time on the game project, functionality was the priority.
Player Death Simulation
Player death simulation made in Houdini. The idea for the player to fall apart as he dies came from animatior NAT PETTERSSON - Game Animator.
Fire
This fire-effect is created using UV distortion and masking instead of spawning multiple particles or flipbook animations. This technique makes the the effect alot cheaper. Watch Character VFX for a more detailed breakdown on how i acheived this effect.
Portal
The portal-shader is made with HLSL. The portal transition screen-effect is made by Elias Örn - Technical Art & the character offset is made by Jonathan Karlsson
Breakdown
Fog Particle-system
A flipbook particlesystem. I was able to reuse the procedural fog i created in Six Point Light - Fog.
Speedlines
The speedlines shader is written in HLSL without using a texture. I experimented with different methods to generate lines from a UV map.
This is how i genreated the lines:
Then, I used the atan function to create a radial UV map, making the lines point inward. Viewing the effect slowed down clarifies how I rotate the lines.
