December 2024
This was part of my final for my ART391 intermediate production art class.
The effect is actually two effects which I combine together to get the charge-up / release effect. The first effect I created was the charge up. It consists of a couple materials layered onto each other and some basic textures.
I created four main materials for this effect: The Core material which gives the blackhole it’s galaxy core; the Swirl material, which creates the swirl around the edge of the blackhole; the star material, which is overall a basic material with the star texture; and finally a ring material which has the glowing rings with a slight distortion effect.
Here are the materials I used for the charge up effect:
Afterwards I went on to make the release effect which was much simpler, I had to model a quick cylinder in Maya, and then I layered three on top of each other. One with an additive material in the core. One which reused my galaxy material from the charge up. And one which had a basic fresnel which gives the outside of the blast its glow.
Finally I created a cracks decal, which was a quick thing to do. If I wanted to make this effect more game-ready I would have implemented the cracks into a niagara system, however to save time and seeing as it was simple enough to do I just added a decal and changed its visibility in the level sequencer.
