Laser Weapon Hit

This was a personal project that I wanted to do to explore the more technical artist side of games. I decided on doing this laser hit effect because I thought it would be a good challenge and it something I had quite seen done before. This project really expanded my knowledge of technical blueprinting and the work that go into game effects.

Level Design:   ​www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/scifi-hallway

My first thought for this project was to try and manipulate the code of the Slice Procedural Mesh node, this ended up being to the best of my knowledge not possible. So the second method was looking at destructible mesh, this worked but it looked more like crumbling stone than a melted metal wall. Finally I went with a render target that was connected to a mask layer of a material, this looked the closest to what I pictured in my head.    

My second milestone I started spawning a cylinder that lined up with the render target hole. To give the effect of melting away I used vertex painting to control the offset of the center of the cylinder. I also use this method to skew the cylinder to give it a directional effect.  

​This next leap in the process happened when I got the overlap effect to start working. This took a few weeks to figure out how to do. I eventually descried to just use a pre-programmed overlap in the material using the uv hit on a line trace. Unfortunately, this limits the cylinder to only be hit twice. I am going to keep working on this to hopefully get it working properly.   

Blueprint Break Down

The blueprint for the Laser Hole effect was constructed almost entirely in the first person blueprint class with a few exceptions with the manipulation of textures and the cylinder offsets. 

The effect starts off with a line trace being fired from the character. Then a line trace being fired at back at the character form the end of the first one. This is so that the offset of the cylinder can be the same thickness as the wall. While also getting the uv to draw accurately on the render target.  

​The line traces are used to pass the uv info to the render target for the door texture. There is also the need to get the rotation of the door model, so the cylinder will not stick out of the door.  

The blueprint then passes a do once that is reset through the release of the fire button. This is because the draw can be updated every tick this unfortunately breaks the spawning of the hole. Then it spawns the scorch decal that appears around the whole. The decal is rotated randomly on the same plane as the door so to not look overly repetitive.    

This section of the blueprint is responsible for setting up the array to ignore the door models it also set it so the line trace dose not hit the most recently spawned cylinder.   

This is the line traces responsible for getting the uv data to set the mask location for the overlap on the cylinders. The first trace hits the previously spawned cylinder while the second trace uses the location of the first to trace the overlap of the currently spawned cylinder. 

This is just the creation of the dynamic material, so all the holes can be at different angels 

The final part of the blueprint sets all the parameters for the cylinder and decal. The timeline is to create the cooling effect of the materials it also is responsible for the expanding of the cylinder.