Tutorial for creating non-destructive assault swipe meshes in Maya (Maya攻击刀光)

Hello Realtime VFX!

I noticed just lately a put up about “Soulercoasters”, and thought that I might share the very best methodology I’ve discovered for making mesh swipes for assault animations. That is the approach I at all times use when making assault swipes on League, as you may see within the picture above the place I made these for Excessive Midday Darius.

The rationale that this methodology is nice is as a result of it focuses on working non-destructively – that’s, by doing sure steps in maya we create a mesh which we are able to simply replace with out destroying any of its attributes, prefer it’s UVs. It’s additionally straightforward to regulate the form of it when you see it in recreation, by simply dragging round a number of handles – no guide poly modelling required:

Please obtain this PDF to see the total tutorial. It’s additionally largely translated into Chinese language, for our Chinese language talking artists on the market

Maya攻击刀光
Making Assault Swipes in Maya (Actual Time VFX).pdf (1.5 MB)

Oooh that’s so nice Oli!

Thanks for sharing

Oh that appears actually good, at all times had a wrestle creating these meshes so good to see a correct workflow for it.

Thanks for this one, it’s nice!

Cool! I’m doing one thing comparable! A colleague from work gave me a tip a couple of approach like that and I got here up with one thing alongside these traces in Houdini.

For the curious ones:

In Houdini I connect two locators to the weapon socket, one for the outer fringe of the blade and one for the internal edge. For each body of the animation I spawn one level on every of the positions of the 2 locators. Then I take advantage of these factors to create two curves (and outer one and internal one). The Sweep SOP can create a mesh from these two curves. To get extra smoothness and even triangulation you may resample and clean the curves with the respective Houdini nodes. And the cool factor about doing it like this: It’s totally procedural per weapon. So the curves don’t should be drawn by hand. If an animator adjustments the animation Houdini can re-export the mesh with a number of clicks!

That sounds actually superior!

I undoubtedly assume this course of could possibly be automated higher, that course of you’ve made sounds nice.

That works nice so long as the animations are good and fluid. When you get to the snappier 1 body swipes, it disintegrate sadly. (My worst one was a spinning assault that did two full rotations in 6 frames :S ) Having it curvebased prevents this.
When you rely totally on the animation, there’s no huge profit to utilizing meshes over ribbons.

100% this. Generally it’s a must to make meshes that can be used to indicate the motions of the animations, and ribbons and trails disintegrate actually fast the quicker the animation is. That holds true for each attaching one thing in Houdini to make a mesh path, and utilizing trails in engines. There’s occasions when all you want is a hoop or cylinder that roughly suits the trail of an animation, and also you’ll be panning your materials so rapidly on that most individuals gained’t ever discover it doesn’t fairly match completely.

In my case ribbons in UE4 offered actually dangerous UVs (faceted) which is why I wished to present with a mesh-based one. For snappy animations the approach typically breaks a bit of. Then I manually modify the curves in Houdini and that normally works out. For that case I don’t actually have an answer for the best way to preserve correct supply recordsdata.

Thanks a lot for this ! Superior …

Thanks for share! im actually like league!

This has been SO useful for my senior capstone recreation venture. I used it for our chicken character’s wing assault! https://i.gyazo.com/e0c771a21c992b6e6c3ab1b52682ea53.mp4

Superb! Thanks for sharing with us!

Yaaay, thanks very a lot, good sir!

Beginner right here!
Would anybody know if Blender generates meshes utilizing curves like Maya? How is it known as?

You possibly can use a “Curve” modifier in a subdivided airplane to realize an identical impact

Thanks very a lot, stunning detailed tutoriall!

Did you ever discover out the easiest way to do it blender?