How to do effects like muzzleflash but in full 3D -without- billboarding

Unity Engine
1

Hello Everyone,

There are no shortage of tutorials and resources available to show how to do various particle effects for things like muzzleflash.

But, How would I make the same or similar effect that appears differently depending on the angle it is viewed
from.

I’m thinking a full 3D object, but am not sure at all how to go about learning about this.

Thanks,

2

Do you have any reference/example how it should look?

Or could just use particles?

Or if you have 2D sprite animation for the effect,
can place multiple planes to see it from different angles,
like:

1 Like
3

Muzzle flashes in full 3D will require volume rendering which is strictly advanced, hw limited and possibly slow to process. I think plenty of billboards will give you volume, as mgear states.

4

Thanks for the replies!

I’m looking at games like Overwatch, Battleborn and Gigantic.
I love the solid color saturated effects in these games.

mgear, If I understand you correctly is this the effect you are convaying?

5

I use three double-sided planes. Two are perpendicular to each other in a cross, and one is flat against their “base”. The effect works reasonably well for both first and third person.

6

basic tricks

model 3 egg shapes, white core normal faces +two others with inverse normals so they act like a stroke (they can just be cheap vertex color objects)
+additive billboard for glow (sort on top)
2642176--185978--3dMuzzle.png
if you want to get more fancy you put ramps on the models, transparency tricks and soft-edge shaders, post processing, animate the models (fast rotation, deforming shaders, vertex level or “flip-book” meshes)

7

super cool!

reverse normals, great idea.
I think i learned something like that when investigating cel shading (duplicate,scale and reverse normals)