Clearly he’s a very complex setup, I’m not attempting a 1:1 recreation. That’s just the closest stylistic reference I can think of to what I’d like to create. I’m really interested in making more fluid “magical” effects. What methods might you use to do so?
Particle systems make sense here, but I’m not really familiar with programming them beyond what the inspector is capable of. I know it’s possible and that’s it.
Probably a transparent and emissive material.
I was thinking of having a handful of scripted gameObjects in a small pool be somehow ejected and then move back to it repeatedly, or perhaps orbit, which I am more confident of my ability to do with C# & Monobehavior.
A light could be attached to this prefab as well.
I’ve been reviewing ShaderLab in general and taking some notes, too.
You are referencing the rotating orbs that leave the trails and all?
A single orb with all it’s effect should be entirely possible within Particle system alone. Then it’s just a matter or creating several and orbiting them via script, which should be easy enough.
I learned a ton about possibilities of a particle system with this:
'Tis free, grab this and play around with it. It’s amazingly well done as well, if the creator of this asset swings by: Thank you!
The key here seems to be the good birth/emission/death subsystems. You need to have a master particle - a glowing orb, which also has a child subsystem (or several, for various effects, see the linked asset) that is active as long as the parent is active, and emits in world space.
Now, truth be told, going by screenshot alone (never played Dota 2), it does appear there are some actual spline-generated mesh trails, but those could be replaced with particle trails easily enough.
So there, few ideas to get you started, hope it helps.
Thank you, it does. I wouldn’t have looked at that specific Unity package, and I will now. It looks great. Io is a very complicated rig and indeed you can see much of it is real geometry in motion, but that doesn’t concern me. I think I can make something neat pretty much just using additive blended particles.
