Hi. I am curious how are spell effects like the ones in rpg games created? my first idea was to use particles in unity but that seams somehow hard to get them to behave how i want without some hardcore c# coding. How are those effect made in unity? Are only particles used or do you do animations in maya? for example a rotating ball with alpha textures and stuff like that to make it look like a fireball?
Anyone knows some links to tutorials to making spell effects? I searched the forums but couldn’t find anything
I’m using sprites for all of the spell effects in one of my games and they look pretty good.
Obviously being able to do that is a bit dependant on your player’s available view angles, etc, and how tricky you get with auto-positioning the sprites as your player moves around.
i am working curently on a 3d game so sprites aren’t the best option i think. I’ll try play a bi with sprites and see how that works out. I never used sprites and i just found a script on the wiki page. is there a more detaileed guide about using sprites. I looked now and couldnt fins something easy to understand
My game is 3D too - sprites work great. You just have to do a lot of experimentation with HOW you use them to fool people into thinking that they’re 3D objects.
Sorry - missed the last bit of your post. Take a look at Sprite Manager 2. I wouldn’t have a clue how to do what I’m doing without it 
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=35655&highlight=sprite+manager
http://www.anbsoft.com/middleware/sm2/
And, I should be more thorough and give an example! Here’s an animated torch in my game viewed from two different angles. It’s just a flat sprite but by having it auto-rotate to face the player, it appears to them to be a 3D object, just like the rest of the environment.
thanks forthe info. i tried now the script at http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=Animating_Tiled_texture its not so user friendly like sprite manager 2 but its free. I was thinking about making the sprites auto rotate to the player but the game i am working on will be a multiplayer game so how do you manage the billboard rotation? on what player will it rotate? or every player will see a bilboard rotated in his direction? i am not a programmer so i don’t know if also in multiplayer with a lot of players rotating billboards are usefull?
Particles are pretty good for general spell effects, but it is difficult to give general advice about how to use them. It is probably best to ask how to create specific effects as you come to need them. Also, it is common to use mesh animations in combination with particle effects.
thanks for the reply. I played a bit with particles and found out that the combination of particles and mesh animation isn’t bad at all. But now i am stuck with something. I managed o do various spells like a fireball for example i made a circle of fire from which fireballs shot out but now i was thinking about doing kind of a lightning spell…and now i m stuck becouse i dont even have an idea how am i supposed to do that. I wouldprobabli have a projctile and when the pojectile hits the enemy than i would need a lightning animation bectween the enemy and the weapon…i dont know how to do the lighning animation…probably with partycles but i dont have any idea hotto do that
The simplest way is with using a line renderer. Iterate through the segments in your line and give them a small random offset along the vector traveling from your weapon to your projectile.
Play with the density of the line segments and the offset, along with the number of line renderers themselves and you will quickly have a nice electricity effect.
There are a few examples of lighting effects scattered about on the forums/wiki. Search around for the procedural mesh example project and Forrest’s particle tutorial video/project/blog.