Techniques for 3D AoE/spell effects

Question

Hi All,

I was hoping some more experienced people might provide some (general) feedback around some techniques for creating 3d explosions/spell effects. In my game, the graphics style is similar to WC3 or DotA. I have a 3D map and enemies that are blasted by towers and need to add some spell effects. For things like bolts, I have been using a physics body/collision shape along with particle effects which works quite nicely for things like balls of energy, but I am not sure how to go about doing aoe spells.

I am comfortable with the mechanics of said spells, so my question is more around visuals. My current guess for how I could do this was to use a sprite3D and an animation player, and then just play an 2d animation using billboard mode on top of the impact point, which seems like it would work, but also might produce weird behaviours in terms of ysort/z-index (stuff being rendered in front of something else when it should be behind, sorry if my terminology is wrong).

Some other thoughts I had was obviously using particles/shaders to create an animation although that would I assume be a steeper learning curve (not that I am against that).

And then finally, I was thinking of making some sort of animation in blender and then importing it although I had not really thought much about specifics and how that might work.

For some reference, these are the general style of effects I would like to implement

If anyone has any kind of tips or advice around what kind of approaches are applicable or effective for making these kind of effects, I would be very grateful 🙂

Thanks in advance!

Saipan

Answer 1

Looks like planar, cylindrical and spherical meshes with transparent textures.

Agc

Answer 2

For things like the spikes especially they're definitely meshes, you intersect them from underneath the terrain to make it look like they're poking through, if you want to do cracks in the surfaces for example for fancier effects I would have the spikes come through from underneath then time adding the cracks with a raycast or something to make sure it hits the surface correctly. If you're doing swirly stuff, those are often 2D transparent sprites with noise added to the movement and I'm pretty sure Godot has built in stuff for that, it certainly has built in noise features you can make plenty of adjustments with.

Tegantegmen

Answer 3

Thanks a lot, will start experimenting a bit 🙂

Saipan

Answer 4

I didn't even consider transparent textures on meshes but ye that makes a lot of sense.

Saipan

Answer 5

It's typically done that way, and then meshes themselves are animated in some way. Commonly, UV offsets are animated too so the texture "slides" along the geometry.

Agc