RIFLE RACK
Personal Concept excluding Rifle by Kris Thaler
As mentioned in the Gunsmith Workbench piece, I figured it's also about time that the Precision Rifle has a Unreal Environment to call home. I came up with the idea of a rifle rack with stasis fields that served 2 purposes. One, to prevent the rifle from falling off and two, to prevent unauthorized users from grabbing the guns since should they try, their hands will just get stuck in place. Game effects aren't really my specialty but I decided to give it a try from what I've learned in my class and I was actually pretty satisfied how it turned out for the stasis field's particles. I also rendered 2 additional shots of the rifle in the gallery on a more standard display stand in Unreal.
FLYBY
BREAKDOWN
Parallax UI
There's just something I love about a futuristic looking UI. I actually was inspired by Ace Combat 7 when I decided to just watch some gameplay on YouTube. I noticed that before each mission, the briefing was shown on a really cool looking holographic map, and one thing that really sold the futurism was the fact that the hologram had a parallax offset to it to give it depth. That was what I decided to do to the control panel on the rifle rack. I made a custom UI in Illustrator and then made separate elements for anything that moves by using Panner nodes, like the yellow chevrons on the top and bottom. After placing the textures in the material editor, I made a copy of the base texture and then used the Bump Offset node to give it the parallax effect as show below.
Parallax UI in-game
Fog and Stasis Field
A good environment has subtle elements in it to complement the main assets. In this case, I felt that having a slight fog would add to the atmosphere. Instead of using the Unreal Engine's default fog, I decided to use the Niagara particle system to create a flipbook fog sprite and using the sprite in a fountain preset. I then added some curl noise so the movements feel more organic and then made the sprite fade in and out from the start of its lifetime till the end of it. After that was done, I placed several of the emitters around the racks to make it foggier. Meanwhile, the stasis field was made from scratch using a regular circle sprite for the main emitter. The particles are then spawn from a box location that is elongated and rotated to match the orientation of the rack, then the particles are given a scale from a curve that makes it start off expanding from nothing to the standard size near the beginning, so that particles don't suddenly spawn at its default size from the get-go, before shrinking over time. After the main particle was done, I created a ribbon renderer that leaves trails by following the main particle as it generates a location event while the ribbon receives the location and follows the former.
Stasis Field(left) and Fog(right) Niagara Blueprints
Stasis and Fog in-game
