Exploding Barrel Blueprint & Effects
Created this little project to go through the process of making a destructible asset players can interact with. I didn't want this project to just be some effects and nothing, rather an asset with behavior and a bunch of effects ready to go into a level, so while the explosion, fireball, and destruction are the showcase of the project, I wanted them to be wrapped up in a cohesive package that makes sense visually and behaves as one might expect in the [gamified] real-world, and allows for expansion into a system that can be used to incorporate any kind of explosive, destructible prop.
The asset features:
1. User-defined mesh
2. User-defined impact & damage effects
3. User-defined critical health indication & impact effects
4. User-defined explosion, blast decal, & lingering effect
5. User-defined health, critical health threshold, & critical health timer
6. User-defined impulse force for destruction, including force, random offset range, and spin
This is it, the final version! Fuel pour added, Houdini RBD sim exported into .fbx for physics blend
Above a defined percentage of health and in between two local Z values, bullet impact spawn a fuel pour instead of a splash.
Shooting the barrel up to show the transition from fuel spills to ignition
Barrel critical health status indication. Spilled fuel ignites and any bullet impacts spawn a flame jet. The flame mesh on the ground and the flame jets use separate material instances of the same material, with the flame smoke materials being procedural
This is the fireball effects in the explosion isolated. 2 Pyro sims in made in Houdini, created a master fireball material in engine with flipbook motion vectors, only 2 color texture samples and a LUT are needed & changeable in the mat instances.
Isolated the 'juice' of the explosion - the light, flash, shock wave, sparks, dirt bits, and blast mark are in this group. The blast mark is a decal spawned in the Blueprint so the P system is destroyed while leaving the blast mark, this is just to show
The dust effects for the barrel explosion isolated. Uses a ribbon emitter and one of the fireball flipbooks with no emissive and a different color matched to the scene's terrain and lighting.
The barrel explosion particle system all together
The first bit of the explosion slowed down to show the timing better
The lingering effects; a violent chemical fire and smoking barrel parts (top chunk, bottom chunk, lid)
The fire column is the same flipbook as the explosion only with a world oriented panning flame texture blend enabled in the material instance.
The barrel death stripped of all particle effects; just the destruction. Impulse location has a random X & Y offset and strength within a range
Showing the barrel fracture and simulation in its first stages. In Houdini I bulged the center of the barrel, split it into 3 pieces, and fractured the center portion and used that for the simulation. Lid deformed in Maya since it's a simpler shape.
Demonstrating how user set variables can change the explosion force on the destroyed mesh.
The event graph. Everything is set up to swap out barrel meshes and effects so the system can be expanded to cover all explosive destructibles. From here on out adding AOE damage is a simple custom event away, called in the "Barrel Death" graph.
The basic design process behind making the asset. Start with what I want, figure out what I need, and plan it out!