Interactive Unreal Effects
This was the first is a series of three projects my team got to create under the guidance of Silent Partner Studios, who served as both our clients and mentors for the semester. This project had us recreate a live stage design in Unreal Engine, with the ultimate goal being an adaptation into an extended reality (XR) performance. I was in charge of the emissive effects on these pillars.
The two effects I created were dubbed scroll and chaser. Scroll is the emissive band that bounces up and down the pillars, with chaser being the quadrant emission that stacks up and breaks down. Scroll uses a texture of a white band on black, which is moved using a timeline as an offset value, and tweaked with several others to get approximately the right visual. Chaser also makes use of timelines, a linear gradient, and rounding to build in quartered increments.
While other team members were in charge of the external inputs, I was able to incorporate the interactions in such a way that made the keyframing of the effects extremely easy to work with. The scroll and two chaser directions were each bound to 1, 2, and 3 on the keyboard as a toggle. The scroll has its opacity multiplied by zero when not in use, disabling the effect. The timelines for chaser are activated to initiate the effect and reset after finishing.