Help with an effect (have you seen this done?)

[JackGriffin]

Has anyone ever seen a visual representation of a blast of wind or air as a UT effect? I'd like to add an effect to a weapon I'm doing so there is clear visual effect that the weapon is causing a rush of air in a particular direction. Imagine you had a big square of stiff posterboard and you made a sweeping arc with it in front of you. If someone were standing there you would see the physical results (their hair would move, their clothes might flap) but in UT I can't do any of that so I'd like to add some sort of visual effect to show "The air just blew from this way towards this way". I can't remember it ever being done and I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to begin to create it.

[Feralidragon]

Hmmm, could you try to show a close picture or a roughly mspaint picture to say what you want exactly?

The closest thing I saw about "air blast" in UT was ironically one my own effects:
- NW2 Nuclear Launcher Level 3 explosion: (from 0:53 to 1:02) - but this one is best seen live in a long corridor so you can see the actual fx better (out in the open the actual "air" fx is not very noticeable)
This fx is very very easy to make, it just takes a good texture/sprite and a few lines of coding, my venom-x blast has the same effect.

Now, idk if you want something like that or something different or more specific.

[JackGriffin]

That's a damn nice effect set but not really what I'm shooting for. I need something that looks good from the side, front, odd angle. I don't think a sprite-based effect is going to do it for this, though a half-shell shockwave might do it.

Imagine it like this:

blast.jpg (62.76 KiB) Viewed 2537 times

Think of a garden hose set to 'fan spray'. BTW I finished watching that collection and the effect at the very end of the megaton is much closer to what I'm asking about. In fact that's damn close.

[papercoffee]

We need something like a depth-sounder wave coming out of the weapon. Right?

[Rakiayn]

you could use the mesh of the queen shield. give it a grey/translucent texture.
it starts small at the end of the weapon then moves in the direction you shoot at while it grows larger and then dissapears

[EvilGrins]

There is a random mutator that makes tornados go around maps. They scoop things up, and people, and if you also have the pinata mutator it makes you lose all your weapons. Thing can also not so much drop you as throw you really hard on low grav maps.

It has a basic tornado look to it, with a wind sound.

[Feralidragon]

Hmmm, I think I know what you want.
Well, long story short, you would need to build a new model just for that, with also a specific animation to it, taking advantage of a certain MS3D bug (yeah, I use application bugs as features at times) and a bit of patience to pull off.

Now, personally I am thinking about 3 ways to pull out that effect:
- Easy: Make a cylinder, shape it slightly like a cone (but with no tip and no base), give it a proper "air burst" texture. No custom animation needed, just code it then so it goes into the desired direction (projectile physics and velocity), grows up slightly (drawscale) and fades away (scaleglow):

example2.PNG (2.03 KiB) Viewed 2503 times

- Less easy: The exact effect you saw relative the megaton: make a cylinder with no central vertex on its bases, and then cut off everything except one of the bases.
From there, animate it to simulate a "grow", then in the script, set it to bParticles=True, set a smoke texture to it, and code it to animate, to fade away (scaleglow) and growing up slightly:

example3.PNG (9.57 KiB) Viewed 2503 times

- Not so easy: Consists in a cylindrical shape which is then deformed to look hemispherical or "semi-oval", from there the animation would be the formation of that hemisphere outwards from a single point or circle... well, I cannot explain well this one, so here's a picture:

example1.PNG (3.6 KiB) Viewed 2503 times

As for the bug (somewhat) to exploit here MS3D wise, is to scale up some animation joints: MS3D doesn't support such scaling "theoretically", but fact is if you use the "Scale All" function during animation mode, you can simply set the keyframe, copy the keyframe, undo the scale, paste the keyframe, done (I used this little hidden "bug-feature" myself quite often).

[JackGriffin]

I think I'm going to try the first one and mix in some spritesmoke between the sides. That ought to do rather nicely I think.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

The Unreal Forever mod has such a gun. At least the Unreal version of it has.