I'll update the status for FAB as soon as I know more.🚨

In the meantime, I'm gonna be on full awareness mode for feedback/issues or request as well as working on the future updates and potential video content 🎥

Cheers! #TheVFXSandbox

It was an intense project to do during the course of the weekend. The unreal project files will be available on the release of my project on the 21st of September. 🤟

Stay tuned for more content reveals and experiments and have a great productive week! 🌸

I exported the FBX Simulation to Blender and used OPEN VAT tool. It's much less trouble in setup and export than Houdini, and I use it exclusively for fracture RBD and generating Vertex Animation Texture.

Link to the tool openvat.org

I used Houdini to get a very clean fracture geometry and it's easier than in Blender. Essentially you displace vertices outward and apply Voronoi Fracture to restore their position.

Sohey explored this technique. I had to do a couple of adjustments to my use case vimeo.com/233305131

On the other hand, for more artistic control, you can paint an impact frame. I actually made one in Substance designer using Impact Textures as a base...

But I felt like having an engine solution instead of using a overlay faked frame as it is also the case in Honkai Star Rail.🤓

Here is my shader setup to work with impact frames. You have to be extra careful with values as the artistic control here can get very limited and add several constraints.

If your scene gets overwhelmed by effects and emissive values you might have to setup extra steps to mask out undesired parts.

- Material Breakdown for the glitch effect using substance 3D Designer.This example is for one frame, you can repeat it 3 times with different noise input and seed variations.

- One trick that I liked using is done in Substance designer to make this glitch animation,Here is the animated version of the skull I used and the Material breakdown on how to achieve it. 🛠️ - Breakdown below -

Extra: Originally I wanted this project to go bigger and have some French team references 🇫🇷✨, but in the end I didn't find anyone among my friends who had the time to work on it with me.

Thanks for reading and Cocorico! 🐓

5: Then in the detail panel, you should not render this in the main pass, but render it in the custom depth pass (3rd screenshot). With these settings, you should be ready to go! 💪

4: Now the tick boxes nightmare 📍. First, activate in your project settings "Custom Depth - Stencil Pass".

For the masking mesh, you don't need anything specific in the material, but you do need to tick in the material "Allow Custom Depth Write".

3: Small note: From personal research, you have to fake everything — skybox, lights, etc. — as I encountered some issues with rendering, specifically with anything related to light distance. It's easier to draw these scenes if you have all of them in different stencil IDs.

2: The shader is pretty straightforward. You use a stencil ID and compare if they match with the Custom Depth Stencil value that we will set a bit later. Here I picked 50, so any object with that ID later will get rendered through the mesh/sprite used to mask the scene with that ID.

1: Without the emissive panels -> it's mostly used to hide the sharp transition. 👀

5. Cube Array gives a nice layering to the scan deployment.
It is a cube with only the extruded edges remaining. For the spawning, it's a simple logic of adding an offset for each index and then apply that same principle to also build height. It's the same logic as a flip-book.

4. My favorite trick for effects is about using distortion to boost the scan effect deployment with just a simple gradient.

I used Refraction with Texture 2D Offset settings:

3. I used a bounding box setup to mask out the border of the mesh from the scan effect part - I can control the sharpness and give it this energy deploying feeling⚡
and it's very easy to setup 🤓☝️

2. This setup allowed me to test my trails efficiently and adjust the path with float curves in the module parameters.
----> just plug it into your Particles.Position in output!🔌