Hedone Developer Diary: Creating the Dust Devil Effect

We're very proud of the fantastic levels in Hedone. A lot of people work to create these arenas and previously we've shown you some of the effort that goes into creating the layouts, lighting and texturing them. Today we're going to look at how we use environmental effects to really bring a finished level to life.

We spoke to effects artist Evgeniy Zaitsev about the dust devil effect that will be seen in a new level that's being worked on at the moment. That means that as well as a glimpse into his work, you'll also get an exclusive sneak-preview of this level as an extra bonus in the video!

Over to you Evgeniy.

"Firstly, I exported the level where we were going to use this effect from the Unreal Editor into a Collada file using Matinee. I used that file to create a motion path for the dust devil object in the level.

Now I had to make the actual dust devil itself so I created a cylindrical mesh and deformed it a bit to make it look natural. This mesh was skinned and rigged in Autodesk Maya, using the specific skeleton hierarchy that you can see in the video. The most important parts of this skeleton hierarchy were two additional bones which we used to let us rotate the dust devil and to add noise. These bones were especially useful for improving the blending of the animated components.

In the video you can see the animation being distributed via the bones. For example, the rotation bone (b_rotation) was responsible for just spinning the object 360 degrees around that central axis while the noise bone (b_noise) was used to generate random noise deformation (using expressions) and then we used another bone for the center of gravity (b_COG) to track the object along the motion paths I had already created. All of these components worked together to create the feeling of an object organically changing shape.

After creating and exporting all the idle animations (rotation, noise, shape deformation) plus the 3-5 individual animation paths to be used, I brought everything together using the Unreal animation tree and Matinee. The animation tree allowed me to blend the separate animations and also add some weight. Matinee provided me with the facility to play the animations at different speeds and weights - for example, if I needed to increase the rotation speed of the dust devil, I only needed to make one adjustment in Matinee instead of having to export the whole animation all over again from Maya, so using this tool provided a lot of flexibility.

To add even more realism, I decided to add a particle system to the skeletal mesh. This particle system used smoke, paper and woodchip effects to produce a realistic dust cloud. This system was then connected to the mesh using a socket which enabled the particle system to not only move along the motion path with the dust devil but also to rotate with it, resulting in a very dynamic and exciting effect. The woodchip elements in particular show this effect quite nicely. The smoke component inside the particle system was created using the Maya fluid system. I had to spend a few days experimenting with different fluid simulations before I finally got something useful.

Once all that was done I rendered the entire simulation as an image sequence then looped it in a compositing tool. It's important to keep filesizes as small as possible so the animation was limited to 36 frames which were assembled into a 6x6 texture flipbook and then collected into a single image using a contact sheet plugin for Photoshop."

So there you have it, a glimpse into some of the attention to detail that our teams put into Hedone. Next time you're in-game, why not take a look around to see what other little touches you can spot? Many thinks to Evgeniy for sharing his work with us and we'll be bringing you more from behind the scenes in the next Hedone devblog.

Accompanying video - Hedone Developer Blog - Dust Devil - YouTube

If you wish to take part in the closed beta, keys are currently available @ hedone.enjin.com