Hera's Lament

For this personal project, I wanted to achieve a soft soothing impression. My initial source of inspiration was the fate that befell upon Argus Panoptes. According to Greek mythology, this many-eyed giant was slain during his service to Hera. The Godess immortilized her loyal servant's eyes in the feathers of the peacock. The main idea behind this effect is that the decal invokes the power of Hera. In context of gameplay, the purpose of this effect is to visualize an area of effect healing ability.

This project took me approximately a week to get to the current result. It is a testament to all the exercises and research I performed during the past two months in context of real-time effects. I am quite happy with the achieved colours and the layering.

A couple of months ago, I designed a character concept based on the above-mentioned mythos (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/vDRnod). Imagining this character in a gaming scenario allowed me to take decisions a lot easier and work in a much more goal oriented fashion.

All the textures were created in Photoshop. The majority of the meshes used for this effect were generated in Houdini to maintain a non-destructive workflow and to speed up the process. Please do check out the break-down of the effect for further information regarding the process, the more technical aspects and components of the effect.

Jason Keyser and Gabriel (Gabi) "Nibilli" Boileau gave me feedback during the process of making this effect. Their feedback helped me to get the effect to the next level. For this I am most certainly grateful to them.

Main Shot

Main Shot - High Framerate

To create the misty suction effect, I manually distorted the UVs of the disc mesh by moving the vertices once the unwrap was defined. Once combined with a proper dissolve map and well timed UV-animation, the perceived suction effect manifests.

There were some key points throughout my effect in which dissolve maps didn't do the job the way I intended to. So eventually flipbooks needed to be created for specific purposes.

By separating the decal into components, I would be able to have much more refined control over the colours and animations.

Pushing the theme of Argus and Hera, I tried to manifest shapes of eyes during the dissolve of the burst of mist at the climax of the effect by means of this dissolve map.

Some of the textures I created and used in this effect.