Foliage VFX: Week 3 Friday

On Friday I added some extra details, like firefly particles that change colour on proximity:

A butterfly particle effect loosely following this tutorial:

By viewing the mesh edges, I could use the UV crop nodes in an instance to correctly scale and place the butterfly texture in the center of the mesh I made in 3ds max, so that the animation vertex painting created within the material editor would then apply correctly to that cropped section of the texture sheet, and the butterfly would bend in the correct area.

I also added a translucency mask to the ground plinth for aesthetic presentation, however it would most likely be too costly and inefficient to have in game, as it essentially turns the entire plinth into an alpha and doesn't allow shadows to be cast onto it:

With Translucency

Without Translucency

Finally, with my remaining time I built lighting (and changed lightmap density), turned some assets into movable objects to receive dynamic lighting instead, messed with the skysphere colours and post processing to achieve the night time look I wanted, then I added some music and sound effects downloaded from here, here and here. I then added them into blueprints to start upon playing the game and upon overlap with the spore particle collisions.