Foliage VFX: Week 3 Monday

On Monday I got to start on the fun stuff, the vfx itself!!
I continued following the vine lantern tutorial to create a physics asset with a kinematic top bone, so that it would stay in place and not collapse to the floor, leaving the rest of the bones to dangle in place. I then added weight and linear dampening to each bone so that it wouldn't sway too much or go crazy when in the scene. I couldn't figure out why only some of the bones had properly been imported and not others, but it didn't effect performance too much other than having the kinematic area slightly too long at the top of the vine:

I also worked on getting a basic wind effect in the scene, using UE4's base simple grass wind with a mask. I also made sure to add subsurface to two sided foliage, but had to get creative with nodes as I realised I'd placed a pink flower on the same map as green leaves and couldn't simply slap a vector parameter colour node onto it.

For the mushrooms on the tree, I went into the material editor and adapted this guide to create mushrooms that grow in size based on camera distance:

I had to vertex paint the stalks in UE4 itself as I didn't have the texture budget elsewhere, but it proved to be relatively easy:

I also used the same method to fade in a colour change to the mushrooms inside the lanterns:

After this however, I decided that it wasn't good enough. I didn't want the mushrooms to simply react to the camera distance, I wanted it to have a dynamic response to the character itself. It would still react if the camera was simply rotating closer to it while the character wasn't, and that simply didn't seem immersive enough- I decided to delve into blueprints later to perfect them.