Unusual Effect: Cosmic Constellations
Promotional video created by Steam user Bonk Nickeltoon.
Promotional poster created by Steam user Bonk Nickeltoon.
The original concept art provided by Steam user Muddrike. I decided that this concept was a good start but could be innovated upon, and we worked together to come up with the design of what would become the final effect.
An early prototype of the first animated texture.
This was the first version of the spritesheet. This version had each "constellation" be on a seperate file consisting of 96 frames of a 128x sprite. This ended up creating a huge size issue, with each file taking up over 10MB.
A very early prototype of the effect seen in-editor, during the blockout and exploration phase.
An early version as seen in-game, confirming my theory that I could compress 4 different image sequences into 1 small file, and instead call different sprites by defining frame sequences in-engine that corresponded to the different images.
The close to final version of the effect, now with 3 out of the 4 image sequences included and properly spaced out.
A look at the finalized spritesheet, which contains 256 frames split over 4 different 64x sprites, all in a neat and tiny 1.33MB VTF file, thus solving the size problem.
The finalized effect showcased in game. This version included the addition of shooting stars that appear at random throughout the "sky"
Ditto. This showcases the 3-D aspect of the effect.
A in-game look at the finalized version of all three color variants.
This effect has been accepted in the Winter 2022 update!
The was a particle effect created in collaboration with 2 other artists for consideration for inclusion in Valve Software's "Team Fortress 2" Halloween update. The goal of this project was to create a night sky themed particle effect that was based off of concept art created by Steam user Muddrike. After collaborating and tweaking his original concept to better suit the game, we decided to create 4 smaller animated constellations, that would be based off of popular items in the game world (i:e, The Heavy's Sandvich, an unlockable hat, the Ghostly Gibus, the frying pan, and the TF2 logo itself). The particle system has a maximum of ~170 particles on screen at the same time, making it incredibly performance efficient despite the technical complexity.
The sprites were created using paths drawn in Adobe After Effects, and then animated by using the stroke path option to create an animated sprite sheet. My first idea was to use 128x textures in order to preserve quality at larger particle sizes, but due to engine limitations and conversion issues, the resulting VTF file format needed to use in-engine was over 10MB per file. My solution to this was first to reduce the scale of the individual frames to 64x, while making sure that scaling the particle up would not pose quality issues at larger scales in-game. Once I was sure the quality would not be affected, I sped the animation up, thus lowering the overall frame count for each "constellation" to 64 frames total. I then marked set frame ranges as sequences the engine could read, allowing me to combine all 4 "constellations" into one sprite sheet. This allowed me to create a square sprite sheet at 2048x, which the engine could properly convert and compress into a 1.33MB VTF file, and then call up different "constellations" by selecting their corresponding sequence number, solving my size issue.
I was the project lead, as well as responsible for all design aspects and sprites. Steam user Bonk Nickeltoon (https://steamcommunity.com/id/BonkNickeltoon) was in charge of showcase videos and promotional posters. The original concept was provided by Steam user Muddrike (https://steamcommunity.com/id/MuddRike7)