The core Strand contrail. This is used in some fashion across all weapons, whether straight up or in conjunction with additional GPU particles.
Strand - Auto Rifle/Scout Rifle/Pulse Rifle VFX. These were the first weapons built out for Strand, mostly consisting of early base work from Mark Flieg with shipping and polish passes done by me.
Strand - Bow VFX: Bows use a unique contrail that is only slightly flavored via color. Most of this was setting up our template systems to support Strand coloration and setting up unique impact FX.
Strand - Grenade Launcher VFX: Grenade Launchers use both the core contrail and additional gpu VFX, as well as a unique firing and detonation VFX. This weapon is debugged to fire as Strand.
Strand - Hand Cannon VFX: Hand Cannons use a larger version of the core contrail.
Strand - Machine Gun VFX: These use heavier versions of the base firing, contrail, and impact VFX.
Strand - Rocket Launcher VFX: These use a unique variant of the core contrail, as well as additional gpu particles and a custom detonation. Note: This weapon is debugged to have the Strand Damage Type.
Strand - Shotgun VFX: Shotguns don't draw contrails, so instead we beefed up the impact vfx and gave them additional Strand flavoring.
Strand - Submachine Gun VFX: These use the core contrail that lingers slightly shorter in the world as well as being slightly thinner
Strand - Sniper Rifle VFX: Snipers use a larger, longer lasting core contrail to convey the weight of the projectile.
Strand - Sword VFX: These split from using our core contrail, instead using almost 100% unique VFX across the subtypes.
I had the absolute pleasure of coming up with and implementing the Strand Damage Type VFX suite for our entire set of weapons, alongside Rewards VFX Art Lead Mark Flieg.
Did you know that most weapon VFX share core systems with individual tweaks across weapon archetypes? Now you do! I took the base work from Mark Flieg of our core Strand Contrail and did the shipping and polish passes, then set them up across every weapon while tweaking as needed, as well as setting up our DT coloration templates for shared VFX assets.
This was a huge undertaking and I want to specifically thank Mark Flieg for letting me stretch my wings in the weapons world as well as the entire Weapons and Accessories team for their valuable feedback and notes. I'd also like to thank Dave Samuel and the Player Abilities team, as well as everyone else who worked on the other aspects of Strand that helped inform the look and feel of our weapons suite.
And everyone else at Bungie, of course. Teams are stronger than Heroes.