Divine Ire Pt. 1

This is sort of a follow up to the previous blog post involving electrical art. Divine Ire is a favorite skill of mine (from the game Path of Exile), and so this would be a good effect to play around with more particle system things. Same basis with some additions. One is the line-based beam discharge, that is some module calculations to have the bolt form in a spiral. E.g xy coordinates are cos/sin of radians from the execution index multiplied by a scalar; z is the index times a scalar for height per turn, the return of that times the radius). I also used the opportunity to do some environment mood lighting + bit of modeling & texturing.

Next update will include some visual revisions to the mesh emitter, possibly more destruction, & the original version (not automaton).

Excerpt No. 2 Parametric

Wanted to do a quick follow up to the previous blog post with some clips of parameters being updated on the psystem. The main level of control corresponds to the largest element in the cochlear structure. Which would resemble that of a logarithmic spiral (according to some research the analytical model that fits the cochlea uses a type of polynomial/polylogarithmic  spiral, which may be closer to what I employed). Fittingly the name for the nervous structure in focus is the spiral ganglion. Although I set up the function for this both in Niagara & blueprint, there’s some advantages to generating the spline data in blueprint.

Here’s a couple clips of me tuning the radius, exponent, height, number of turns, neuron count.

In the radius modulation clip it’s apparent that there’s some amount of perturbation on the z-axis. To fit the rough/complex profile of spiral the height variable also gets multiplied by a float curve that can be tuned. This still needs refinement.

In the video below I have examples of me tuning a few of the shader parameters, as well as having a soundwave asset linked to the shader so that the frequency and amplitude map to the Z. The hair cells actually respond to the frequency spectrum respective to their location, from the base to apex. This is my first test; also in this video I had to overlay the track afterwards as I had recorded with a video-only software (timing is slightly off).

More to come