Studio 1 Week 10 - More Particles, Movement & Scenery

By Natasha Vranic-Peters

This week, I continued refining the prototype for my nature avatar. I refined the wind particle I began last week (the simplistic trail), and introduced a rotation velocity to simulate a kind of "cyclone" movement.

Then, I wanted to take into account the movement of the avatar - I had previously succeeded in spawning the particles and having them move "with" or locally on the player object. However, I wanted a degree of lag and variability in the particles, to make them seem less uniform, and more responsive to movement. I coded the particles to follow the vertex they were spawned on during each frame, using linear interpolation to ease their movement - with varying degrees of success. Initially the code was extremely buggy and required iteration to properly loop through and match each vertex. Furthermore, since the wind was not being programatically updated (rather, operating on the built-in particle velocity), I ran in to a lot of trouble trying to get the wind to "lag" in any way. Switching its position from "local" (following the player precisely) to "world" resulted in very strange movement (as shown in gif 4). I then moved on to actually placing Gale in the environments I had previously built, and added movement code to allow the player to control Gale's movement through the environment.

Going forward, I still have to resolve a lot of the buggy behaviour and visuals.