NWN2 Visual Effects Editor: Particle Effects Tutorial. By Kamalpoe

Transcription

1 NWN2 Visual Effects Editor: Particle Effects Tutorial. By Kamalpoe Basics and definitions: right below Raging Blizzard (changing properties on a default effect): Page 11 Placing an effect ingame: Page 17 Falling volcanic ash and ember effect (combining multiple effects): Page 20 Falling Cherry Blossoms (using custom images): Page 22 You can find the NWN2 visual effects editor in the toolset under the plugins menu. Let's open it up... Well, that's totally easy looking and self explanatory, right? Right? RIGHT? That's what I thought too. First, we are going to load up some of the default fx. Trust me, much easier to just change a default than make a whole new fx. Let's copy the default fx somewhere so we can work with them without screwing up the originals. By default, here is their location. C:\Program Files\Atari\Neverwinter Nights 2\Data\NWN2_VFX.zip

2 There are also some in C:\Program Files\Atari\Neverwinter Nights 2\Data\NWN2_VFX_X1.zip and C:\Program Files\Atari\Neverwinter Nights 2\Data\NWN2_VFX_X2.zip as well. You can copy and work with those as well. For my preference, I made a vfx folder on my C: drive, and copied the contents of the zip files to that, so I'll be referring to that folder for examples. Decide which default effect has a look similar to what you want. It's much easier to start with something that is at least close to what you want, whether it's the type of the effect or motion. For this tutorial, I will be turning the default snow effect into a blizzard, and then showing how to modify the blizzard into a rain of volcanic ashes and embers. This is a change focused first on the motion, snow->blizzard. Then it shows how to modify secondary things like color and intensity. Then I will take the ashenwood leaves effect and turn it into falling cherry blossoms like in kung fu movies. This change focuses more on the effect and the primary change is just the graphic. So I'll open up the default snow effect. It is fx_snowfall_fx1.pfx. The pfx extension tells us that it is a particle effect. There we go. By default we have an overhead view, you can turn on the ground plane and sky if you want, and rotate the view (same way as in the toolset) to get the view of the effect you want.

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4 I prefer to work from a ground level perspective.

5 Now we're ready. All the properties for snowfall are over to the right. I've changed my window size so you can see all the properties. There are a lot, but we're going to ignore most of them. I'll start at the top and work my way down.

6 Flow type: controls whether this is a one time effect (like an explosion), or happens continuously. Snow of course is continuous. Frame buffer and Frame Buffer pixel: We can ignore these. Play around later with them if you'd like. Texture: The texture is the picture that's applied to each particle. When I change leaves to cherry blossoms later, we will change this. Custom textures like the cherry blossoms go in your campaign directory (or override). Texture animation and Texture type: We can ignore these. Play around later with them if you'd like. Acceleration: This controls the acceleration of the particles. There are three values, one for each axis, so we have x acceleration, y acceleration, and z acceleration. Z acceleration is for the vertical axis. A steady fall would be 0,0,0. Angular velocity: This controls the spin of your particles. It is a vertical swirling effect, higher values make this more pronounced. For our example, go ahead and change the value to 30 and watch what happens.

7 Begin size: the size of the particle, in x and y sizes. This is the size they spawn in at. Cone half angle, control type, disk: We can ignore these. Play around later with them if you'd like. Emission radius and emission radiance variance: These control how large the effect covers. We can ignore these. Play around later with them if you'd like. End Size: Your particles can change size over their lifetime. The size of the particle, in x and y sizes. The size of the particle, in x and y sizes. If this is different from Begin Size the particles will gradually change.

8 Gravitate Towards Center: We can ignore this. Play around later with them if you'd like. Orientation: Play around later with them if you'd like. Lifetime variance: Affects particle lifetime (see next item), this way not everything disappears at the same time. The number is in seconds. Particle Lifetime: This controls how long the particles appear before fading away. In seconds. Size variance: Everything the same size or vary it? 0 will make everything the same size. We can ignore this. Play around later with it if you'd like. Spawn Rate: Controls how many particles there will be onscreen at once. We will vastly increase this to make our blizzard. Too much onscreen at once will drastically drop framerates, so don't get too crazy. StartAngleVariance, StartPhi, StartTheta, System Relative: We can ignore this. Play around later with

9 them if you'd like. Velocity: How fast the particles move in x,y,z terms. For vertical flow we want the first two to be 0. Negative z values make the particles move down, positive make them move up. At 0,0,0, things float in the air. Velocity variance: Make things have different speeds. For fun, if variance is greater than the absolute value (eg, ignore a negative sign) of one of the velocity numbers, things will sometimes move in the opposite direction. So if you have a velocity of 0,0,-1.4 and a variance of 2, some snow will float up, at up to 0,0,0.6. Some will fall at up to 0,0,-3.6. Also affects the x and y values. Generally you'd want to keep variance below the absolute values of your velocity, so everything falls in the same direction. Blend: We can ignore this. Play around later with this if you'd like. End Color and Start Color: Let's make yellow snow... Misc: We can ignore this. Play around later with them if you'd like.

10 Ok, now you know what the properties are. On to an example.

11 Raging Blizzard I am going to turn the game's gently falling snow into a raging blizzard. First, let's save the effect with another name so we don't mess up our base effect in case we want to start over. I'll call this fx_blizzard. Here is the after look... Holy cow what did you do? Well I already had snow, it's a default effect, so I need to focus on two things, the amount and the driving snow effect.

12 Spawn rate went way up. From 14 (default snow) to You can play around with your spawn rate to make the snow as heavy as you'd like. Remember if you put spawn rate too high it's bad for framerates is way too high for ingame unless you do drastic things to hide it. Ingame I have mine at 1000, but then I hide most by having a really close in white fog. The white fog emulates not being able to see very far in a total blizzard. Velocity also changed sharply. Default snow falls at 0,0,-1.4. My blizzard is very windy, 6,-5. It falls nearly sideways, driven by the wind. It also falls rapidly down (heavy wet snow), -3. When playing around, it's better to keep the spawn rate near the default, and play around with velocity first to get the motion you want. Here's a video ingame. And a screenshot with some golems to help visualize. Notice how close in I've set the white fog.

13 We have a blizzard now, save it. Save it in your campaign directory or override. Personally I only use my campaign directory. Now we have to make a separate effect so we can actually place it ingame. Go to File -> New -> Special Effect. You'll get this...

14 We need to add an event. Since blizzard is a particle effect (remember the pfx extension?), we select particle system.

15 Under Name, select the blank line (like in the picture). Under properties, there's only one thing we care about for environmental type effect, the definition file. Other properties are more used for things like spells. You can delay the effect from appearing, target the victim etc. Select the definition file, and select your blizzard effect. If you'd like a preview, select play (by where you selected Add Event.

16 Now save your Special Effect (to the campaign or override folder).

17 We're done with the VFX editor for now, so let's close it and go place our blizzard ingame. In the main toolset, open up the blueprints for the placed effects. Right click one and copy it (to the module or campaign depending on what you need)

18 Select your new effect and give it the name/tag etc you want. Under behavior, select the effect you want to happen (this is the special effect we just saved).

19 Indoor blizzard FTW! Ok, we've made an basic effect and put it ingame. Now for new things.

20 Falling volcanic ash and ember effect. Volcanic ash falls pretty much like snow, so we are going to use that as our default effect we are going to work with. Go back into the VFX plugin and open the snow pfx back up. Yay, snow! Ash is basically just recolored snow. So we're going to change the color. Adjust the colors until you get something you're happy with. Also you can play with the spawn rate and velocity to get whatever density and movement you want. Now save the effect (to your campaign directory remember...). Well, that's ash, how about ember? Same effect, just with a different color. Probably red/orange. Adjust the spawn rate of the embers so you have the ratio of ash/ember you want. For my demo effect I am using spawn rates of 140 for ash and 14 for ember. Save it with a different name since we're going to be mixing the two effects. Make a new special effect, File->New->Special Effect. This time we are going to add two effects.

21 So go ahead and add effect twice Under each effect we've added we need to point it to the effects we just saved. Just like we did for our blizzard.

22 There, I've added both fx_ashfall and fx_emberfal, and played the animation. You can now save your special effect and place it ingame. (see beginning on page 17 of this tutorial for how to do so)

23 Falling Cherry Blossoms The game has a falling leaves effect, called fx_ashenwood_tree_leaves.pfx. That's pretty close, so we'll use that for our default. We don't want leaves though, we want cherry blossoms. Under the appearance, you can see where it's specified as fx_small_leaves.dds. That tells the vfx editor to display that picture for each falling particle. We're going to change that Editing pics is outside the scope of this document, but here are the basics. Find and copy the fx_small_leaf.dds so you can work with it. Paint.Net can handle.dds files. I use it since it's free. It doesn't look like it, but the small leaf is actually a square picture, with transparency around the leaf. Find your source pic. I found a cherry blossom pic with google, then cut it out in paint so it was just the blossom. I made a new image and pasted my cherry blossom in, then reduced it to the appropriate size (small_leaf is 32x32 pixels) and made all the extraneous pixels transparent. Then saved it as a dds to the campaign or override directories.

24 So we have the picture we want to use. Click the drop down for the appearance and chose your picture. Hey! Cherry blossoms aren't yellow! No, but the effect is automatically tintable. It's picking up the default tint set for the leaves, which is yellow.

25 Ahhh, much better. Once again, you can change the motion and flow to match what you want, then make your special effect and put everything ingame. You can also combine two (or more) effects, so you could have two different flowers or different colors etc. In experimenting, I actually found that the flowers were too big for the falling cherry petal effect. I wound up using pink snow.

26 Remember, don't eat yellow snow.