Friday, March 21, 2014

More Progress on Electrical Arc

These are some very rough, quick proof of concepts Dylan and I made after class today. While looking through the vector parameters for the emitter we discovered a Random Vector variable, as seen in this screenshot, and used it to produce the first result.
Unfortunately it's not possible to make the beam particle update in local space, so these random variables will not work in prefabs because they reference points in world space.

With no point of reference it may be hard to tell but the triggered beam is switching location with a random offset. Dylan wanted to animate the beams in Matinee and I suggested using the following Kismet code to change the location procedurally. This code could be combined with the previous one that targets the player to set up a nice effect, but it seems like a heavy solution for the desired effect. Perhaps there is a way to do most of the work in the emitter but we couldn't figure it out today.