Week 10&11 - VFX Particles

I wanted to add a few animations into my scene, originally I had intended to have animated flickering candles, some atmosphere fog as well as some floating particles. In the original film there are a number of golden, yellow fireflies, so I wanted to include a similar feature. By following the Niagara steam effect tutorial on the learning space, I created a fog effect that I wanted to use outside to create a cloudy mist around the nettles. However, the fog I created was more like smoke that moved around very quickly and only seemed to move downwards. I was running out of time, so I didn't fix it any further, I left it outside the door, even though the movement looked a little jolty, I felt it didn't harm the scene. Doorway fog recorded using bandicam:

Niagara system setup: Material set up:

I decided that since it hadn't worked ideally, and I didn't have enough time to fix it, I wouldn't attempt to use it inside of the room. So instead I focused on the particles, I used a generic Niagara particle system and used the same material instance as the fog set up but a yellow variation. The particles in the scene:

Video of particles working in scene, recorded with Bandicam, accompanied by chosen music for end cinematic: "The Key in the sea" (from the song of the sea OST)

The last feature, I really wanted to include in my scene was the flickering candles, however I ran out of time to animate them. I did test out a couple of methods, however it never worked as I intended. Either the flame only worked as a 2D plane, or my original assets and lighting clashed and would not work alongside the animations and flickering. Because of this, I could not include it. If I had planned the lighting for the room a different way, I may have not had this issue, but then I don't think I would have achieved the look and lighting that I did and am otherwise happy with.