These effects were created for the character abilities in Outriders.

In an earlier version, the rock was a real mesh. For this mesh to spawn and fly from character to character following the curve of the beam, more calculation was required. Due to performance reasons, it was requested that phantomstabbers would only use beam emitters.

The fake mesh beam I replaced it with, compares the light direction in the scene in combination with the fake mesh normals to determine which side of the fake mesh should be fake self-shadow casting.

As Beam emitters were not fully supported in Cascade, I ran into issues like:

No native Dynamic Parameter support. This was solved splitting Color Over Life instead.

Beam noise modules would break curved beam emitters when linked. This was solved by instead using WPO for noise in the shader.

Created with

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  Unreal Engine 4

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  Autodesk Maya

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  Adobe Photoshop