There is probably a pun to be made about QA being too particular, but I won’t make you read it.
I thought I’d share a rough outline of what I tried to include in the effect that was rejected to help everyone start to get an idea what they might/might not fit into a project. And we can start to understand better how much we can do in the current build of the VFX editor.
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I did run and pass a performance test. Note: We were told at current not to rely on the self-tester for VFX effects. I ran it anyway because… science.
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Side note: If you have to pause your effect preview in order to keep making node connections in the graph, you might have too much processing strain on the effect. This is not a perfect indicator, because my hard drive is so full they wanted to put it on an episode of the Hoarders TV show. But worth noting that I wasn’t totally surprised when it didn’t pass QA.
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Overall file size was 2.0 Mb
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What I tried to include in the first attempt:
• 3D portrait segmentation
• Two 3D planes (wings)
• 6 different butterfly particle systems (See below for screenshot of how I set them each up). Each system included a flip book with 8 sprites with a ‘flipbook blend’ in the output. Each was set up on a ‘transit by time’ node so the longer you hold up your hand, the more butterflies spawn per second. Transit by time is set up with min spawn rate from: 4, maximum spawn rate to: 50 increasing over a 30 second duration.
• The lifetime of each particle was set to 8 seconds. I figured a maximum of 50 particles multiplied by 8 seconds… 50*8=400, so I set the capacity of each particle to 400. (that would be the maximum there would be on screen at any given time. Although even at the 30 second mark, I don’t think there are even close to 400 of each butterfly on screen (some will be flying off screen due to the random velocity).
• Additionally, I added a magic flipbook sparkle tail sprite to each system (slightly modified from the firework tutorial). The capacity of each tail was set to 200 for no real reason, my gut just said 200.
• If I add up the total particle capacities across 6 butterfly systems, that setup would allow for a maximum 3,600 total particles, each running a flipbook sprite sheet.
