Hi! I’m currently making explosions for a game in Italy and i have some questions.
I started using EmberGen in February and i’m trying to find the best balance between the flipbook length and the resolution to achieve the best possible visual result. I use 2048 textures (can’t go to 4096), and i made different 9x9 flipbook, but now i’m switching to 8x8 because the quality is better, the only problem is that the explosion is a bit short compared to longer flipbooks. I also saw on a forum that vfx artist of Hell Let Loose or Post Scriptum (don’t remember which one) divided some explosions in 2 flipbooks to have a longer effect. Do you guys have any recommendations?
Thanks, sorry for my English i am Italian
You could try channel packing your textures. If you are using greyscale textures such as smoke, you can put frame 1-64 in the red channel, 65-128 in the green etc. You need to do a bit of work in the shader to unpack it but it would allow you to have longer sequences without incresing texture usage. Each texture has 4 channels so you could do 2 diffuse channels and 2 alpha channels. Wont work if you are using color in your textures though, however there are ways to color things in the shader. (gradient lookups etc)
You could split the sequence into 2 textures like you mentioned, but it would be more efficient to just increase texture resolution since it would be less texture reads in the shader.
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