Islands - Dialogue Trigger Beam

Shawn and Morgan looked at our games the other day, and gave us great feedback. I've been working on one of the things Morgan suggested. Which was basically, instead of creating a bunch of character animations for landing, talking off, walking around etc. We could just have some kind of beam of light shining into the sky right near where an NPC is waiting to talk to you. The player flys into the beam and triggers the dialogue sequence. Cameron has explained it on his blog aswell, with pictures!

I figured I would create a platform and attach a particle animator and renderer on it and create some pretty effects.

This is how it started -


And after playing around with some settings and textures.

This is what I have ended up with so far -


I don't know if this will be the final look, it depends on what my team thinks of it and also how the game progresses. But I'm pretty happy with how it looks right now.

I think this falls under my personal project stuff aswell. I really enjoyed doing this, hopefully the rest of my visual effects stuff will be as fun.