Week 10

It was definitely one of the most challenging projects I have worked on, but worth putting my effort in and working with the team. I am proud of our team for finishing this project within a quite short amount of time. Along the journey, I learned a lot about working in a team in terms of communication as well as the different skills we have. It was a lot of fun from the ideation part to troubleshooting the issues and experimenting with tools.

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One thing I am willing to try in the near future is going to be creating the same FX especially asteroid one, using Houdini instead of the Niagara system in Unreal. There is no doubt that both software are great tools for creating the FX. However, I felt the limit of the Niagara system while I was creating Asteroid FX in terms of collision calculation in the system. In this project, I was able to fix the problem to some extent by expanding the collision radius of the objects, but it slowed down the execution due to calculating the collision value between every object. In Houdini, I expect I can get the value of the position of all the objects and set the minimum/maximum distance limit; this will reduce the execution time because it doesn't need to calculate all the values in real time. At least, meteor FX created in Unreal Engine in real-time is way faster than the one created in Houdini – me and Yilin tested this in the early phase of the project.

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Overall, it was so much fun and gave me so many takeaways. Once I get time to work on the asteroid FX with Houdini, I will certainly upload that process next to this post! Thank you to the readers who joined me on my journey and hope to see you again!