I wanted to recreate the whole function of the weapon with single shots, charged shots by holding the trigger down, weapon temperature building up, overheating and all the animations on the Materials, UI, Niagara and decals as they were affected from the states of the weapon.
I also chose to implement fake recoil from the weapon as it fires in some attempt to create pseudo haptics for the user, to make it feel more realistic and also a "lazy" UI reticule that lags slightly behind the movement of the gun.
I chose to have the reticule UI not as widgets but in the world more so because of the VR nature of the project, it felt more suiting to not overlay it on the screen and make it more physical in the space.
A nice little additional thing was the purity seal using some chaos cloth for real time cloth movement, that's really fun to use but lots still to learn.
I learnt a hell of a lot more than I'd anticipated, bit off a bit more than I expected but had an awesome time making everything and including flexibility into the materials and niagara systems to react dynamically to the state of the weapon.
I hope you enjoyed it, and please feel free to look at the breakdown of the weapon asset also on my portfolio.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Zl09Lw
Many thanks.
1st capture of the weapon in VR with single and charged shots also illustrating the chaos cloth "purity seal" on the left side of the weapon and the Niagara and decals for shot blasts and hits.
2nd capture of the weapon in VR with single and charged shots also illustrating the chaos cloth "purity seal" on the left side of the weapon and the Niagara and decals for shot blasts and hits.
Material used for the reticule UI for the plasma pistol including alphas to fade relevant parts in and out, temperature, "brackets and forks" for shot animations, overheated boolean and colours, all would be updated via blueprints.
Material used for the charger bars on the reticule UI including charger bracket masks to animate, a shot charge bar and colours, again all are animated in blueprints.
Material used for the plasma chamber on the weapon with overheated boolean and weapon temperature, both adjust the speed and shape of the plasma pulses to illustrate the state of the weapon, updated via blueprints.