Swatter/hammer/whatever this weapon is

[Kinsu]

I have 2 suggestions of improvements for the current swatter version in SVN. My global feeling when it swats karts is that it's too... linear. Not enough CarToOn

1. I think a cartoonish motionblur would be very cool, a little like this one :


source

2. Also, the swat could be graphically accompanied by an effect that highlights the shock, a little like in comic books :

Here we can see the air move caused by the swatter, which reinforces the shock effect.

paf.jpg (10.24 KiB) Viewed 3424 times

Though I don't really know how this kind of effects could be achieved... with some sprites ? Or the first effect might be made with a geometry deform & texture change (or post-processing, Funto ? ), and for the second maybe a kind of animated decal could be OK ...

[Funto]

The first effect (motion blur) would actually be hard to do in post-processing : first, you need to know the speed for all points of the object (requires an additional velocity buffer), and then, you would need a way to store "curved" velocities in them...that could be interesting though, but we would need a great control over the rendering, and mainly time to implement :/

There are techniques for motion blur with deformed geometries ( http://www.amddevcentral.com/media/gpu_ ... ortion.pdf ), but I never implemented such a technique.
In any case, there are more important things to do for STK, though this is indeed an interesting topic ^^

As for the second effect, I would just add some particles to make smoke around the impact point ^^

[Auria]

For the first effect, I think it would be easier to do it in blender, just add some planes with a blurry texture on them and animate them.

For the second effect, some thing could be done with particles, but not sure it will be as nice as in your mockup

[qubodup]

the dust clouds (second effect) idea is great!

Looking at super mario galaxy ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Qw1ClCVN8 - disable sound recommended) the effect could be achieved this way:
1. spawn 15 cloud sprites aligned in a circle around the hit zone
2. move the sprites at linear or decreasing speed away from the hit zone (parallel to the plane below the hit zone?)
3. grow the sprites in size (linear?)
4. fade the sprites out/to alpha (linear?)

for additionall effect, different sprites could have a different size-growth speed or target size and different fadeout time. also the positioning could be slightly randomized.

[Kinsu]

Thank you for your suggestions. I'll try to make a little effect like this using one of these methods.