Late in our third semester at FIEA, the art students were expected to create a thesis based on something or some technique we wanted to or had learned while at FIEA. The teachers described it as an “innovation presentation.” Most of us used the opportunity to document and explain how we had overcome some crazy obstacle for our capstone games. Many of us chose to write it almost as a tutorial for future cohorts to use when they started their capstone games. Personally, I had been doing a lot of effects and particle work in UDK around that time, so I decided to describe one of the more challenging particles I had been creating–the Machina death/oil particle. I had gone through a ton of iteration on this particle, it had taken a long time to get it to look right, and it used some more advanced (I felt) particle work that I wished I had known when I first started using UDK, so it the perfect candidate to write about.
The paper goes over what my original task and goal was, some of my iteration, some (hopefully) helpful methods, different kinds of UDK particles, and, of course, the final product. You can read it here! If some of the videos don’t work in your browser, you can download the .pdf, and they should work.