/vr/ - Retro Games

>>3378435
For fireballs they stopped using "flipbooks" (pre-rendered movies of explosions) and instead used two textures: One for, well, texture I suppose, and another for the alpha.

A section of the "Base Plate" texture (as in bitmap) which has the lumpy smoke texture (as in the feel, appearance, or consistency of a surface or a substance) is scrolled through while the Alpha texture defines the transparency of the section.

This would be easy to do in Photoshop, just get your lumpy smoke texture, put a cloud particle as the mask, unlink them so that they can move independently, create a frame animation, create a new frame in the frame animation, move the lumpy texture, select both frames, and click interpolate.

This should also be possible in Textures (to an extent) using an inverted alpha texture (Transparency is white instead of black) and the Subtract blend mode which creates a sort of Multiply effect. Of course, with this method you'll only get a transprency effect if you set the actor to Additive blend mode which isn't the best for explosions since you want the explosion to have an opaqueness to it. You may be able to create some fantastic explosion effects using only Textures and vanilla assets.

I'll attempt a GIF example in the next post.