Talk Title: How Parameters Drive the Particle Effects of 'Forza Horizon 5'
- Joaquin De Losada
- Jul 28
- 2 min read
Effective talk: Particle effects
Year of Talk: 2022
What will be covered:
New editor for the new game.
New VFX redesign.
New editor for the new game:
The development of the game was planned to take 50% more time than the previous game.
Giving the team more time to flesh out areas of the engine even more. And increase the scope of the game.
The VFX team decided to create a new particle system for the game.
The main reason for the new system was that the previous system was very bloated and would take a lot of time away from development.
The old system for Forza Horizon 4 was also a middleware system that was no longer in development, which meant that there wouldn't be new additions to the program.
When initially creating the new system, the team decided to have it be node-based to help artists have more control over what they can and cannot do.
Used PopcornFX v2 as their particle editor at the time.
A major problem was that there wasn't a lot of visual feedback to the player showing what the car was doing.
The little feedback that was achieved was through a lot of workarounds and duplicated effects.
Making it hard to achieve behaviors seen in reference footage.
The new system would allow for improved localization of effects. This way, they can start/end in the correct zone and seem more natural.
When talking with the subject matter expert for car handling, they also discovered that the team could include a “Slip Ratio,” which is how much a wheel moves forward vs rotating.
The more energy from the rotating wheel that is not used to move forward is being used to affect the amount of mud being picked up.
Dozens of variables for the wheels are considered, including the car speed, the arch of the wheel, the wheel RPM, and so on.
When working on the smoking feature (I.E, when drifting), the team realized they needed to consider wheel temperature and how dense of an effect they wanted. Compared to real life, the smoke effect when drifting the game's effects wasn't very dense and wouldn't appear at the appropriate rates.
So the team started raising the minimum temperature needed to start creating the smoke and reworked the smoke lighting effects so it would appear denser but slightly lighter.
Many of the effects being used for the wheels were also repurposed for destructive objects. As the team would only need to rework what the item being kicked out is.
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