HW3: Jets

Homeworld 3: Jets
The Game is not due for release until Q2 2023.
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After the reveal trailer showing the traditionally vertical Mothership in a horizontal orientation, the game community was a bit distressed that their iconic ship had been rotated. We produced this video to show the ship rotating to its traditional orientation.
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The video utalised a tweaked vector jet I had developed for the game. You can see it in some of game play footage when a ship moves in a direction different to the thrust of the main engines.
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It is completely passive system, and relies on the position, orientation and speed of the particle between frames to scale the jet accordingly. This means the jets on the outside edge of a ship rotating about its axis will be larger than the ones closer the moment of rotation. It also means if a ship is strafing, all jets will be the same size as the ship is moving in a linear fashion
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To make life easier for the artist to place jets where ever they wanted, I created an extended "pick and place" node in Houdini, that also captured the hit/surface normal as well as a points position and other data. This was then imported to Niagara as a JSON file and the scaling maths processed in a custom module
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For a passive effect its really satisfying to see when a small fighter craft suddenly change direction, or when collectors maneuver into position to mine resources
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Find more details about Homeworld 3 here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1840080/Homeworld_3/