Visual Effects in Decentraland

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Mission

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Decentraland is a platform that aims to innovate and impulse artists to create, own and control its designs inside the blockchain.
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However some of its limitations have us scratching our heads, we took it as a challenge and developed a series of special effects to employ in our scenes. Here we are going to explain some of the VFX we developed.

Resources

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• MayaLT
• Photoshop
• Unity 2018.3.6f1
• Decentraland SDK

#00 - Scratching the main concepts for VFX

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This is one of the trickiest parts to make in Decentraland, since the engine don't allow the use of particles or any kind of post effect.

​In order to tackle this, we have to decompose which effects we want to create, and decompose them in their basic parts to be able to recreate them with the means we have at our disposal.

At the end of the process we had a list of effects, that we could do mixing three main concepts, that are animation, transparency planes and the basic shapes.
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We learned that this simple concepts mixed allowed us to recreate a variety of effects, that looked difficult to achieve without the help of the particle system or effects.

For each effect we implemented these concepts, for example for the fire on the we created a gradient to create a transparency map, then to do the twinkle we animate so planes in the animation tab on Unity.

The animatons aren't too complex, just animations of scale, rotation and position. And surprisingly got a variety of effects. In this article I want to show some of them. Since the procces is really similar, so I'm not going to dwell in the process of how we did them.

#01 Post Effects in Decentraland

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Art Stations (goto)

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Here we can see two ways to use the transparency maps.

The first one is in the light in here we use a gradient map as a way to create the source of light, and an emissive map to add some lighting to the model.
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The second one, is in the corner of the wall, with a plane over the window, and using the ambient oclussion as a reference to darken the corners of the walls.

Tomb Chaser (goto)

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In here, we used the transpararency to create an operture full of light for the finish room, this was made to give the exit a victorious ending kind of feeling.

This is what I explained on the first part, to create the tiwnkle effect we animate the plane with the scale, also the fire follows a similar aproach.
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It consist of three planes animated in squash and strecht while rotating slightly the plane.

Momus Collection (goto)

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One of the main problems we found is that you can't animate texture in the decentraland engine. So in order to create this effect we put several layers one of top of the other.
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And of the top layers we put transparent texture of flow of the river, finally we animate the scale from 0 to 1 on loop to create the illusion of flowing river.

This process is the same as explained on the art stations for the lights. But in this case we overlap several rays to create the effect of the sunray.

Animation of small spheres with an emissive material to create fireflies.

Plane with open red eyes drawing, but animated in the scale to create the winking effect.

In here we created the opposite effect of the light by creating a dark gradient in a transparency map, we can create a dark ambient on the exterior.

South Transit System (goto)

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Same concept as lights explained before, but here we create a more complex mesh to create the light of the elevator.
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which we animate throught the scale to create the effect.

To create the effect of trail on the train, is like we create the planes of lighting. However this time we put the plane on the tracks to bring a gleam effect.

Conclusion

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These were some of the effects that we used on the scenes we developed on Decentraland, using the principles we knew worked on the platform, and twist them to improve our scenes and give them an extra, as you know the devil is on the details.

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Laura Usón

ARTIST

Passionate about videogames, movies and creatures. artist by day and superhero at night.

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