Any advise or creative ideas on how to create a good looking 3D wormhole (with funnel) effect?

Help & Support
,
1

Hi,
We are developing an online game where you will be able to fly thru a portal to some other planet.
We have modeled a portal device and now we need to create some good looking portal effect.
I did see the portal example in https://playcanvas.github.io/#/misc/spineboy

But that one looks way to flat. We really want a more 3D effect. Also because the user will be able to move around while looking at the portal (with effect). So the funnel needs to be 3D anyway. But I also do not want to make it look as flat plane in the shape of a funnel.

Any advise on how to make a more appealing 3D wormhole (with funnel) effect?

The directions I can think of:

  • particles
  • special shader
  • rotating textures that are mapped on multiple funnels

None of them seems easy to me. So I would like to have some advice first on which path to follow.
Which of these options will look good?
Which will be very difficult or easy to make?
Other options?

2

Do you have an example (video or other game) of the effect you want to get?

Looks like you may want to use stencilling like this: Stencil Buffer - 3D Magic Card | Learn PlayCanvas

3

Maybe we can use Stencil Buffers too, but the hiding of the funnel is not the problem.
The question is more how to create a good looking 3D funnel effect.

And no we have no example yet. When we have a technique we can and want to use, we will think about the effect we will make. This to not exclude any technique that is useful for this.

4

A bit difficult to give advice without knowing the kind of result you are looking to get. Do you have an example from another game etc that can help?

5

Well, the problem is that we want to make an effect that does not exists yet :wink:

Te question is: what technique can we use best to render a funnel shape that does not look as a funnel made from a flat sheet of paper.

If we for instance create a mesh in the form of a funnel and put some rotating texture on it. It will still look like a funnel made of a flat plane.

6

You can render to a texture so that you have a 3D rendering on a flat surface

You can try this 3rd party VFX option for PlayCanvas and if it can produce the effect you are looking for GitHub - effekseer/playcanvas-effekseer

7

Ok, thx a lot. I will take a look.
Can we do with that tool more than we can do with the particle system build in in PlayCanvas?

8

Yep