That’s awesome to hear! The particles themselves are normal mapped erosion particles with the textures generated in Houdini. For more detailed information on how to do those, I would strongly recommend taking a look at the Liquid Effects in The Last of Us GDC talk by Eben Cook which served as great inspiration for me when looking at how to do the blood for Rage 2.

When it comes to how they interact with the impact animations of the enemies, we want to cover as little of the character as possible with the effects while at the same time have something that reads very well. So what we focus on is trying to use the blood impacts to break up the character’s silhouette.

We do this by taking the normal of the impact surface where the bullet hit and orienting the impact along that vector, then we give the particles in the effect a lot of directionality. So in most cases when you shoot a character the blood will fly outwards, breaking the silhouette and staying very visible while not covering up the impact animations of the target.

Overdrive Mode Effect

80lv: How do you actually figure out that static influence effect you’re using in Rage 2? What are the challenges? How is it done?

Oh wow, that was a long process. It all started when we were in a meeting talking about how we should do the Overdrive where the player goes into this super mode, which is one of the major “peaks” of the combat loop. In this meeting, one of our UI artists showed a previs video he made where all these crazy video compression artifacts would start happening once you went into Overdrive.