The orange is supposed to be like burning up from the inside, black being the ash; and the blue being some kind of digital/holographic style dissolve.
There are a few particle effects going on, the brighter/larger is a result of bullet impact in the middle of the back, there's some lighting and a couple of dissolve shaders at slightly different timings.
I'm sure the technique I used has a name but I have no idea what that is, I just been thinking of how to do it for a while now.
The animated mask is running from the red channel of this image :
http://i.imgur.com/XPvTc.png
it incrementally clamps off the colour value, dark to light, and uses that for a masking texture. It is currently capped for convenience at 255 frames of animation. I have used this texture to discard pixels but it could be useful for other applications. The blue effect is running of a 16x16 image that comes in at under a 1kb but its hard to tell any difference.
@nehon for sure, it’s so deviously simple it doesn’t need much explanation (beyond what I did) but I will draw up a bit of doco and put up the code I used in the next few days.
Also if anyone does know the name of this technique please let me know, save me reinventing the wheel
hehe thanks @mifth but you’re really too kind, if you have a look back through some of the old User Code and Project and Contribution topics you will see where the true GSLS talent lies, I’ve barely scratching the surface so far.
Enhanced particles (including a soft implementation) are coming, jus let me sink a couple more thousand hours into the Gears franchise and I will get back to game dev
