Hand Shattering Effect
Breakdown
Effect 1: The Hand
For the hand effects, we start by having the cracks appear on the hand as it's touching the wall. This was a simple shader effect with a texture where the opacity was being driven by a parameter.
From there, we use some opacity masking on the hand to hide it.
At the same time that the hand is being hidden, we also spawn a niagara particle system. This particle system samples the skeletal mesh hand and spawns low-poly triangular meshes. We are also sampling the hand's normals so we can correctly orient the triangle meshes to appear as though they were part of the hand itself. Essentially, we're doing a crude recreation of the hand in niagara. From there, we give the particles some velocity and noise to help them fly away and disappear, giving the illusion of the hand breaking.
Effect 2: The Wall
The wall's effect is fairly straightforward: I'm opacity masking out the wall as the hand gets close to it. The character's hand position is being tracked by an MPC parameter, and when it gets close enough to an actionable wall (and the effect is flipped to Active) then the pixels on the wall close to the hand will be masked out and you can see into the room beyond. I added some extra shader math to make the distance check appear like an oval rather than a circle, and threw in a grid texture to help break up the masking transition.
Effect 3: The Post Process
In addition to the hand breaking and the wall opening up, the final piece to the effect was the black room with rainbow outlines. This was achieved as a post process effect, where I sampled the normal buffer of the camera a few times with different offsets, and then combined the renders. I also added some UV distortion to this effect, to give a glitchy feel. The result was the rainbow line work that you see.
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In order to show the actual post process effect, I used a combination of the stencil buffer and scene depth to identify the wall mesh, and used the wall as an alpha mask to differentiate between the normal scene view and the dark rainbow world.
And finally I added another small post process effect on top of everything, which is the classic red vein vignette you see in games when a character is injured.
