Sandmans Bow
For a long time, I’ve been interested and inspired by John Blund (Sandman), who helps children fall asleep by sprinkling magical sand in their eyes. With this project, I wanted to create a weapon out of sand used by the Sandman to fight nightmares.
The vision I had for this project was to create a weapon that takes its shape by sand moving up from the ground into the shape of a bow. After the bow shot an arrow, I wanted it to collapse back into sand. The main goal was to create a magical feeling without losing the illusion that the bow and arrow are made out of sand.
Tools used
Unreal:
Blueprints, Materials and Particles
Houdini:
Bow remeshed
Maya:
Animation and Rigging
Substance designer:
Textures
Niagara Breakdown
To get the sand to magically move from sand to a bow the way I wanted was not an easy feat.
I tested multiple ways. For example, I did a deep dive into Niagara module scripting, I tried making particles move in a spline before reintegrating to a bow and played around with point attraction force.
I ended up using point attraction force together with setting particles with a lerp. It lerps between A : particles position to B : sample skeleton mesh position, through time.
I wanted a more dramatic end to the bow becoming sand. To get this effect, as shown in the picture above, I used the emitter called sand burst, with a lot of curl noise to get a more explosive and magical feeling. The other two are more affected by gravity and wind, giving the feeling of falling to the ground.
To amplify the illusion of a bow made out of sand, I made an emitter that imitates sand catching in the wind, as well as falling to the ground.
To sell the force in shooting the arrow, I made a burst emitter with particles exploding out and a light that affects its surroundings to make it more magical.
The loading effect has a lot of emitters. The ribbon emitters that follow a different emitter that has a rotation point.
I added some curl noise to get the movement more diverse and an absorbing particle that handles the size and speed from the outer part into the middle of the disc.
Lastly, a fast little circle to make it more explosive.
To make the arrow look like it generates some power and force, I added a smoky effect and some sparks shooting out of it.
Rig
Here is a showcase of the rigg I made and used in the project