Crystalline Entity TFO VFX

I created the VFX for the Crystalline Entity in Star Trek Online many years ago. It had undergone another revision while I was away and now I’m back again doing a huge overhaul to all the VFX to improve the quality and readability during the TFO gameplay. It was really a fun project trying to think of different ways to show the mechanics of what is happening.

Basically the Crystalline Entity has a main beam which will shot players when they get into range. I changed this beam several times and the final version is much more reddish and has a kind of jagged shape language. It blooms at the start and end too.

Every time a player shoots the Entity it releases shards that fly out and home in on the player. I chose purple as the color everything going OUT from the entity.

If players don’t shoot and destroy the purple shards they will impact and detonate on their ships and also launch smaller blue shards which will fly away and be absorbed back into the Crystalline Entity.

When the Entity health gets below 50% it will send out a big AOI warning UI and when it is complete a large AOE explosion will happen.

Main Beam

Crystal Launch

I broke apart the existing Crystalline Entity geometry and decided the center spikes would serve perfectly as the Charge/Release and Absorb indicators. I duplicated the spike geometry and gave it new UVs with an animating mask texture to show energy flowing in or out of the spikes. This is the proof of concept in Blender: