Trying to recreate a "per-tile" shrink-away effect

Currently I’m trying to figure out how to tackle creating an effect similar to the blue triangular tiles on the surrounding dome shrinking away at the very beginning of this video:

in gif form:

(this is a UE4 game)

I’m assuming that this is some kind of material effect, but I’m not sure where to start here. Any pointers would be hugely appreciated.

Hey Tain,

I could be wrong, but from the looks of your gif, this effect is done using an animated 2D texture, not a 3D dome. The texture is animated to open the center up like so, and then the image size is increased rapidly to appear like the player is moving through it. The resizing of the image can be done in either the animation itself or in Unreal, depending on its variability of use.

Hope this answers some questions.

~K

To add some info (as the gif doesn’t convey things perfectly), this is a VR game and the dome is 3D. The player flies out of the dome after the opening effect that I’m referring to (which is the fast motion in the GIF). While flying by the triangles, they don’t seem to exhibit any texture artifacts, and the scaling of the triangles seems to happen at the full 90fps in VR, so I don’t think it’s a flipbooked texture.

I know that there is no way to make exactly the same effect with wpo in material, and it’s very expensive to use many scaled mesh instances for this.

So, I believe its done with some kind of vertex anim/morph.