Pimping the FX.
polycounter lvl 11
Hey fellas.
Put these effects together in the last 2 days. Just wanted to share them.
I'll explain my approach when designing these spell effects.
The rune placement represents casting time and warning that the spell is going to be cast. I figured it would be cool to see a visual casting element instead of watching a bar slide across the screen.
Apologies for resultion, i havn't put together the highres stuff yet.
www.virtuosicstudios.com/newart/Fire_Vid.mov
www.virtuosicstudios.com/newart/Glyph.mov
www.virtuosicstudios.com/newart/Ice_Vid.mov
Put these effects together in the last 2 days. Just wanted to share them.
I'll explain my approach when designing these spell effects.
The rune placement represents casting time and warning that the spell is going to be cast. I figured it would be cool to see a visual casting element instead of watching a bar slide across the screen.
Apologies for resultion, i havn't put together the highres stuff yet.
www.virtuosicstudios.com/newart/Fire_Vid.mov
www.virtuosicstudios.com/newart/Glyph.mov
www.virtuosicstudios.com/newart/Ice_Vid.mov
Replies
Pyromania - Ya man i wanted to have the glyph circle finish glow really bright, then erupt, but i just don't have the control i really want with the cascade system. Either that or I'm not good enough to understand how to do complex animation with it yet.
have you thought about giving the flames some movement in the texture using a bump offset or using a noise texture. Also, have you thought about making a fire animated tile texture, that way they would all look different when they spawn.
I like the ice fx, I've been trying to make ice grow from bottom to top of the player but I couldn't get the look I wanted, still working on it.
I actually used a bump offset in the texture. The texture also tiles horizontally. :-)
here's the shader i made -
In other words, awesome work!
^ Second this. Always liked the fantasy/runic stuff, and this is some top notch stuff. Would love to understand how you made it all work.
I'm guessing that shader is just for the fire FX?
For instance, the fire effect has 7 different particle emitters in that particle system. I had to make a shader for each one that represented how i wanted that particular effect to work. Once i had all the shaders made, it was just a matter of plugging in the properties and fine tuning them till i got the desired effect. It's a long process but it doesn't feel long when you are making awesome effects.
Were they just for fun or do you plan on using them in some kind of mod with unreal?
Ice:
Not sure why you present this in a different setting, doesn't really seem to add anything.
You could try a bit of distortion on the crystals and varied their size a bit more. There is no real depth to the shader since it doesn't distort anything.
A cubemap for some fake reflections.
There is no real punch or shockwave here, adding one radiating along the ground plane and maybe a spherical one in the area around the meshes could look nice.
You could try adding some frost that grows out from the crystals along the ground.
The glyphs just fades in, they don't really glow or does anything special.
The snow/frost quads are just a simple texture, align them so that they radiate outwards from the main body of crystal and put a simple panner on the material (you need to tone down the rotation) would really give some extra life to it.
No collision on the fragments, get a few to stop on the ground or bounce.
Fire:
Same thing here with the glyphs, nothing really happens they just fade in.
Learn some basic Matinee and add some scripted lighting, it would really help here.
More speed on the panners in the fire material, it fades so quickly that the fire look stationary.
Add some more pulse to the embers flying out from the centre. It would cool to have them smolding on the ground.
The lava cracks just appears, I would tile a texture horizontally along a flat tubesphaped mesh
and add a panner that starts in the centre and grows vertically towards the edges, it would look more like the fire was spreading outwards. The cracks also fades very quickly but I guess that is because you want to play the effect two times.
Glyph:
My favorite (I'm a sucker for subtle distortions).
Try added one more circle and rotate it in the other direction and fade it before it goes to far from the centre.
The circles disappears a bit abruptly.
Again, lightning.
Maybe a subtle flat glow pulsing out from the centre?
The centre glowsprite tornado is nice, you could try and add an extra emitter with some slowly upwards accelerating glowsprites.
Updated FX reel - http://www.virtuosicstudios.com/FX
WIP.
www.virtuosicstudios.com/FX/groundexplosion.mov
btw, nice to see more guys into FX around here. There aren't many of us around polycount
[ame]
Does it actuall leave a hole in the floor? You probably worked with pre-made meshes, maybe even rayfire baking ?
Great effects btw.
Yep, The tiles are just meshes designed to blend in with the ground, and the chunks of earth below the tiles were baked with rayfire. The rest is just a bunch of complex physics sims.
This tool is going to change everything.