[Riot Art Contest] - Klemen Lozar
Latest update:
Here's my final submission. Apart from some minor tweaks, the electricity is mostly the same, I've spent the remainder of time polishing the fire spell. I'm pretty happy with how everything turned out, I think I succeeded in reaching my initial vision of a simple concept with a lot of stylisation. I want to note it's meant to look the best from top-down LoL's gameplay perspective, I've included front and side views as per the competition rules.
I wish good luck to all of you, it's been great seeing everyone's progress, a lot of excellent effects all around!
Click the image to view the animation:
Additionally here's a compilation of action shots I've submitted:
Hey everyone,
I'll give this a go as well. I suppose I'll start with a short breakdown of what I plan to do. As far as fantasy effects go, I'm really fond of the natural elements so I'll be mostly working with fire and electricity but try and avoid the usual stereotypes. I'll be working with UE4/3ds Max.
Electricity - I want this to look really impactful and sharp, like it could cut you apart.
Fire - I want to avoid the standard fireball look and go for something more fluid and stylised.
I did a first pass on the electric effect. At this stage I'm blocking out shapes and getting a sense of the timing, I will later go back and work on the animation and textures/treatment in more detail.
Click the image to view the animation:
That's it for now, I'm currently doing a first pass on the fire effect, I'll do an update when I have something to show. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else comes up with, good luck people!
Here's my final submission. Apart from some minor tweaks, the electricity is mostly the same, I've spent the remainder of time polishing the fire spell. I'm pretty happy with how everything turned out, I think I succeeded in reaching my initial vision of a simple concept with a lot of stylisation. I want to note it's meant to look the best from top-down LoL's gameplay perspective, I've included front and side views as per the competition rules.
I wish good luck to all of you, it's been great seeing everyone's progress, a lot of excellent effects all around!
Click the image to view the animation:
Additionally here's a compilation of action shots I've submitted:
Hey everyone,
I'll give this a go as well. I suppose I'll start with a short breakdown of what I plan to do. As far as fantasy effects go, I'm really fond of the natural elements so I'll be mostly working with fire and electricity but try and avoid the usual stereotypes. I'll be working with UE4/3ds Max.
Electricity - I want this to look really impactful and sharp, like it could cut you apart.
Fire - I want to avoid the standard fireball look and go for something more fluid and stylised.
I did a first pass on the electric effect. At this stage I'm blocking out shapes and getting a sense of the timing, I will later go back and work on the animation and textures/treatment in more detail.
Click the image to view the animation:
That's it for now, I'm currently doing a first pass on the fire effect, I'll do an update when I have something to show. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else comes up with, good luck people!
Replies
I've made some progress on the second effect but I'm not too happy with it yet. I need to work on the timing, it's much too even now.
Click the image to view the animation:
Or just show us the texture. That would be equally interesting.
Russell, I'm using custom static meshes with some shader trickery for the trails, I find ribbons in cascade a bit limiting for stuff like this. Blend mode is transparent, that's what you were asking right?
Looks real fluid! Id be interested to see what the shader looks like. Dont worry im not working in Unreal so I wont steal your ideas :P I dont get to see how other effects artist work very often is all. So im trying to see all I can while this competition is on!
Great work though
I think the bloom might be a bit too intense though. Maybe tone it down a tad? (Not too much though!)
-AirRun, fully agree yeah like I said, that's something I'm working on.
-Lokii, I've actually done a first pass on the impacts, I'll probably do an update tomorrow!
-Cyan_Fox, I might have bumped up the emissive a bit too much in that one yeah
-C.K.Shepherd, thanks man, glad you like it!
Thanks again everyone, really appreciate all the feedback!
Also I agree with Rusty, if you could, offer as much exposure as you would be comfortable with. This is more of a learning experience for some of us and it would be awesome to see an honest breakdown of your process.
Oh it's definitely a learning experience for me as well. I've been gearing up to do a tutorial for a while now and this seems like a good platform, but I would rather wait and do a comprehensive breakdown a bit further down the line when I have more spare time.
AirRun, no worries at all
Sgtscience, you're a bit off as far as technique goes. I'm using a panning hand drawn tileable texture I made for the fire (3 variations, one in each channel) and I use a sphere mask to move it through the UV space on the static mesh.
I've updated the trajectory and animation of the trails a bit and added some impacts.
Click the image to view the animation:
This made my day. Awesome!
Just one thing, maybe. The trails look a bit too slow compared to the impact, in my opinion. But well, it's really nice! *^*
I like how they all converge on impact, but its missing a bit of the impact.
The break away pieces start out too soon and because of this a bit away from that center area of impact. Also I feel like the break away flames are facing the wrong way. The hotter brighter part should be going away from the impact location not facing to it.
The flames themselves go through the sphere instead of stopping. You could hide this with more spark/ember like effect. Kind of the way when throwing a hot coal at a wall or a bottle rocket hitting a wall.
Again great stuff!
Yeah, it's not meant to be really polished yet, right now I'm just spawning the impact stuff with a delay, just to get an idea that's why it's a bit messy. Impacts need more pop to them as well, you're right.
I don't agree with the flames bouncing back away from the impact, that's how a solid would behave. I want this to be really fluid and keep that directional momentum after impact like you might imagine water would for example.
I won't be speeding it up much more, I imagine this homing in on the target and blowing up short if you happen to escape it. I'm also thinking about having about 4 trails hit the target directly and have 4 shave off, fly upwards and come down around the target with aoe damage, just to break it up a bit. Does this sound like a useful dynamic to any of you more committed league players?
League effects, even the lengthy ones, are really punchy and quickly executed in their effects. My thought is that if the attack misses its target, it just terminates itself into the ground or off to the side. If you decide you want to go the fly off rout, my suggestion would be to have all of the trails spread out from their ignition and not target dead center on the other sphere. Think directed rockets, instead of homing missiles. They should veer off center a bit, and some more than others. Have them "detonate" close to the sphere even if they do "miss". Again, too high up, or too far behind, and you run the risk of having an effect that looks too lengthy.
The mid part could feel a bit more dynamic though, maybe the UV animation could be less linear. Good old massaging of curves could do the job here.
On the other hand the movement can be intended as it is and its absolutely fine... damn lovely ^^
I made a rough test for the recent idea I've had. So 4 trails do direct damage and 4 peel off and hit the area around it at random. Seeing it in action, I'm not that fond of it any more, it looks a bit too chaotic. I think I'll abandon it and just focus on hitting the target directly.
Click the image to view the animation:
I'll probably go back to electricity now to change it up a bit.
It looks really (REALLY) nice, but logically speaking, it sounds a bit off. ^^ Looks like some missiles are intentionally missing their target.
But still, it looks awesome! \o/
I have the perfect LoL based reference for you Klemen. I was considering the same behaviour in one of my concepts.
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Nice one!
danielzklein, I'm careful to keep actual gameplay in mind every step of the way, I'm making sure it's nice and readable from different angles and completely viable as far as performance goes.
Apologies for being a bit distant lately, I'm going through some rough waters at the moment and won't be able to work on this for some time, I'll sort of have to play catch-up at the end.
I've made some updates to the electric effect. I made a couple of new assets, the build up is much more gradual now and I've polished the main release. I'm also experimenting with a new colour scheme, I'm going with deep purple and orange for high energy parts.
You'll always surprise me more and more and more... This is looking... Eh, I don't even know how to say. It just looks perfect to me. xD
Click the image to view the animation:
Following up I want to do some more general polish and balance the colors so the two spells compliment each other a bit better. I'm generally happy with the major elements now so I wont be doing any big changes.