Hey everyone!
First time posting here. I would like to share a little teleportation effect I made for fun, and ask for feedback.
The effect was created in Unity, using a standard Particles/Alpha Blended material, sprites only and no lights. The highest amount of particles it reaches on screen is 80.
The idea is for a character to cast a spell allowing them to float above the ground where the sphere would build around them and then teleport them to their desired location. The hexagon sphere consists of two halves allowing the back half to appear behind the character.
I’m an experienced 3D Artist, but have no experience in VFX. Currently filling in at work until we hire an actual VFX artist and it’s been great to have the chance to create VFX for one of our current game projects. For about 6 weeks I’ve learnt a lot and loving it so far. I would definitely love to do it full time one day.
I’d say there is not not enough build up at the start to creeate anticipation and it disappears waaay to abruptly. Adding some sparks (and that’s just an example) when it disappears and may be some rotation to the sphere would help. Although you said you only used some texture ? You should try using a sphere mesh to give it some depth.
Also some lighting and a ground to reflect the emissive and some post processing.
Oh and some color grading as well.
Other than that, it’s a good start
And holy molly there is a lot of sub particle systems on this one
Although I wanted it to be a pretty quick and short one, I do agree with you about the build up and ending. There’s other things I’m not completely happy about with regards to timing - the sphere shake starts only after the sphere was completed for example. I had a lot more planned for this one, but I decided to leave it as it is and move on. I’ll definitely try using a mesh as I haven’t done that yet, but I’ve seen some awesome results from other people.
Yup, no lights or emissives there at the moment as I wanted to keep it fairly simple. Also I haven’t used any Sub Emitters. Speaking of which is it bad to have so many individual particle systems? In this case only what’s in green is particle systems, the rest is empty GameObjects to keep things tidy.
I would perhaps approach this in a different manner. Look at using a lot less particles. A lot of this could be done with some clever texture work. This will keep it super cheap and run time friendly.
Similar to Fenix suggestion I would perhaps look at adding contrast in your colour, brightness, shape and timing. Zoom out, play the effect and check the readability. At the moment the build up / anticipation isn’t to different from the release. I would also look at exploring adding an ending to the effect. At the moment it just pops off. You could make the ending quiet and scale it out, fade to nothing, erode. A small detail, rather than just popping.
This effect, although a project just for fun, was designed with mobile game use in mind, or any other case where things need to be kept very simple (no 3d meshes etc.) and all FX would have to use a single material + single texture sheet. My understanding is that the overall particle count ( all FX playing on screen at the same time ) is what matters for performance, not how many particle systems a VFX is made of. Hope that make sense and please do correct me if I am wrong.
I ended up using so many PS as all elements of the hex sphere are separate so I can control their behavior in realtime.
Yup, I’ve taken note of Fenix’s feedback. Thanks for your input too! I think I am going to leave this one as it is and use all feedback and new stuff I’m learning to re make it from scratch and do it properly.
I’m just looking at this right now so might come in handy:
