Hello everyone, i want to show you my VFX reel, and some other works.
In last year I worked on the project called The-Exiled. It’s a sandbox MMORPG with strong skill-based PvP combat.
All the special effects was made in Unity3D. For the most of my special effects i use scrolling alpha blend shader, hand-painted masks and colored noise clouds.
Same technique was used here for splash screen effects.
That’s super impressive to see you approach those splashes in realtime! Nice work man. Your reel is really lovely too! If you’re looking for any bit of feedback I noticed that your effects sometimes get a little blown out/muddy like this:
which make them feel a bit flat. Also a bit more hue variation in some of your stuff like this piece could go a long way:
Man I can’t get over your splashes, those are so rad. Are you you manipulating all the motion in realtime or are some elements baked into the texture?
Thanks for the feedback!
Yeah, in this project, each character class has only 2 colors in palette, so unfortunately, i can’t use other colors in this effects. But, yeah i probably should change them little bit, thanks!
I made couple of black/white masks from original image and control them through particle system in Unity3D.
Your circular effects have an interesting motion to them. Would you mind sharing your techniques? What kind of noise textures are you using and how does the shader utilize them?
That first smoke puff is one of my favorite smoke puffs I’ve seen. I love the shapes and timing. Is it 3D in game, or is it camera facing sprites? I’d love to see it from some other angles.
Im super interested in those splash arts.
Do you perhaps have any breakdowns or other resources i could scour through?
Would love to give this a try aswell.
(p.s. in the original art from teemo, there’s a water splash in the background, but yours doesnt have it.
did you cut it out or something and made an effect of it ?)
Yes, i’m always trying to clear original image as much as possible, removing all drawing effects and remake them with particle systems. This is cleared background for Blitz for example.
Overall It’s very simple scrolling textures and masks.
Masks - just black and white areas of original image.
1 - cloud / 2 - additional cloud / 3 - combined with mask
Textures - Photoshop Cloud noise.
Refraction - UV distortion shader with mask.
Scrolling shaders very easy to find for any engine. http://acegikmo.com/shaderforge/wiki/index.php?title=UV_Rotation_%26_Panning
ohhh, thanks for replying so fast!
Can i ask how you go about clearing an image of it’s “cluttering/effects” so you can add your’s?
Photoshop seems a given almost, but do you handpaint back in the area’s you removed or something?
Great work! One question: for explosion and puffs you use complete sequences sheets from FumeFX and show them as single elementor you create a spritesheet that you combine for multiple particles in a traditional way? In the first case in Unity how do you cope with view direction?
^ similar to above:
It’d be cool to see the first effect from other angles to see how the smoke puff handles it/ if it’s only setup to be viewed from this angle how you’d go about changing it to be able to be viewed from other angles
It’s always depends on task and view angle of the game. For example in MOBA, RTS games and some FPS games have locked camera angle, so you can render all sprite in one direction. If it’s not works, you should make Smoke/Explosion puff more abstract or rounded shape, and it will be good for all angles.
Also, you can cover middle and bottom of the effect with different sprites.
But this effect works only in couple directions yes, it just for practice. But, it always depends on the task. It’s not a problem to remake sprite for different angles.
Hi Alexandr, thank you for your answer. Please, don’t get my question as a critique: I loved the result and I was just curios and I know that works perfectly innsome situations. As I’m struggle with explosion in Unity, I thought that to obtain such result with standard workflow was quite changing so I was just asking. It’s amazing, congratulations
But, yeah i probably should change them little bit, thanks! 
