Hey Everyone, pretty new to this awesome community. I’ve been diving deep into real time vfx in Niagara after coming from doing live action pre-rendered vfx. I love it so much more. Someone recently told me about this forum and thought about showing-off some of the work I’ve done, there’s a good bit of stuff and I don’t want to just spam a bunch of videos and images on one post, so thought it be best to share my artstation portfolio? I don’t know if that’s okay to do here and if not I apologize, but I figured it would be best to do it that way without spamming.
I took a look at your effects and they are a good beginning!
Glad you were playing with different techniques and sorts of effects (the fish made me laugh xd).
Probably something I noticed the most is that you struggled a bit with getting a natural transition between different parts of the effect. When you have build ups for projectiles, the projectile itself doesn’t look like it would be created from the build up like this. Would be good to play with shapes that are more similar, or use blend techniques, like flashes, smokes, distortion to make blending between different parts of effect more connected.
Apart from that motion is something that is very important. For that I recommend reading about 12 principles of animation and learning how to achieve movement that is more appealing. For instance your projectile are very slow and feel stiff while moving. Maybe you can stretch them with speed and modify the speed value so they feel more threatening!
And lastly! Just create more and more Get good references and break them down! Glad you picked on Hades as it’s a great reference, so pay a close look on how they did timings and what techniques they used to achieve certain looks!
And good luck feel free to post here. I would suppose it’s best to post 1 vfx at a time while asking for a feedback as then it’s easier to give insight review. While when you send entire artstation I kind of have to focus on overall performance, but that’s also fine!
Thank you so much Manus. I never even thought about how the transitioning between the different stages of the projectile didn’t line up properly and now I can’t unsee it haha.
Im glad the fish made you laugh, I really think it helps sell the effect more and it looks hilarious.
I do have a question about one thing you mentioned about the projectile speed:
“For instance your projectile are very slow and feel stiff while moving. Maybe you can stretch them with speed and modify the speed value so they feel more threatening!”
When you say stretch them with speed do you mean to physically stretch the projectile and crank up the speed? One thing I struggled with was when I was tweaking how fast the projectile moved I felt like it was going so fast that I couldn’t read it, so I slowed it down, but I’m thinking that that’s my fault and maybe the projectile itself is too complex? Maybe I need to simplify it more so there isnt so much going on with it so when it is going really fast it’s more readable?
And yeah I realized I was making a lot of FX and not posting any of them so this is the stuff I had so far, from now on I’m just going to be posting one at a time as I do them, but I really appreciate you taking the time to go on my artstation and take a look at everything. I’m so glad to find a dedicated real time fx website of people posting crazy stuff, it really inspires me.
Hahah glad you can’t unsee it now it’s a pain, but learning a proper blending is a key to immersive vfx!
As for the speed, there is a trick I learned from one of the VFX Artists here that you can use to ‘immitate’ the speed.
Basically the more stretched (longer in a direction of velocity) particle is, the quicker it seems. And on the other hand, the rounder it is the slower it seems. So you can modify the dimentions of an effect during flight to fake change of speed.
Here’s an example of one of the projectiles I did: https://youtu.be/URFmYQAreDE
It has the same speed throughout the entire flight, but because I stretch it, makes it look like it speeds up.
Oh wow that’s crazy I love this. I’ll remember to implement this in the future. I guess this goes back to squashing and stretching with the 12 principles of animation? I should really print out a cheat sheet to keep at my desk at all times so i dont forget. Thank you for reminding me about all of that
