Burning Hammer effect using MassFx & Unreal

Hi I’m working on my portfolio for a Junior VFx artist,

https://youtu.be/rji4ZiaUIzI

I welcome any comments, suggestions and corrections.

2 Likes

Hey!

Welcome to the community!

That’s a great start :smiley: I ramble a few thoughts which come to my mind.

First off, presentation. Please make sure you present your work properly! It’ll not only help people critique your work and give you feedback, but it shows that you’re putting in the effort! :smile:

Play with the encoder/recorder settings! Or record it with the engine itself. It’s never fun looking at compressed, blurry video with the mouse pointer waddling around on the screen.

That brings it to my second point, context! Always show your work in context if you can. Grab the free assets off the Epic store or search the internet for them, there’s plenty of props and environments that are free to use, especially for non-commercial and reel purposes.

This not only helps you with timing and staging, but it helps with picking proper colours and is good practice for a more real-life scenario. You won’t be seeing your effects on a blank infinite plane world or a solid dark background, it just makes sense to not build them that way in the first place.

Get a quick animation off Mixamo, sync it with your attack, think of how it would play in the actual game and how it would affect other characters or the environment or some barrels in the world. Make it juicy!

On to the effect itself, the timings feel rather linear and even. It might look better if you squeeze and stretch them to get a more quick and tight feeling to the effect. Say when the axe comes out it does it in a super quick flash of energy instead of lerping from the bottom to top in a straight line. There’s also so much bloom right now I can’t differentiate all the parts when it launches.

Also maybe have some more persistent elements in the world. Some decals, scorch marks, debris, sparks, dust, anything that tells that something happened here. The axe comes up from the ground with a bunch of cracked rocks, where did they come from? I don’t see a hole in the ground to show if it broke through the earth!

The dissolve on the magic circle could use some work, feels awkward right now.

I’ll save the rest of the thoughts for now. It’s really a great start and an awesome base to build off on! I hope you’ll push this a bit more and polish it. Good luck :star:

2 Likes

Hi,
thanks for the awesome feedback it’s really appreciated.

For the presentation i didn’t saw the mouse pointer around at first. I’m using screen to gif to record video and i don’t know why my video’s blurry. Do you have any recommendation for a good encoder/recoder?

Cool I’ll check that out so basically put a backgrounds and set up a scene.

When you say squeeze and stretch to get the tight feeling of the effect what do you mean by that. Like squatch en stretch or something similar?

That a good idea for the Mixamo characters
I’ll tone down the bloom effect for sure!

For the decals, scorch marks, debris, sparks, dust, do you mean where the spawn circle is ?
And sorry i don’t understand that phrase: Say when the axe comes out it does it in a super quick flash of energy instead of lerping from the bottom to top in a straight line.

do you have any helpful tricks for the dissolve in the material editor?

thanks again