Hello everyone!
I’ve somewhat recently begun my own journey into VFX and decided to use this as a sort of learning diary to track my progress.
Being responsible for VFX and Shaders in our student project last semester just kind of showed me how much more there is to learn about both of these topics.
It definitely scratches my incessant problem-solving and going-down-long-rabbit-holes itch :’ D
If there are any particular techniques you enjoy or just find interesting, I’d love to hear about them!
I’m still a beginner, so advice would be incredibly appreciated!
Here are some of the very first concepts and Effects I made for Bewitching, our latest student project.
So during some free time, I’ve worked on learning a bit more about effects. Specifically about the Event System in Unity’s VFX Graph.
It felt a bit like a revelation : D
These effects are based on: ‘Unity VFX Graph - Meteor Rain Tutorial ( Trails + Trigger Events ) - Gabriel Aguiar Prod.’
Alright so, time to put this learning diary to some more use:
I’ve recently been looking at Persona 5’s Psiodyne Effect, because it features some interesting Particle movement and also a sick looking color shifting gradient which I was dying to figure out.
This might be super obvious to people, but it wasn’t for me, so I decided to write these down as I find out about them in case it might be helpful to others as well
Let’s talk about the color shifting on the particles first:
This took me a while to figure out, even though in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense and is not that difficult to implement.
So how I got this to work is by using a Shader that uses a greyscale texture as the UV for a gradient.
I’m assuming this is pretty much exactly how Gradient Maps work, which is where I got the idea from in the first place.
(And thanks to Simonschreibt, I even had an idea of how to implement it : D https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4XLk04)
I’m using SDFs for this.
The cool thing about SDFs in this case is not only that this circle is going to stay sharp, no matter how big or small it’s going to get but also that it just instantly gives me the sort of effect I want in combination with this greyscale-tex-as-UV-for-a-gradient kind of technique.
This is because of the way SDFs are constructed.
