As part of my learning process and entry into VFX i am trying to recreate some of my favorite games, i see this as a good way to break down the elements that make up an effect.
I am currently trying to replicate this spell effect from Divinity 2:
I am using a some generated noise scrolled across a mesh to get this effect currently. I am not 100% sure if that is how it would be achieved normally so if anyone could advise how something like this would be done in a game that would be appreciated
I am mostly having trouble getting the transparency and colors correct. I have tried a few different methods and noise textures but this seems to be the closest i have got so far.
I was wondering if anyone would be able to offer some feedback or assistance on how they would achieve this effect. I’m not looking to create a perfect replica but as close as i can get it just for practice really.
The cone should be flat and wider. I don’t know if you can see it, but the ring with the scrolling texture is not the same effect you made. There’s no emissive, just an reflection from the scenery. The blue color is coming from the decal on the ground. Also there`s a refraction happening on the ring.
You could create a more splashed texture like water with a better hard edge to be scrolled multiplied by an greyblue noise texture with some transparency.
The Refration explanation you can find here and someone using it here. I’m suggesting sources because I’m not a good explainer about it
I don’t know much about the Orbit Module in Cascade, but you can use it when you make the steam flowing around the ring.
Thanks for that! I have adjusted the mesh i agree it wasn’t wide enough
The more i studied the reference the more i thought i was doing it wrong. I haven’t played with refraction yet but ill give that a go! The black hole video is awesome might borrow its ideas for another effect.
I’ll try my hand at painting a water texture but that is still a weak area for me so lets see how that goes
some refraction based distortion or uv distortion may really help to get those more broken up edges and maybe try adding abit more breakup/broken edges to your base texture itself and some extra noisy parts like in your example!
[perhaps use three different textures in rgb - one for softer shapes/one for sharper more graphic and one for between? just a thought!]
Hello !
First, VFX artist from Larian here, I’m really glad our work inspire other artists, its touching really.
The effect base is pretty much here, its basically a textures scrolling fiesta and we can use emissive and diffuse. As pointed by @Rafael we use refraction too on this one.
Basically we have a mask texture, with UV distortion (basically a noise texture scrolling added to scrolling uv coordinates) and depth blending.
We scroll two different normal maps with UV distortion too (we love uv’s distortion) added together and normalised.
We use that normal map for fresnel too for some emissive.
This is awesome thank you! Divinity is actually one main reasons i wanted to get into this scene so thank you very much
I have tried to implement refraction within unreal but i cannot seem to get refraction working with some alpha erosion like the in game version. I dont know if you have any experience within unreal but this is where i am currently!
I’ll keep plugging away at it though and see how it goes. I am looking forward to trying to recreate many effects from the game! Which did you work on?
I have some experience with Unreal, but dont use it enough to say right away what could cause that. Hmm either be sure to clamp before plugin to opacity. Also check the blending type of your material?
I arrived mid production and we usually passing on each other work. Loots of skills, Status effects, and a lots smoke flipbooks aswell. Death wish, Elemental arrow, Arrow storm, Tornado and bleed fire are stuffs that I’m happy about it. I did explosions too and despite it looks flat I quite like the my fire surface flipbook. Didnt worked on the surface’s material tho
I think the way refraction works the alpha doesn’t affect it, wich kind of makes sense because you usually want to use it in transparent surfaces. If I’m not mistaken the way to do it is to use a mask for the refraction texture that sets it to 1 in the areas you don’t want refraction, as 1 is the refraction of the air and therefore doesn’t warp the image.
Edit:
For example, here I’m setting the refraction to the range (1,2) along the UV coordinates:
And here you can see how along the plane horizontal the refraction gets stronger, where the refraction set to 1 at the left doesn’t warp the image background:
You can do something similar with your alpha, using it to lerp between 1 and a scalar that so that the parts that are transparent also have a refraction of 1.
Hey Filo thank you very much for that example! With it i was able to understand where i was going wrong and have some things click in place for me. I have been playing around tonight and i think i’ve gotten a bit closer
Still a while to go though. @meta_t thanks for the additional info too! I’ll let you know when im done
