One of the threads that first got me to this forum was @ShannonBerke’s thread about some of the effects she had worked on for League of Legends. It was really cool to see how some of the effects were done in a game I played a lot. I was especially interested in how they manipulated the UVs of the meshes in order to create interesting results. This post in specific, where she shows how she made Taric’s shield, has been stuck in my head since I first saw it as something I wanted to try and recreate. Which is what I did a couple of months back.
The mesh and UVs are made in Blender and the effect is constructed in Unity’s VFX Graph. It is all one VFX Graph which spawns 4 different types of particles, the crystal mesh, the background “halo”, and two types of “glitter”. The mesh uses a custom shader which allows me to scroll the “sheen” texture based on the lifetime of the particle mesh. The goal was to keep it really similar to the reference so I didn’t add or change much.
Looking back at my work a couple months later, as well as looking at Shannon’s original work, there are a couple of things that I’m unhappy about. I think my layout of the UVs could be a bit better. I tried to arrange them so that the “sheen” hits them from top to bottom, but I don’t think I really pulled it of. I think going for a side-to-side movement like Shannon did does work better. I also dislike how some of the faces really show the texture I’m using to create the sheen. Making the UV islands a bit smaller might help with that.
Even before revisiting this effect I was pretty unhappy with the “glimmer” I had created, but I couldn’t really pinpoint why. Comparing it to what Shannon did I think the textures I used for it are a bit too chunky and I think I also should’ve made the quads a bit smaller in order to justify adding more particles. Giving the particles some prismatic colors are also a great idea.
When I first completed the effect I was pretty happy with it, but reexamining the work some time later there are definitely some areas that could see some improvements. I started this post just to show off some of my work, but now I’m pretty tempted to boot up the effect and touch it up a bit. We’ll see.