Florian Barnier - Sketch #59: Dark

Glad it helped a bit! You are my personal winner for sure :3

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Coolest dark effect I’ve seen and the idea is unique as well.

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This is so good, love it, amazing

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I didn’t have much time to work on the effect these last few days, so I mostly did small polishes here and there. Here’s what I did!


1- Added some particles flying from the arms.

It’s not much but I think it’s neat. I also tried other things like reusing the same droplets as I have on the puddle, or adding other droplets falling down from the arms, but all of that felt too cluttered.


2- Added another bone at the base of the mesh used to blend between the arm and the puddle, so only the top deforms with the arm:


 
(I also removed faces at the bottom to optimize it a bit after taking this image.)


3- Now that I had a base that didn’t move, I switched the material back to transparent and painted an alpha mask in the mesh’s vertex colors:


 


4- Added some smaller scale distortion to the decal:

It’s subtle, but that makes it a bit more “organic” I think.
 


So what’s next? Well, not much! I’d still like to do these things as mentioned in a previous post:

  • Improve the droplets “stringy” bit (following felitastic’s suggestion).
  • Improve the droplets themselves, for now it’s a billboard so it doesn’t work very well when looking down on the effect.

And if I have enough time, maybe I’ll make the whole thing interactive :thinking:

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:eyes:

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Damn, you even bring inverse kinematics into it? You crazy person!!!

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Finally got around to improve the stringy part of the droplets, following @felitastic’s suggestion (thanks again!):

Now back to messing with IKs :eyes:

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IKs are done!

Toying with IKs is so fun, the only downside is that I always spend more time playing with them than actually working :sweat_smile:

Well, I guess that marks the end of my work on this effect, now to take videos for the final submission!

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Insanity! Best sketch thing I’ve seen <3

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Here it is, my finished entry to this Sketch!


Here are few stills from the video if you want to see details without YouTube’s compression butchering everything:






It was a pleasure working on this and posting the process on this forum with everyone being so lovely! Now I’ll take a few days off, and then start a portfolio/sketchbook thread so see you there!

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This is totally amazing! But I have some feedbacks:
• All the hands are moving in sync as the player moves around, and they all stop at the same time the moment the player stops, maybe you could add some noise signal into the IK direction so it make them more lively?

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You’re absolutely right, and now that you said it I couldn’t help but be bothered about it so I had to fix that!
I added both a position noise so the arms always have a bit of movement (especially noticeable when the player is static), and also made it so the damp speed is random for each arm (picked once at the start).

Well, now I guess I have to update my previous video :sweat_smile:
(currently damning myself over not having kept all the camera setups I used to shoot it, ugh)

Thanks for the feedback! :blue_heart:

EDIT: I updated the main submission video in my previous posts to include these improvements. Thanks again!

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what a nice way to start the sketch challenges!

you’ve got a bright future in VFX ahead of you, so keep it up and you’ll reach very far! :gem:

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man this work is absolutely insane, the bump offset you got and just the colours are so dark and gloomy

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I updated the main submission video in my previous posts to include the improvements suggested by @Jukerlaw. Thanks again!


@Lush @Jack_o thanks so much! :blue_heart: The way this VFX has been received around here makes me so happy, and I sure can’t wait to do more of these!

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