Hello everyone! I’ve been putting that off for way too long, so I’m finally creating a sketchbook!
Here are a few mostly uninteresting things about me, feel free to skip to the (hopefully) not-so-boring part in the next posts!
Summary
I’ve worked for the past 2.5 years at a 10-person indie studio in France, on a 3rd person adventure game. Sadly, like many others this year we’ve been hit hard and money ran dry, so the project got shelved and I have been laid off.
At this company, I worked mostly as a Unity programmer, since it’s what the project needed the most at the time, despite previously having been more of a graphics person. I’d now like to go back to my first loves, aka environment art, tech art and (obviously) VFX!
Since the project is no longer under NDA, I plan on retaking and improving some of my favorite works from it, but I plan mostly on focusing on creating new effects. I’m still unsure if I want to find a new job asap or if I should try some freelancing, but in any case I need to make myself a portfolio, and I’ll post my progress there! Most of the things you’ll see there will be made in Unity, though I do plan on trying Unreal soon.
Well, I guess nobody bothered to read all of this, but if you did, thank you
Starting with 2 insects VFX I originally made for my previous company and improved a bit. My goal when making most VFX for this project was to make them as lively and interactive as possible, and we thought having flies and roaches moving around and avoiding the player would be a good way to bring life to the environments.
Roaches:(Man I hate those things)
Flies:
Both effects were made using VFX Graph in HDRP. The whole effect is pretty basic but I think it works well, and judging by how most people who saw it and/or tried moving around it were clearly disgusted, I guess mission accomplished lol
The avoidance especially works pretty well imho, and it’s actually extremely simple: calculate the direction from a particle to the player, apply an opposite force, and rotate the particle to face its velocity.
A tubular mesh with some scrolling noise to add a bit of detail to the storm.
A plane on the ground for the sand blown by the wind.
The first 3 parts follow the camera around and sample a SDF containing exclusion zones so the effect doesn’t go inside houses. The tubular mesh itself was a bit tricky, because since it is parented to the camera, I had to cancel its original rotation, then rotate it in the wind direction, which I made inside the shader (which reminded me of how much I loathe dealing with matrices lol).
I’d love to get feedbacks on how to improve this! Thanks for reading
Started work on a new effect, and I figured I would post the process as I’m making it!
The idea is to make some sort of a telekinetic attack, here’s how it looks currently:
Next things I want to do:
Fix all timings.
Redo the end of the effect.
Change the part of the animation when the attack goes off.
Make a shader for the character.
Add big objects on the ground that will get grabbed and projected too.
As always, please give me all the feedback you may have! Have a great day
I added a few objects and improved the movement of the smaller particles. Both the objects and the character also have some sort of duplication effect, as you can see here (I exaggerated it a bit so you can see it better):
For that, I used two custom passes, one that draws all the objects that should be affected on a custom buffer, and a second that distorts this buffer and writes it back on the camera.
Okay so I had kinda paused the galaxy effect as I was experimenting with compute shaders for a little while (I’ll post the results of those tests soon ), but I think I’m finally done with it now!
Not much to breakdown about this one, but feel free to ask/comment/critique on anything!
Looks awesome, really unique. My only critique would be that the fog/mist particles look static both in terms of shader and its motion, it’s a bit uniform. Anyway it’s a cool idea, color pallette blushes my cheeks
You’re right! Another case of being so deep in your work that you can’t see the most obvious things
I tried breaking it up a bit with some distortion, color noise and and slight rotation over lifetime, not perfect but I didn’t have much time and I think that improves it at least a bit:
), but I think I’m finally done with it now!
