From absolute zero to VFX Junior in 4 months! [Is it possible?]

Personal Work
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Hello !

This is another checkpoint on my way to junior VFX Artist.

After my last post about the effects made, quite a lot of time (8d) passed in my coordinate system.

All this time I was engaged in crafting a fireball. And now I will tell you why I spent so much time on it, and will show you what I did.
(only fireball without caste and reaction VFX)

Fireball

Not as cool as you expected, is it?
Oh… Yah, but it is mine…
Not high-quality video

Initially, I set out to make a fireball with using some things. (It was my milestones)

  1. Curve trajectory with variable speed

ConeCurve

  1. Elementary mesh for head effect

Screenshot_1
Screenshot_1841×728 14.9 KB

  1. Shader with UV offset and dynamic alpha erosion

DynAlfaEros

  1. Alpha erosion based on lifetime of particles

AlfaEros

  1. Export animations and models from Maya to Unity
Let's not forget

Let’s not forget that I had no background in these areas, and I had to learn everything from scratch.

For those who want to find out how I did it, below are links to something, with the help of which I did it.

My way
  1. Curve trajectory with variable speed
  • Animation along the way in Maya
    Editing NURBS curves, Snapping curves to animation
    (Everything I read was in Russian(Animation along the way), but you can easily find it by yourself.)
  • Baking animation
    Coped without help
  1. Elementary mesh for head effect
  1. Shader (in Shader Graph) with UV offset and dynamic alpha erosion
  1. Alpha erosion based on liftime of particles
  • Using Custom Vertex Streams and Custom Data in Unity Particles System
Only this

Through custom data in the particle system. In the shader: UV - split - (B channel) to the value that you want to change in the particle system. In the particle system in the render tab - use custom vertex stream, select custom1.xy (zv), turn on the custom data tab in the particle system, set the x value to 1, change it to a curve and control the dissolution from the particle system.

  1. Export animations and models from Maya to Unity
    Units and Scale Factor

And now the things that I did right or wrong (in my opinion):

Right or wrong
  • Perhaps I took too big VFX for me and therefore received little feedback from what I was doing, and understood little what I was moving to.
  • Some days I lost concentration and worked for a maximum of 4-5 hours (instead of 8) May be due to reason above
  • Not all intermediate goals were so helpful to me at that moment. And they might be put off until next time. (dynamic alpha erosion)
  • Perhaps it was necessary to share here the intermediate stages of my work.
  • Despite the minuses, I achieved those intermediate goals that I set and studied a lot of useful information.

Conclusions:

  • I believe that instead of doing complex VFX, during this period of my training, I need to create as many effects as possible here (inspired by So You Wanna Make Games??) and do not try to learn a lot of new stuff for one effect, and stretch new information for several different effects. (Soon I will add it to my Small curriculum and Knowlege)

  • During the preparation of large VFX, make more checkpoints and set more intermediate goals.

I would be very grateful to you if you give me feedback about how my effect looks like and about the right or wrong conclusions I made.

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