Alrighty! Good stuff Alex now you got a good base on your hands to start making some tweaks. Let’s get into it.
#1. Let’s try to exaggerate the feeling of power. In order to do that you could increase the time it takes for the build up sphere before the shot is launched. But not just slow the current across the board.
The current motion of your build up is also starting small and pulsing a bit bigger then pulsing once more even bigger at the moment of launch. That’s good, try to exaggerate even more. So you could make it so that build up sphere is taking about 1.5 or 2 times more time to build up but you make it steadily grow while giving it the same pulses you have there, but more of them with a cracking erratic timing. The steady growth will make us believe in the powerful nature of the shot, the erratic pulsing will make it feel as it grows in power its hard to contain, it’s literally crackling with Power. Then, the final pulse could expand the sphere much much more as the projectile is shot.
The projectile is pretty good, it’s well understood and delivers at a good speed. Nothing much to say there, well done.
The impact though is a bit underwhelming and showcase exactly why I challenged you with this task. I’m not feeling the power! And even if the impact was a fully realised FX it would still feel a bit on the softer side. So why is that? In parts, I feel it’s because of 2 things mainly. Size and timing. It starts big and then shrink. We can feel that and it prevents the power feeling quite a bit.
Start it small and get it to expand really fast that it feel almost instant… like going from size 0x to size 3x more than the current max size in something like 0.2 or 0.3 seconds with a curve that is starting almost vertical and then ease off on the speed on expanding as you reach the 0.3second. From there keep expanding from size 3 to size 3.5ish slowly from the 0.3 to 1.5~2.0 seconds while fading it away in transparency. Play around those lines but the crux is we need to feel the outwards expansion of the hit explosion. Even if it really fast, we need to be able to feel it.
Check this from @Nadir Nadir's Sketchbook - #5 by Nadir The explosion after the build up feels good even if its fast, we can feel the motion starting from a point and expanding rapidly. It feel good because of the motion, not because of the color of the detailing. You can and should try to get that feeling with the gray sphere, if you do, then you’re golden.
Try around those adjustments to #1 let’s see how much more power can we squeeze out of it. Remember it’s all about timing and motion. So don’t be scared of exaggerating. Making slow things slower, big things bigger, fast things faster, pulsing things more erratic.
For #2 I like where you are going with the build up that’s also serving as a sort of origin source of channelling. Exaggeration is once more needed. Make the pulses faster as if there was a pulse for every projectile launched. (No need to be perfect there but it’s the feeling we want) make the sizes between the pulses more different. Small → smaller and the big pulses → bigger.
For the impacts try to randomise a bit more the location of the sphere as it pulses to fake the impact points being more sporadic. It will help connect the projectiles to their hits. Right now it feels a bit disconnected since we can feel that they hit in places but the impact FX is always on the same spot.
With those changes in mind let’s look at #3. While applying the same as 1 and 2 (since 3 is made from them) the time between the shots is too slow) it doesn’t feel like a combo. Think fighting game. The first 2 shots are quick jabs, then the 3rd is the knock out roundhouse kick. Your timing is something like this: (o = shot is launched)
—o-------o-----------O
Try something like:
—o–o-------O
Where the small shots are much closer together and setup the big one.
Overall, good work I think you can see the value in this study. Don’t be scared to exaggerate a lot more and make your motion more deliberate. Looking forward to see the progress!