Finished Preview:
WorkFlow:
Well better late than never.
I’m knocking out two birds with one stone and sharing my first WIP with the monthly Sketch. I have no real reference for this effect I’m sorta just making it up as I go. I definitely plan to add more interesting details such as runes and an explosion hopefully by the end of the month.
The color and first few elements give me the impression of some sort of water-themed teleport. What if the dome kinda “rises up”, revealing that it’s actually a sphere/bubble that implodes/bursts and teleports the object away? There could be ribbons around the sphere/bubble as it is performing the teleportation? Just something that popped into my head. I made a very rough quick sketch, forgive my horrible drawing abilities. 
Love the sketch. I didn’t think to make the bubble implode but I actually wanna try it out. I’m thinking I should try doing it using a shader rather than just shrinking the mesh. Besides that, we were on the same wavelength. I have the bubble floating now and I added step edges to the scrolling shaders that I’m controlling via custom data. And I’m gonna mess with ribbons and color palette later.
Added some much needed character and flare to this effect.
Scrolling shaders galore!
This sketch has done wonders for expanding my knowledge of vertex streams and materials. And I think I’m pretty satisfied with this anticipation effect. Now to actually teleport something!
One last update.
This was quite the undertaking. First I made a lot of style changes. I decided to move the scrolling texture from the rune circle to the orb and remove the cracks among some other smaller changes. I wanted the effect to shatter but I wouldn’t really learn anything doing that. So per @CuddlyBunny 's recommendation, I spent all day figuring out how to use displacement vertex. I almost gave up, but by accident, I found out I could multiply noise and shrink the vertex with a single vector1. And I’m controlling that vector 1 with a custom data stream within a sub graph.
Voila!
A somewhat janky implosion effect. But I definitely plan to add more oomph to it later.
Alrighty, I think I can call this finished!
I had a blast making this effect and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I’ll be honest, I didn’t plan to turn this teleport into a Black Hole but it just sorta ended up that way. I think this style was much more fun to play with than what I had in mind originally, and I learned a whole lot more about shaders that I will apply to other VFX down the road.
For the functionality, I used Untiy’s animator tool timed with the particle system controlled by a single script that also deletes the game object.
