I’ve worked on the rest of the effect and I’ve added the character model and animation. I’ve also changed the ability indicator texture and the color palette. I’ve tried to go for a “cosmic darius” style, with the nebula and star textures following the motion of the blade.
The Nebulous trail is made with a a combination of the same noise used in the warping and a stars texture. The material is applied to the same circular mesh
The ground scrapes left after the attack use the following texture with a gradient applied to it. The material also uses the same noise to control the irregular fading in and out.
The blue edge reinforces the ability range and gives some oompf to the impact frames. I used a texture to mask the colors because I was tweaking the shape a little bit but now that I’m happy with the results I should probably create a new circular mesh that uses vertex color to mask the effect instead of adding another texture to the pack.
I tried to add some contrast color with the golden weapon trail, although I’m not so sure about the result so I might tweak the color a bit. It uses a similar mask to the blue edge.
The gifs are not the best way to showcase visual effects so I’ve uploaded a webGL version of the unity scene I’m using to scrub around the effect and animations.
You can run the VFX on your browser and play with the animation speed in this WebGL build: