After a while lurking in the shadows of these awesome posts, I decided to start being more active in the VFX community, so that I can also force myself to try new things in the field! Therefore, I decided to start my sketchbook in the hopes that I’ll regularly update it!
Here are my first entries:
Tornado
Explosion
I’m open to any and all advices and feedback, as I come from a kinda more technical background and still struggling with some artistic concepts!
I have followed you on Twitter for a while now, good to see you here as well.
Great stuff too! 
Woah I wasn’t even aware that you were on the forum ! That’s awesome 
Your marbles breakdown is dope man, I tried to do something similar with nodal shader recently.
Keep it up !
Just decided to dip my toe into the world of VFX, and thought this was a great place to start!
Thanks a lot!
Thanks so much for the warm welcome and your kind words! 
Looking forward to seeing your result :3
Also, I have to say, I really love your work; your tornado breakdown really inspired me to begin working on my own! ^^"
No problem !
I’m glad that my breakdown helped you 
I’ll do more of these in the future.
Made some RPG loot beams, for fun and experimentation!
Added a small write-up of the first effects (tornado & explosion) to my site, if anyone’s interested!
im super curious how you did the explosion on the 2nd gif, ive tried multiple times making a shader or an effect like one but seem to fail. Any hints to making something similar as a base that i can expand on to create my own style? Appreciate it. Awesome stuff!
The shader is fairly simple tbh, just dissolving based on the noise texture and lerping between 2 HDR colors. The write-up above should clear some things up I think ^^"
Besides that, the explosion is just layers of some spheres with that shader and I use a custom animation tool to scale them up and increase the cutoff value to dissolve them.
ive tried doing dissolve but i dont get the “linear dissolve” like you do seen here 
is it just texture dependant or more UV dependant?
That’s thanks to the noise texture I use as a dissolve guide, it has this effect since it’s already streaky, and if I have to, I increase the tiling in one axis to make it more “linear”. It’s more obvious on the second, emissive layer, where there’s a bunch of repetition too, even in the frame you showed.
thank you so much for the information has been really helpful!
Oh by the way, I forgot to say that your tornado shaders works pretty well ! Maybe try to make your distortion noises less sharp, because I feel like the distort is pretty violent, as we can see on some spinning lines around the main tornado
Ohh and the most importantly for me, try to add curves to your meshes, don’t hesitate to bend your main tornado and to try to twist your meshes !
And a rule that I follow for my tornadoes : the slower it turns = the bigger it is
Those are some really solid suggestions, thanks a lot! ^^
Sticking with the classics for now, so here are some basic sword slashes!
Took a stab at a simple projectile too!
you say basic but i dont even know where to begin to make sword slashes xD. Keep up the good work looks amazing
It was basic as in a common effect you see in a game, but wasn’t easy at all to find how to approach it! Thankfully, this video helped immensely!
More projectiles, this time of the frosty variety 
