Harry Alisavakis' Sketchbook

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

tornado_opt

Explosion
explosion_dot

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!

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I have followed you on Twitter for a while now, good to see you here as well.

Great stuff too! :slight_smile:

Woah I wasn’t even aware that you were on the forum ! That’s awesome :smile:
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! :smile:

Thanks so much for the warm welcome and your kind words! :grinning:
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! ^^"

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No problem !
I’m glad that my breakdown helped you :stuck_out_tongue: I’ll do more of these in the future.

Made some RPG loot beams, for fun and experimentation!

rpg_loot_opt

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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 image

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!

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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 :stuck_out_tongue:

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 :stuck_out_tongue:

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Those are some really solid suggestions, thanks a lot! ^^

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Sticking with the classics for now, so here are some basic sword slashes!

sword_slashes_opt

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Took a stab at a simple projectile too!
projectiles_1

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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 :snowflake:

ice_projectiles_opt

7 Likes