Hey everyone, I’m working on a ZZZ fan art by Quadtonne (I can’t post the images because I’m a new user, I’m hitting a media limit, I’ll try to add all the extra images as comments), and I need some help getting the look to closer to that of ZZZ’s fires.
My blockout uses fast spawning sprites for the fireball, and using a gradient and an additive material, it works alright. I use two emitters, one that stays with the ball as it travels to get the round shape of the fireball, and one that trails behind to make the tail, it gets the color and timing across but it doesn’t convey the same shape language or smoothness of it at all.
ZZZ tends to get these really smooth fires, made with what I think are deformed meshes, would anyone know good resources or pointers to make this kind of fire/ how to adapt it for my use case? (or even just generally how to achieve the look in this concept art):
The effect is a combination of a flat plane with a scrolling texture (possibly a particle trail), a handful of velocity oriented particles, and some regular particles to fill out the smoke near the end and smaller embers in the air. I don’t actually see any meshes (beyond the trail-like one for the center body) in that particular effect, though many of her other attacks certainly use them.
But absolutely think more in terms of panning textures vs particles.
So you’re saying that large center mass is a camera facing flat plane with scrolling texture? If so how did they animate this, something like a moving sinusoidal wave + noise for the shape (that tapers at one end)? And then scrolling texture + a gradient from one side to the other for the colors/heat?
The only thing that makes me doubt that is that that shape holds up from the front (as in I can get the camera INTO the fire) without the shape breaking, which typically doesn’t hold up with camera facing sprites like this. There’s also a few points in the VFX where WPO deforms can be seen (at the end of the fire, and some mesh vertices can be seen near the front at certain angles). Is it possible this is a cone with WPO animations instead? It also feels like it has like way too good volume for a plane:
I would say that particular video is far too compressed to make a sensible breakdown of what’s happening. What could be multiple separate elements are getting blurred together by compression.
In case they are working with the method I thought they used, I seem to have found someone who goes over how to do that WPO deformation and how to set up the mesh/textures for it. Figured if someone stumbles upon this at a later time this could be useful!
