How to polish an effect?

Personal Work
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Hi! My first post on the forums! I am working on this burst + projectile effect. I want to polish it more. but I don’t quite know how/what it means to polish effect.

Link to a video of the effect I am talking about.

To boil it down to an actual question:
How do I improve the quality of this effect?
What are some usual points that FX artist polish first?

Of course any other feedback or ideas are welcome!
Thank you for reading!

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you need post processing. Its all about how you deliver it.

Also I would say, create more particles for the blast? make some gustwaves as well

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Polishing has couple steps to it:

  1. Secondary/Tertiary elements:
  • So adding anything that you feel would be part of the effect. If it’s an explosion, it then can be a shockwave with bended grass or dust/smoke flying away. If it’s something like a fire then it’s sparks, heat distortion, light that affect environment etc.
  1. Connecting all elements together:
  • If you just add a lot elements it’s not enough. Usually they will not feel grounded together. That’s where you gotta look for things that help to blend between colors (glows, dark backgrounds, lights), making sure they are fitting the world (proper shading, depth fade etc.)
  1. Polishing the look:
  • It can be adding environment, postprocessing or just looking into some references and seeing from works of others what you like :smiley:
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Thank you so much! This was really useful! I will try to apply these these steps!
What type of post processing would that be? having some camera effects? or color correction? a little bit of bloom?

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5

Thank you for the reply! Good idea, I will add some more particles to the blast and some gust waves.
I should work on my presentation. I will try some things out.

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I usually go for a mix of lil: vignette, chromatic abberation, bloom and then experiment with some others

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I did some experimenting and It looks way more interesting. I can probably push it further but this was a great help thank you so much!

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