Hi. I’m a solo game dev working on my 3rd game in Unity. I’ve done a little bit of literally everything, coding, modeling, shaders, vfx, animation, texturing, UI, all kinds of design and everything related to game dev.
I’m not particularly great at anything and I’ve taken a special interest in VFX and shaders. I am familiar with the particle system and shader graph (not vfx graph yet but it looks like a particle system on steroids mixed with shader graph).
I’ve also used embergen to make flipbooks for fire and smoke.
Anyway, I have some questions related to what tooling I should look into for my journey.
From what I’ve seen, stuff like embergen with flipbook can be used for more realistic vfx and for most of the stylized/magic vfx I’ve seen, shader graph does the heavy lifting, with some control from vfx graph or shuriken.
I admit, I find the shader graph-based vfx a bit hard to grasp and often they don’t look really great, even when they are very complex.
Is that still the right tool for the job? Is there a way to make more stylized/magical flipbooks? Should I stick to doing it that way until I get better?
What tools do you guys use for your game vfx? I really want to know so I know what to delve deeper into.
Can you give an example of what tool you would use for what? Any other tips and tricks? I am eager to learn.
Thanks.