My first time posting here, so please excuse the mess while I figure out how links/embedding/etc works here!
I’m fairly new to realtime VFX in general, so I wanted to get a bit of practice in and decided to try and recreate Jaina’s Ultimate ability from Heroes of the Storm. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out, but would love to get some tips/crits from people who know better then I do.
It’s built primarily by using some simple mesh (planes and rings) and some custom shaders using Unity’s Shader Graph. This was the first time I created custom shaders with the intent of animating the properties after, so pretty happy to have started figuring that out. Also the first time I’ve made a multi staged effect, rather then just a persistent particle system.
I’ll start of by saying that I havn’t really played hots, so I don’t know the exact function of this spell.
That being said, from what I can see it looks like your having a good start here.
I’ve gone ahead and made a slowed down gif of the og effect to illustrate some ways to improve.
1 The original blast is way more horizontal. Strech the cylinder in the up direction and try to improve this feeling of stuff flying upwards.
2 They use multiple layers of cylinders at different places throughout these circles to add a feeling of depth. As wel as using different textures and scroll speeds to add interest.
3 After the original blast, the effect slows waaaaaay down. This helps to add to this explosive feeling.
4 Their colours range from a deep blue to bright cyan. This again helps with adding interest to their effect as well as making some of the elements feel more at home. The magic is brighter and more blue, the mist is whiter making it feel more like the result of the magic instead of the invocation of it
Either I forgot to turn my graphics up for my reference, or a slow-mo gif shows WAY more detail haha. Mind if i ask what site/software you used to slow it down?
Outside of that, thank you very much for the feedback! Definitely a large amount of subtle details that I want to do a second pass with and see how much better I can make it. Ill give you suggestions a try now that I have some extra direction!
