Hi guys, I’ve been eager to participate here and post my work. So this will be my first post, and I hope to be active around here quite often.
I’m specially interested in realistic to realistic-fantastic kind of effects and in learning about techniques or new approaches to doing things.
This is the first VFX I’ve completed, and it involved a ton of learning, especially since I had no prior experience with Houdini Pyro Sims before starting this effect.
That said, I know there are still quite a few things that could be improved, like the timing, for example. So I’d really appreciate any comments or feedback you might have.
Explosion plume, looks like you are spawning two of these and I can see the outline of the second one… spawn one not two.
I know why it fades quickly because your flipbook ends so you don’t want to have a still frame hanging out.
So what you can do is add a secondary smoke that is similar to your plume, but maybe comprised of several particles that you can allow to “linger” since a large plume like that would linger for a while as far as the smoke goes.
Add secondary ground smoke that rolls out and lingers as well.
Doing this kind of stuff is all about layering things that the eye can’t see as layers but comprises the whole so that your explosion goes from looking like a single flipbook (which is what it is) to looking like an explosion that has random mass and elements that are doing different things each time.
A shockwave would be good on the ground
Add some emissive to your ground decal that fades slowly instead of just having the black mark… will make it feel more alive.
I like the arcs of lightning, nice touch… but give them some light to interact with your smoke… maybe amp the emissive up a little randomly (some higher than others)
You’ve got some hot bits coming off but they disappear before they hit the ground.
Let those hang out longer, hit the ground and leave your ground with more hot bits.
The debris ig good… but I might add more debris.
You’ve got some trailing fireballs, have some of those last longer and hit the ground too with collision… why not
just to clarify, because I don’t want to bring anybody down with unrealistic expectations, this my first finished effect but it isn’t my first effect at all (not even the first version of the same effect haha)
That’s a lot of great feedback, tysm! I’ll start searching for references and working on it right away.
I definitely see the smoke not lasting for enough time, that sounds like the logical solution.
Hope to bring a enhanced version soon, thank you for your time.
I’ve been working for a few days now on a sci-fi type VFX composition scene and I’d like to share two elements I’ve had the most fun working on.
First off this is a particle-driven Raymarching Shader:
I’d be glad to do a breakdown or sharing any insights on it, but for the most part it’s just about having a particle simulation (not rendering any sprites) be written onto a buffer and reading the buffer with a custom HLSL node.
Im planing to use this effect on the core of a charging effect but as you may be noticing popping is quite noticeable.
Next, here’s some iterations on the frequently used hexagonal shield barrier shader. For this I used a logic based on the same idea as PivotPainter but with my own implementation. I had to build some blueprint tools for baking the pivot position, because I’m using the vertex colors to save each piece ID and two random index (which I use to sample randomly onto a noise texture).
I think they look somewhat cool but I’m also a bit scarred of not being able to create a decent enough VFX to put them in. IDK, anyway im pretty happy with both of them and I think they’re kind of complex for my current experience.
