LBo's Sketchbook

Hi everyone, I’ve been a 2D/3D generalist at a small indie studio for a number of years. A handful of months ago started the dive into VFX and was pointed to this wonderful community. So far, I love the amount of problem solving and visual communication at every level and hope to keep growing with you all!

These first ones are fan effects for League of Legends. A big (lurker) shout out to Shannon Berke, Bakewell Russell and Jason Keyser for having a lot of resources and tutorials available online.

Blueprints in UE4 have been a struggle for me, but slowly been slapping them together (albeit not optimized for actual gameplay).

Here are a few older vfx, when I was thinking about magical girl style effects and couldn’t stop doing hearts.

Critiques and tips are welcome and appreciated, thank you! Hope to post more in progress pieces here soon.

8 Likes

I feel like the heart over the target player in the Heartseeker Lux VFX is a bit small, would be cool to enlarge it a bit and give it some contrast against the background!

Great job overall @LBo :sparkles:

1 Like

Ah! That’s a good point. I’ll play around with the size a bit and add a supporting darker “back drop” to get it to pop a little bit more.

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Small-ish update, I toyed around with the Lux Ult beam a little bit. Defining the swirling mesh as the focal shape and giving the overall beam a bit more of a hierarchy (or at least trying to). The only worry being that the damage space is a little less clear than the TUBE of light before. The Mark at the end has a darker glow under it too and is larger after Lush’s suggestion.

3 Likes

Great!

You could lay an almost invisible tube shape on top, only glowing in the edges so it delimitates the AoE.

Also, I’d try to upres the yellow trail meshes just a subdivision level, I feel like the edges are too sharp and pronnounced. :alien:

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Update time
Finally had time to update the video for the Lux effects, thank you again Lush for the feedback :smile:

Then decided to go back and make some revisions to an older vfx. It was one of the first and I learned a lot doing it-- especially getting used to unreal’s animation importing, set up, and diving into materials. Maybe in a year I’ll completely redo this cat to see how far I’ve progressed.

Next!
I wanted to learn how to implement gradient mapping into unreal. Turns out it’s really easy thanks to this post by Ryan James Smith

First here’s the material set up. https://i.imgur.com/WMhdn7k.png
And these are the two gradient maps I used. I didn’t add horizontal variation since I wanted the direct visual feedback of solid colors.
https://i.imgur.com/Kmt5zov.png
https://i.imgur.com/oUYzYGG.png

The second one is just a blurred version of the top one-- I wanted to see the difference between the colors just jumping from one to the other vs lerping.

So here is a simple particle set up with the colors changing through the dynamic parameter value.
(Right side is the blurred texture)

Then here’s a set up where the Y Index is randomly set between 0 and 1 in the dynamic parameter value to get a color.
(Right side is the blurred texture still)

It was fun to play with these, now to find a more practical application for it! For solid colors it’s easy enough to control the colors through the particle system itself, but having the option to quickly swap out a palette in the material is nice. Although I really didn’t do much gradient mapping to a grayscale diffuse, haha.

1 Like