Hello peeps This is my first post here and the first time I’m sharing work, so let me introduce myself very quickly too!!
I’m Leote, an university student from Portugal enrolling in game development. I want to pursue VFX, and since my course doesn’t have a dedicated curriculum for it, I’m learning on my own :))
Internship season is almost coming too, so I wanted to develop a portfolio piece to land me a job around the country :)) I also love and dabble in technical art from time to time!
I was very inspired by Matthew’s Toxic Beam VFX and I decided to go ahead and do something along these lines, but with more fire-based shapes and colors. I think a sketchbook detailing my progress is an awesome idea, and I want to be pretty transparent, so I’m going to include a whole lot of progress and my reasoning behind it!
I would say that despite my goal being having a nice, polished, if still noobish, VFX piece, I think my most hopeful takeaway is hearing alot of the communities’s opinions and advice, but also gauging if my thought processes are going the right way (as in having the correct mentality for actual production work!)
That’s all for this first post! I extend a greeting to everyone here, and I hope everybody keeps sharing their awesome work too
I admire the confidence to post your works as a beginner as many people are scared of that, but it’s actually one of the best things you can do! This way you are showing to other vfx artists your progress and also can get some feedback and direction where to follow, so great idea!
I’ve been studying the effect both artistically and technically over the last few days, and I’ve focused on building a clear idea of the shapes and complexities that I want the effect to have, as well as what resources I have available / still have to make.
Do apologize for many of the notes being in Portuguese, but I’m mostly including it for illustrative purposes
I’ve built the start of a reference board and jotted down some doodles, a general timeline for the composition, as well as a very basic tasklist of assets needed. It seems to me that, at the start, it’s a bit hard to fully commit to a rigid asset list structure, as I have yet to make an initial in-engine mockup, so I’m not sure I’ll end up using these particular assets, or in the quantities mentioned… so it’ll likely not help me much now at the start.
Some of the references are now in an AnimRef board to easily visualize once I’m in the mockup stage. It was mentioned by Tyma on the RTVFX discord, so many thanks!!
As for what’s next, I’m thinking of running inventory on what I’ll need conclusively, while simultaneosly setting up the effects in a very initial state in Unity, in order to already work on timings and composition. My intuition tells me my inexperience might underestimate the technical complexity of some of these aspects, so we’ll see how it goes, but hopefully I’ll manage!
I have spent the days inbetween crafting the timings and general blockouts of this effect. While there is no “instigating action” just yet, I wanted to make sure some elementary things are okay with the beam first!
This is my first time really using VFXGraph indepth to create something, which has its own caveats. For one, integrating every system in one graph solution is very handy and customizable, but on the other hand, I’ve ran into a few technical hurdles with this solution that I wouldn’t have found with the corresponding features in Shuriken :((
Off the bat, I haven’t given too much thought to coloring and values just yet, and I also feel like certain textures and shapes don’t match too well with eachother (case and point, the upwards flames in the foreground of the beam itself, as compared to the noises of the inward beam). This I shall work on next. I also think some more fine particles could give it a nicer, refined touch.
I’m very eager to receive critical feedback on this, so if anybody has any opinions or advice, please reach out! My next course of action will be honing the color and values of preexisting systems, and carefully looking at the gathered textures to see what can be done. Only after deciding on a permanent collection of them will I start channel packing and some more optimization work.
Here we go! I’ve basically ran out of time as a whole this year for more musings in this effect, so this is how it’ll end.
I admit that it was pretty difficult iterating until this level. Alot of textures had to be scrapped as well as some effects I had begun to iterate extensively until now.
But I’ve learned a big ton about VFX as a whole, about VFXGraph and its quirks, and I’m more knowledgeable about the production experience too. This effect is not all that I’ve envisioned on doing, and it is by no means perfect, but above all, I think it was a great great learning experience, and that’s all that matters.
I feel like being transparent about these things is also a great thing that I don’t see too often unfortunately. I am just beginning and I hope to one day in the future look back and see an extensive catalogue on how I’ve evolved, both in technical skill, artistic eye, and mentality. So I urge to everyone who reads this and hasn’t started posting here; do it! Anything at all, no matter your skill level. There’s no ego, we are all colleagues and the game industry demands collaboration.
Thank you to everyone once more! I have my effect and some other extras on my Artstation now: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gRaAEm
This is my first post here and the first time I’m sharing work, so let me introduce myself very quickly too!! 
My next course of action will be honing the color and values of preexisting systems, and carefully looking at the gathered textures to see what can be done. Only after deciding on a permanent collection of them will I start channel packing and some more optimization work.