@Stefan_Jevremovic, Thank you for the feedback! You gave me some new ideas I will try out and see if I can get them to work. Gonna experiment a bit with the lightning in the beginning, like you said. I will add vertex colors to all the mesh arcs so they blend better as well and iterate on their shapes. Hopefully I’ll come up with something cool!
Here’s todays update so far:
Added some more sparks. Thanks for that feedback @Partikel. Don’t hesitate to let me know what you think!
There are quick pink sparks flying off in all directions without drag or gravity that dies out really quickly and then there’s the bluish sparks that fly off and get affected by both drag and gravity. Then there’s also some other blue sparks that are a lot fewer but have a higher gravity set to them. The random range doesn’t give me an enough random value so needed to make a new emitter for that. (If there are other ways to do this I’d like to hear of those ways. )
I also added the scorch mark which is a decal that I had to spawn and fade within a blueprint (This was a bit new to me so took quite a while). I will keep iterating on the shape of the scorch mark as I’m not quite happy with it but it serves the purpose of connecting the effect and covering some of the smoke blending with the ground. It also gave me an opportunity to have some stuff happen while the smoke faded out.
Next up is looking at the arcs in the beginning and iterating on the arc meshes to make them feel and look a bit better. Also iterate more on the decal. But I think I have most of my elements in there now at least.
Love watching these updates and thought I would throw some CC in the ring.
Perhaps have the smoke expand at the end, rather than shrinking inward. The sparks have so much power, the smoke would be a nice follow through on that energy.
Similarly the scorch mark could almost look like a molotov / cartoon impact in sense that it radiates from the center.
I would also suggest less lightning but more pronounced. At the moment it feels a little noisy, like it’s fizzling. I would recommend a one, two punch combo. Ie : Strike, pause, pop, pop, pause, pause, pop, pop. With the later two being slightly smaller. The silhouettes would read quickly and nice.
I want to share my workflow on the smoke texture for this effect. I haven’t really painted that many before and I was really confused on how to go on about it but I finally got to it and I think it turned out alright.
I knew I was going to make an erosion shader so I started painting with that in mind.
I painted big shapes and clear steps in the texture. The brighter the area, the longer it would stay visible once finally rendered.
Then I began blending the steps with a hard opacity brush. The softer the blend, the smoother the fade to the bright areas and the sharper the blend the longer that area would stay visible until it started to erode. Once this was done I did a gentle gaussian blur and continued to paint with a softer brush.
The last step was getting some swirly darker cuts into the shape that would give the smoke it’s puffy little shapes when it was almost completely eroded.
This is just one way to go about this kind of thing I guess. But I felt that I should share it in case someone finds it useful!
Feel free to cut out the final texture from the image and try it out.
Thank you for sharing how you made the smoke. I am trying to learn how to paint something similar and was about to ask how you did it. Great work on this effect!
I did some cleaning up of the lightning and paced it a little differently. I also changed the timing in the initial strike and added a fading in lightning that has the same shape as the main strike. The decal is also a bit sharper, less round and spreads out slightly further.
Feels like I’ve been staring at this for so long now. Looking back on the iteration before this one… It feels as if the actual strike is more powerful. But this one feels more lightningy… >.>
I will have to take another look tomorrow.
Think I’m going to have to call this done for now.
I made the main lightning arc wider, added some branching and re-added the pink beam just before the lightning strike. I think that the lightning it self is much clearer now and is less distracted by the pink beam. Also I think it helps with both color and anticipation.
I also made the smoke grow at a more steady rate.
Hey, I’m new to VFX and am trying to recreate your beautiful lightning strike effect, and was wondering how you were able to get the little zaps inside the smoke to appear and disappear in a way that feels very natural. I don’t seem to understand how you have such varied shapes in the sparks that appear inside the smoke
Hey Luke! I’m happy you like the effect, and welcome to Realtimevfx!
They’re meshes that have the shape of small arcs. They also have a texture on them, of course. Then take whatever measures you need to make them appear in a random order and at quite high speeds. Another thing that would help is to make sure that some get rendered behind the smokepuff, and some in front. You can do this by having multiple shared emitters placed either before or after the smoke emitter. (You can move emitter positions inside of cascade with the arrow keys)
Gonna experiment a bit with the lightning in the beginning, like you said. I will add vertex colors to all the mesh arcs so they blend better as well and iterate on their shapes. Hopefully I’ll come up with something cool!
Thanks for that feedback @Partikel. Don’t hesitate to let me know what you think!
