Hey there beautiful RTVFX community !
I’m currently working on a game with some friends at school, and we went with a cartoon art direction.
The game is about pirates shooting water canons so I’ll need to create water effects. I went and found some references of what we would like our effects to look like.
I know they are using a lot of meshes with some cool textures.
I’m looking for ressource on how to make that kind of textures and how to make the shaders to apply them.
I watched @simonschreibttalk about Rime’s effects, the GDC 17 talk about art directing for stylized games
What I’m looking for now is some application of those technics. So I’m coming towards you for some more awesome references/tutorials/talks or just some advices !
the technique are really simple here just a UV scrolling on mesh it’s not a hard shader, if you want i have found one time a really cool texture pack with a lot of cool texture i add mine too in this pack i can share it
To me, these all look like cylinders with transparent textures displaying only in the front faces.
The water projectile might be a simple quad facing the camera, or something like a Line Renderer in Unity.
You can see some artifacts here:
They might reveal that the shader is only showing the front faces, as it looks like the texture continues revolving around the cylinder but it’s not showing.
They also seem to be using billboards (green) and stretched billboards (red). Those highlighted in green might even be packed in a single texture instead of having a particle for each one.
As for the textures, you could paint them manually in Photoshop or Krita.
Keep in mind the foam outline, its sharp but round, and has an irregular width. Then, for the water, it has a little bit of variation in color and opacity, smooth gradients.
It looks like they rotate the water mesh or the UV’s. And they scale them in the vertical axis so it looks like the water is coming in and out.
They also seem to be using alpha erosion to emulate surface tension, as you can see in the last gif.
There is the pack, i repeat but all the texture are not made by me, and for me you can learn making texture by seeing other guys stuff, or making of in this forum, artstation, 80.lv etc imo
Surface tension is a pretty cool phenomena, but this video will help you visualize what I was trying to convey:
The liquid starts “tearing appart”. In the gif involving Greninja, they seem to be emulating it by “cutting” the water texture towards the foam in 2 to 3 frames.
I recommend you use this Google Chrome extension that allows you to scrub through gifs, and even explode them frame by frame:
