Hey all! Back story first for context: this is a 2.0 of an effect I made in UE4 for the recent search for a star competition. I was hoping to get some feedback on it. I know from prior feedback on the previous effect that I need to work on timing and context, which I am attempting to improve in future works.
The goal of the effect was just to create a large and striking magical area of effect spell. I wanted to push myself compared to what I have done previously, and so was ambitious - possibly too much so, for my capability at the time 
. I feel this one reads better than the previous one though, and is presented much more nicely.
So, to the actual point of this thread: I’m interested to hear what stands out in this iteration, both good and bad so I can take that information in to future work to help me grow as an artist 
perspective1
perspective2
Hey @Raconite,!
My thoughts are this
- I really like your materials, I’m no expert but they look cool to me!
-Overall the direction of the strands arent bad, They seem a little random, but they may have to do with my first criticism
-The timing is all out of wack my dude. D:. It feels like i’m watching this in slow motion under water. For something with such an ‘explosive’ ending, the first half of this animation really isnt working for me.
-When the first fire gets ignited by the two floating particles, I think there’s a slight delay. I’d make that happen like .25 seconds earlier, or maybe even less. I just think its too slow right now
-The pulsing bit with the souler coasters going up into the exploding ball is also slow. If that’s supposed to be like a “its building up energy! too much energy !” bit, then I’d suggest animate the mesh like its having trouble containing the heat. .
When the ball finally expands, I’d add
-More speed!
-Those sparks need to fly out! I need to feel like i’m getting hit
-Distortion, shockwave. proceeding the heat. Really crank that up.
- A bright flash, if this thing is as hot as I think it is, It should be pretty bright for at least .005 of a second maybe, Look at some fire balls for reference. (Phosphorous explosions maybe? i’ll look some up too).
Either way, I think this is a great start, and i look forward to seeing this once the timing is nailed down
Biggest take away… timing…timing TIMING! 
Totally agree - there’s some cool technical stuff going on here which i like but its so hard to see past the slow motion timing.
Try really studying a similar style of effect from something like LoL or Dota and see how they various parts move and pause and create a dynamic effect.
Yeah, I think I may have slowed it all down to get a look at it as I was building it, and then forgot to change it back, and there’s been that many iterations since that I just forgot about it. I’ve been very frazzled with uni work lately, and general life stuff, I will go and address the speed of it though
Thanks for the feedback so far!