Need help : How to approach this kind of texture for a "Mist" vfx?

[Lothrinn]

Hello everyone !
I’m currently working on a student project in which you play a character that can control Mist. I wanted to explore a little bit and I found those two references from Demon Slayer that I really like and would like to (at least somewhat) replicate :

However, I’m really not sure how to approach it, especially on the texture-side of things since there are so many shifts in the shapes !
I’m really not sure if a seamless panning texture would do the trick or if I need to layer a bunch of them on top of each other or if there’s another way I don’t know about so I’m really scratching my head here

So far, I managed to make this with VFX Graph (anticipation of an AOE attack where the player disappear in the mist to quickly slash all enemies trapped inside the zone) :

But I think it doesn’t really convey that “feeling” of mist and it looks really cluttered in my opinion

Could someone help me please ?

PS ; English isn’t my first language so don’t hesitate to tell me if things are unclear, I will gladly give as much details as possible

[Manus]

I believe you would need a seemless texture that would have a distortion on top to make those interesting shapes: https://youtu.be/gwx2NOZJ5CE?si=SOJoqUNc0GSJB624

[Lothrinn]

Thanks for your answer, I’ll try that !

One question though : wouldn’t I need a pretty high subdivision count on the mesh that’ll receive the texture for the distortion to look nice ? I don’t know much about optimization yet so I don’t know if that’s okay to have an effect like that or not performance-wise

[Manus]

Nah, you can use distortion on sprite

[FlorianBar]

Have you tried using a mesh? A basic plane with displacement and depth fade could do the trick, and would give something quite close to the softness of your first reference.