Hi everyone, I’ve made this nuke fx and I want to take it to a level where I can make it a portfolio piece. I’m better on the technical sides of VFX and I really need some feedback on the more artsy sides of things.(Like color, shape, timing and good stuff like that.) Please just leave a little feedback about what parts you like and what parts you dont like. (Or maybe some ideas about how I could make it better.)
Thanks for all the feedback in advance ^^
here is some reference…
Also starcraft2’s nuke fx is a good reference
Ok this gonna be rough, and here some small tips:
_ No double high intensity light at the beginning. The flash light is supposed to be an peak explosion cools down to a already-formed explosion, not to vanish then explode again.
_ The second flash starts too slow (must be instant like the first one) and last way too long (cut 1/2 of its current duration, drop faster, easy out).
_ Use smoke trail, not laser trail like that.
_ Your shockwaves have the same intensity as the explosion, drive all attention away from main element. Big nope. They also expand too fast.
_ Your ground dust looks like lava flow. The motion is completely wrong. Then fixing the color will be the cherry on top.
_ Create another instance of your explosion material, and change it so the column part of the explosion doesn’t have a white part at its tip. Only the head part of the mushroom should have that.
_ If you want it to dissolve, do it at part of the explosion that starts lose energy and turn black, not wait until everything is black.
_ Remove the debris at the end.
_ Camera from below will get better impression. You should try that.
_ Talk about camera, you need camera shake.
_ Finally, change the skybox to a darker one, or remove it all together. And change red color on ground to more neutral color, dark gray for example. You need dark background so your effect can shine.
Except point 1 and 3, everything else you can learn directly from clip in Vich’s reply. My recommendation:
_ Read this: /dev: League’s VFX Style Guide – League of Legends (and download the PDF file included at the end of the article)
_ See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQDQLS_gNXM&t=4s
_ Try to mimic Lang’s explosion first. Make your own changes later.
_ Overall, you should mimic other excellent FX before making your own. Trust me, it’s harder than it seem to be.
Oh thank you so much for taking the time to write all this man… You have no idea how valuable this is to me ^^ I understood all of your points and I was looking at my effect like “He is goddam right…” xD I’ll try all of those. (Only one point I wanna ask, “Remove the debris at the end”; you mean the ground mark or you didn’t like my attempt at flying dust particles ? xD)
Lang’s explosion was my first reference but I wanted to try to do those without copying every step. But you are right, I should just mimic people at the start, until I learn some basics.
I’m talking about your flying dust particles. They looks good, just not fit the effect at all. Try them on some other effect, fireball or burning paper for example. That would be great.
Oh I forgot to talk about the ground mark yesterday. It shouldn’t be that large, the ground dust don’t have that much heat, so the heat color shouldn’t spear with it. Also, the center of the explosion is where most of the heat should be focused. In short, you did the exact opposite of what you should do.
This clip is one of my favorite explosion FXs. Clear, excellent timing and color. You should learn from this. Just don’t follow his bloom setting, that’s horrible.
About copying others, don’t feel bad about that. Till this day I still shamelessly copy a lot of VFX even from beginner guys (I’m senior btw), sometimes they accidently get something super cool, and I still have to copy in order to make it my own. So do it. Just don’t hard copy them and claim that’s your own.
Yea that’s right, thank you ^^ just one more question, why do you think the bloom in the clip you shared is bad ? Since his mistake isn’t obvious to me, it means i’ll probably do the same mistake at some point(or maybe im already doing it) xD
His bloom setting is not a mistake in this particular FX, due to simple shape, not so much detail and it is a bomb, but in general you should avoid over-blooming like what he did. In the short run, it will kill any fine detail you may have in your FX, make your color choice uglier and less interesting. In the long run, that will make you addict to it and ruin your artist-sense (if you know what I means).
Bloom can be used to hide a lot of problems, but not every game will allow you to use it, or use your setting. You must follow game’s postprocess setting, so learn to not rely heavily on it to make your effect looks good.
You can see the shape of the sparkles at the end of the explosion is almost unreadable (only readable when they are eroded halfway). For example in this screenshots, the details where I mark is bleeding. That bleeding is fine here because it has simple shape and no detail, but an effect with more details will suffer from that.
Bloom is great, as great as other effects but learn to use it right. If you check Florian’s portfolio you will see he doesn’t do this on every of his effects, he knows what he does. Just warning because this’s a common newbie mistake when try to learn from other good effects. These effects often have so many layers on top of each others so newbie will try to replicate what they can SEE, not what actually matter.
Oh and yes, you did that mistake in your scene. I just don’t talk about it since you have many more important things to work on.
If you want to learn to make good effect without abusing postprocess, check out Sirhaian’s tutorial and his scene breakdown. These are a little outdated but still teach you a lot on how to do VFX right.
Thank you so much ^^ right now I have other projects to work on so I didn’t get to fix the nuke effect yet; but everything you said is noted; and I will update here when I get to it. Have a nice day sir ^^
