Shadow64's Journey

Personal Work
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#1

I’ve decided to just dive in and start posting some things. I’ve only recently started working on my 3D skills but I’ve always thought that VFX was a cool area of study. Recently I’ve made a really basic candle flame that I’m happy with as well as a (very very very) basic heal spell.!

vfx_heal_001

I’ve read the things that others have posted, but I’m a little unclear on how things work still. For example, the heal spell is literally all done with shaders and math. It’s a cylinder, with the top and bottom removed, over a plane. All of the movement is happening within the shaders, the actual objects aren’t being reshaped/moved at all.

They are there the whole time I’m just using sinewave math and shaders to trigger the transparency based on frame count. It’s also all being handled in Blender natively. But I get the feeling that this isn’t normal.

Even when I look at more elaborate VFX here, it looks like models are actually being animated/scaled/etc., but in other things it looks like every single thing is just turned into a particle system or group of particle systems on a loop.

I’m just confused about that right now. Is it all particle systems? Or is that just how it gets utilized in engines?

I guess I have some more research to do.

#2

Only a day later, but I decided to try pushing things a bit further. I tried making the heal spell effect again, but this time I started by modeling a “plus” symbol. I edited the shader so that it would naturally fade once it rose high enough (something I imagine I would tie to the distance from the target model’s feet in an actual game). You can see the results below:

Once I had done the basic spell, I wanted to see what it looked like with a character, so I tried a Jinx model which I found. There were some issues with the rig, but overall I was able to try animating in Blender for the first time as well (though the posing system took me a little to figure out).

The sound effects were created in FL Studio.

Overall I’m happy with the result, even though I know there are ways that basically ever aspect of it be better (except obviously the Jinx model is incredible).

Anyway, looking forward to trying more! Thanks for taking a look! :grinning:

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