This might not be my place to say but when it comes to CC, which i think you mean is “Crowd Control”. There must be a visual representation and a clear intent of what it would do.
Example: Damaging abilties being Clear and Sharp, Healing abilities being vague and soft. CC would fall into that catigory. How the priority would work idk. But visual representation is always key.
If you debunk Lissandras W. The visual representation is that the ground becomes frosted with the intent to “freeze” a Champions feet to the floor for a certain duration!
Same with her R. There is a clear visual representation of someone being encased in ice, and being unable to move until it fades away.
Another one is Leona from LoL. Whilst her Q and E are fairly simple (she was made a real while ago so understandable) Whilst her R is a sunray binding the opponent in blinding light. Or you have Ahri with her charm, the charm wouldnt have the same impact if it was just a sphere or any random shape, the “heart” combined with the soft particles and charmy / romantic color, gives the hint that the enemy truly will be charmed by her.
TL;DR Whats hard about visual representation is to get across the Intent and visual representation without cluddering, aka You want a heal effect to be looked on as a heal by major majority, and a damaging ability to be looked on as damage by the major majority.
Please correct me if im wrong, this is just my take on it.
Hey Sai! Disturbed is right that making sure that the CC type, when possible, ties back to the theme without sitting somewhere it shouldn’t in the kit hierarchy. For this reason new magic types are really difficult because there isn’t an already identifiable shape language you can pull from, but must create a bridge for the player a lot heavier than smoke blinds or vines bind. League has tried making that connection easier with specific shape language for snares. So even new skins etc have an easier time reading well
As far as iterations go I’ve seen a lot of people use a three pass system. First pass, second pass, polish. What first pass looks like can differ greatly across artists mind you, but it’s been a nice to frame feedback in.
It’s so easy to noodle and iterate but something that’s also been helpful is having really clear goals to reference. That way every iteration is taking steps closer to those goals so when someone swoops in with last min feedback (which never happens right?) it’s a lot easier to identify lateral movements vs forward ones.
Hi @ShannonBerke thanks for all the knowledge. I have question. How do you solve a problem if the effect changes its geometric parameters depending on the skill level?For example, first level skill has a shot at 5 meters with an angle of 30 degrees. The same skill at the 4th level has other characteristics, for example, a shot at 7 meters with an angle of 45 degrees.
(example drawing)
Heyo! It depends mostly on how many increments, and how long it’s on screen for. If it’s an indicator, most players in LoL use quick cast so the odds of players even seeing it is low. We have the ability to scale indicators on X and Y independently so having a high rez triangular indicator like that and squash and stretching it LUA side is pretty handy. This saves us from making a lot of different particles for every instance.
BUT if it’s on screen for a long time (charges with button press for example) then you could argue that making a different particle hook for every level would be helpful. It’s not very expensive either as you’re already loading the assets once.
This is my attempt at using this trails technique. Nothing too fancy, just a couple trails layered with time offset to spice it up. I created the trail texture in Krita with “wrap mode” enabled.
I’ll be posting the results of each and every of your techniques!
Thank you very much for sharing the knowledge.
I also created this “sword trail”, but it has some stepping on the mesh.
You can slow down or pause the .gif using a tool like this one.
I’m working my way around creating high quality gifs, but the file size gets pretty big and it won’t let me upload them to the forum. I would be really happy if someone could lend me a hand!
This is a little known secret, but I’ve never been a big fan of trails attached to meshes @.@!! Haha, secrets!! This is mostly because the trails usually end up choppy because of framerate or anim compression. It has its pros though but I’m selfish and like meshes ooohohoh $$$
You can always use an external site like DeviantArt to host and link to it on the site instead.
you said LoL dont use many shaders cause you want it to run on everything, then are you using a master shader that can do it all? Or smaller but more expansive shaders?
Hi Shannon, first of all thank you for this incredible thread! I just finished reading it and has made me so excited to go out and create!
My understanding of this is that you’ve used a blend shape for the bubble? If so, was it spawned within the emitter? I have searched how to do this a few times and haven’t had much luck; for UE4 at least. Or was it squash and stretched with vertex displacement within the shader? Would you be able to go into slightly more detail about how the bubble was spawned and animated? Edit: Just realized you could spawn a sphere and key frame size over life :doh:
Also just out of curiosity, does the VFX team make the meshes for things like the ram head for Braums Q or are they done by people from the environment or character art side?
For something character-specific I’d imagine that’s included in a character artist’s task list, but the Riot fx team are just all-around amazeballs artists, so it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them made it themselves. But vfx artist as a whole tend to borrow and chop up whatever meshes we need for our own uses.
Ah, I’m so happy that this thread was inspiring to you!! I can’t wait to see what you make!!
Zoe’s bubble wasn’t a bleandshape, or vert offset, but a static mesh that I hand keyed scaled in our particle engine X Y and Z values for. This gif is choppy as butts, but it shows the keys on the left and bubble on the right:
Looking back (omg this is 1.5 years old now what @.@) it’s not too shabby!
To get stuff inside the bubble I attached a child particle to the mesh so that the glow/sparkles would move with it and I wouldn’t have to key their positions.
It depends on the artist actually! Some are more comfortable with making meshes, UV, rig, texture, etc. For large things like Ornns Ram that was done by a character artist and animator with FX on top as it’s the same screen space as a champ so we wanted to make extra sure that the details and quality were awesome awesome. Often times it’s so much faster to have a character artist tackle those things too. I think I’m one of the rare artist who really likes doing it myself haha and even then it’s usually smaller meshes like Talon’s blades in his W.
I’ve stolen so many things from environment and character art cut some stuff out, re-UV, throw a soft transparent material on it, and only the most discerning artist will notice
Hello shannon! I have a question regarding a Skin. Its Snow day Syndra. Her Q’s windup in the beginning have these lines coming into the Center. Seen here
Is this just a circle UV mapped to have a special texture panner towards the center or is it something else?
thanks for the answer !!
but I’m selfish and like meshes ooohohoh $$$
I can’t wait to see what you make!!
cut some stuff out, re-UV, throw a soft transparent material on it, and only the most discerning artist will notice 
