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.