Thank you 
I’ll try my best!
Hey man, the cool stuff started after that! Thank you very much!!
Started working on a personal project.
Quick sketch, heavy WIP. (Sorry for the CA everywhere 
)
Blocked in some random meshes and quick animations so I can start setting stuff up.
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Wow awesome work. Looks like you really hate that Sphere02 
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Should get back to the above WIPs and finish them. I just felt a bit empty and felt like I was missing an important piece in my life and art, after reading a bunch of books and stuff I’m starting to feel better 
I realized I wasn’t pushing squash & stretch enough so I did a few versions and turned my brain off for a bit, the second one is the one I was looking for! also learned what to not do 
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Some more sketches for today
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These are great! Thanks for sharing your stuff
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These are both awesome, I really like the second slam so so so so so much!
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You’re a beast in 2D Animation 
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Writing a small crit for @the_archie from discord. Doing it here because it’s easier and for archival purposes.
Source effect
Critique
I’m going to assume it’s a stylized water/elemental shield. Of course it’s all subjective and I’m just rambling on. I’ll try to keep it a bit generalized, too. Feel free to tell me to fuck off. It’s all good!
I like it, it’s a good start! I like how you’re building up the ending of the shield with the shrinking and expanding to make it seem like it’s unstable and about to pop. I like the effect on the ground, has a nice motion to it. Definitely usable for caustics. The shader on the shield also looks neat and can definitely be built upon.
Small note on staging, I think it’ll benefit you to pick a world that has a bit more contrast to it and various elements. Just get a simple level off the asset store. It really helps with values too. Like how you’re using a character with an animation and putting the effect in that context. That’s great. Do it more!
Questions & Personality.
Ask yourself questions to explore yourself more. That’ll add some personality to your work!
Some things that came to my head when I looked at the effect :
What kind of spell is it?
Is it a protective shield that absorbs magic?
is it a shield that slow all projectiles inside it?
Is it a utility spell that allows the user to breathe underwater?
Is it a healing sphere?
Is it a buff? Does it restore mana over time?
Does it bounce back projectiles?
Does it hurt enemies inside?
Where is the water coming from?
Where does the water go?
Does the user press a button to activate it?
Does it have a cast time?
Can you do it on allies?
Can you cast it on enemies? Does it trap them?
Does it require mana? Some other kind of resource?
Does it need any other requirements? (Like a waterbody nearby)
Does it move with the user or is it stationary?
Is it always the same size?
Can you cast it midair? How would that look?
How does it interact with the world? What if you do it near a fire?
What doth life? Are we just fleshy blips in some meaningless stew of cosmic oblivion?
What kind of questions did you ask yourself?
You could then narrate your effect to show what you have in mind, once you have a clear vision of what you want to make. Give it some personality!
Timing?
The first two things that jump out to me are timings and colours.
Try to have some purpose to things. Don’t think of a sphere scaling in and out, think of a physical bubble filled with water, evaporating out or coalescing in. How would that look? How would that work? Physics? CHEMISTRY?!
Overall everything feels very linear. The Bubble scales up quick, that’s nice. But then it linearly scales down when disappearing. That looks very weird. And the particles linearly come out, spiral and fade off.
How about we do this instead?
I hope that makes sense, I can expand on it later if you are confused.
I don’t think I can explain it better than Jason Keyser does, so check it out!
Colours!
The Colour & Contrast could use a lot of work. It’s difficult to even see the particles inside the bubble because of the values and colours. Also everything is pretty much the same hue which makes my brain wander and everything just meshes into a big blob of blue. It doesn’t stimulate my brain.
LoL effects are absolutely beautiful when it comes to colours and readability. I’d say study a few of them. The subtle hue variations and changes are very eye-candy to look at.
Try playing around with shader math and combining different colours over life of particles, mapping colours to textures and overlapping different colours together.
You can also map 3 colours to your greyscale texture to get additional hue shifting/variation.
Play with the Bias and Scale values to shift the thresholds and contrast around. (Thanks Jan for the help!)
Remember that contrast just means two different (or “contrasting”) things. It could me colours, hues, values, saturation or
Shapes, lines, hardless or
Quantity, position etc
You get the point!
Here’s a quick example of shape contrast.
Having harder elements with soft shapes and textures looks great. Give it a try! (Learned this from Glad’s twitch stream 
)
Another fun thing to try would be to add refraction inside the bubble.
You can use fresnel to fade away the edges of the bubble to make it look softer in some parts.
Let’s go through the motions.
The Effect’s life cycle
The Entry :
It’s solid! I would love if there was more storytelling to this.
Maybe imagine blobs of water coalescing from the vapour around the caster and materializing into the bubble?
or cracking of the earth and water erupting from it and engulfing the caster in a vortex 
A firetruck shooting water at the caster and him bending it into a bubble?
Sucking the water off a nearby lake?
Or perhaps a large water dragon being summoned, which circles the caster and builds the bubble around him?
I would give it a nice little anticipation and pop the shield in. Right now it scales up from the center of the caster and it feels very fake. We want to make the user think it’s water but when you see an obvious sphere scaling up, it breaks the immersion. How do we lie better? How do we make the user feel the effect?
You can obfuscate the entry with a small flare/explosion or magical energy gathering in and lighting everything up.
The Loop :
For the idle, you could have it animate wobbling around or shrinking and expanding.
Here’s a snippet of an example vertex shader for you.
You can change the speed and strength to match your needs. Layer this with simple noises for more fluidy motion. Try also playing around with the strength of the axis. Have fun with it!
The ground shader looks cool. You should perhaps put it inside the bubble to make it look like caustics.
Also let’s you experiment with more prismatic colours. Would be cool to see!
Here’s another reference for you
The Exit :
The scaling out is very awkward. What happens when bubbles burst?
You could try quickly eroding it out with a large quick scale up and some particles spewing out.
You could have it melt out and leave a puddle of water.
You coud have it explode and disperse a bunch of rain!
Maybe the caster just drinks all the water himself?
Or maybe a very thristy crow comes over and peppers the bubble with pebbles until it bursts.
You could pick a random spot on the bubble and start eroding it quickly and morping it randomly with vertex shaders and spawn a bunch of particles. I would prototype this with a simple spheremask expanding from a random point with noises to make the edges not so perfect. Hell, you can even do multiple! Get creative with it.
https://youtu.be/ktvZ2Z_s4Bo?t=58
You could spawn some decals on the ground to make some wet puddles and then erode them out.
The top of the sphere has the pinching of UVs which you might want to mask somehow, there’s severa ways to do that. Fade it out with vertex colours, use a cube sphere, mask it out somehow, etc.
Secondary Elements
You could try experimenting with adding overlapping elements like foam, bubbles, splashes, etc.
You could have little fishies inside the bubble.
I will try to edit this later to add a few more information hopefully. But for now I hope this helps a little bit!
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Hi, it’s seem to me you are using particle attractor because rockets fly from back with an unreal trajectory.
Was that the original idea?
Hey.
My intention with that was to just learn spawning and moving stuff with Blueprints.
This wasn’t done in a particle system, but scripted. I just calculated the vector and added force to the rigid body to move it towards the target.
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Can you shake tutorials that you used? I want to watch them too 
Sorry, I didn’t watch any tutorials. I just mess around until I get it. But I can try help you out if you want.
Thanks, I don’t need, I just interested 
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Really cool effect…
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Oh yeah. Don’t know what I was smoking before. Here’s a small correction for mapping 3 colours to a greyscale texture. It might not be perfect but it seems close enough. If someone knows if it’s wrong or if there’s a better way to do this, please let me know.
Curve Atlases are great and swapping LUTs is cool but I want to have a simple, 3 col based set-up like this for something.
