worked on readability & shading.
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It reads a lot better now and I love the way you shaded it so softly inside!!
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I’m sure you’ve run across it already, but @SrRubfish did a great breakdown of a 3d version on Twitter.
I’m pretty sure that’s Rafles’ RTVFX tag on here, hopefully I didn’t tag someone else on accident 
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@SelicatoArt thank you!
@Travis thanks for the hint, i love rafles works!
Calling it finished! Tweaked last details (motion blur for central slime, tweaked the shield glow, …). This means, after only ~4 months I finally finished the first part of the course! Whoop whoop! 
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Next step in the course is a handpainted fire texture. Here is my first result. It’s really hard to make it look like smoke insteaf of stone with lava inbetween 
https://imgur.com/nuhhcQ8.gif
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new version. tried to make it look more cloudy instead of stony and gave the inner glow a direction (it appears “above” a cloud blob).
texture preview. i’m actually using a b/w gray scale which i colorize via black body node in unreal.
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i reworked the texture to stay closer to the style shown in the course. also i mask the “pole” to avoid vertex offset there and also let it glow to hide the stretched texture. the “inner glow” is a color + fresnel mask.
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first steps bringing it into niagara.
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Loving seeing all your progress! It’s looking great so far
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One of the difficulties I had when doing this style of effect is the scrolling motion coming to a stop while at the same time the effect is visually accelerating due to the alpha causing the shapes to quickly shrink. In your case you appear to be fading from the bottom of the cap first, which is itself fine, but causes the flow of motion to suddenly reverse.
You may want to try starting the fade out sooner while the cloud is still in motion, or even accelerate the UV scrolling while fading out to counter the dissolve’s apparent motion, or add some other motion (scaling the mesh up slightly while fading, failing or rising, a bit of rotation, etc). I also used a second duplicate mesh inside the cap that was rotated slightly and half the size to give a little internal volume during the dissolve. For the ground ring I scaled the Z height down during the fade out to make it look more like settling dust.
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wow, thank you so much for the tips and the video! great ideas, i will play around with that!
I didn’t apply any feedback yet. Added rough wip version of elements: glowing trails / ground decal / spherical shockwave / ground shockwave / cam shake / glowing ground circle (damage indicator).
My plan is to setup a simple version of all elements i need and then making them look nicer.
Oh, and I had some funny accidents while playing with ribbons:
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always love a good ribbon accident… last one looks cool and useful if can be tamed 
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tiny update: added swirly WIP projectile which triggers the explosion:
https://imgur.com/jjfIeFO.gif
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Hmmm, maybe stagger the scaling of the ground cloud and the mushroom cloud? The scaling and motion on both feel really good already, but they both feel like they reach their max size at roughly the same time to the point they feel too uniform. I think the speed the textures are panning on each is a good benchmark for what I mean with the scale. If I look at the effect out of the corner of my eye, I can tell the ground cloud texture slows down almost to a stop before the mushroom cloud’s does, but the mushroom feels like it reaches its peak height at the same time as the ground cloud reaches the max radius from the center.
Maybe delay spawning the ground cloud a few 0.1 seconds, or have its starting scale much smaller, but then have it scale up to its max size faster than it currently does?
The mushroom part of the vertical moving cloud could probably start smaller on X and Y (75% ish?) and then scale outwards to its final size as it travels up. Again, just looking at it from the corner of my eye, the geo feels like its only motion is moving upwards. I think a bit more scale adjustment over its life would give more a feeling of expansion and expended energy.
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Thank you rfor the feedback travis! I’ll definitally keep that in mind as soon as I’m working on the timing.
Small update:
- worked on projectile path & trail
- ring on ground appears at start of projectile (to tell the player to leave the damage area)
- first test with some mesh particles in the mushroom to give it depth while dissolving. i don’t like the outcome. will try with a multi-layered-mushroom-cloud-mesh.
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I’ve worked on the mushroom cloud colors but the main improbement is the fade-out:
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Do you already have a solution in mind for the emissive fade out?
Painted a little decal texture and tested using parallax occlision mapping:
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