I had an idea for an effect and coincidentally it perfectly matches the current sketch! So I will try to finish this before the deadline.
The idea is that a frosty bubble will form, along with cold swirly winds around a target. When it’s completely filled, It then bursts and the target is frozen. I have a sketch somewhere but I’ll look for it tomorrow .
I worked a bit on some textures in Substance, it was quite a challenge getting a decent frosty looking texture, but this is fine for a first version. I worked on the alpha texture first, then based the main texture on that.
Started putting the textures in Unity, worked on the bubble shaders. still not there yet, I’m going back to Substance to improve the textures a bit more. But all in all, not a bad first version.
Worked a bit more on the bubble, went back and improved the textures a bit more, and tweaked the shaders a bit more.
I’m currently working on the wind swirls, but running into some annoying layering issues. Hopefully I can figure those out soon.
It’s finally coming together bit by bit. Added wind swirls, struggled a bit with the distortion due to the scene opaque only rendering opaques (who would’ve thought?). URP doesn’t do custom render passes, so I ended up adding a secondary camera, which renders to a texture. I then sample the texture so I can add distort effects. I also added some cold fog/smoke effects.
Lastly I made a burst simulation in Blender. I keep running into issues with Unity not being able to load the baked FBX, so I really should start looking into Houdini.
Up next is a bit more work on the burst and adding frozen effects to the dummy.
Another update! Looks like I’ll be able to finish it in time.
Worked a bit on the frozen status effect, added some sparkly particles.
Not happy with how the ice looks, it’s way too saturated compared to the bubble. Also I need to create a better shader for the ice, it’s just using a default lit material right now. So working on that next.
All in all, motion, timing etc is pretty much there.
Final submission!
It could still use more polish, but alas, schedule got quite busy so I’m running out of time.
I mainly worked on the ice shard shader. I completely redid the ice models because they looked like frozen turds Also did some more small tweaks. And I’d like to mention that I used one of @Niels’s excellent VFExtra textures for the bubble burst effect. I sadly ran out of time to make my own.
Thanks for following this thread, it was a really fun challenge!
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