Hey Kyle, I also started learning fx in my senior year too, so you’re not alone! Keep at it, and with this community and online resources you can learn rtvfx pretty quick. Fine tuning it is the harder part and learning to see what works and what doesn’t takes time.
First effect: I agree with @tharlevfx in that there is a style mismatch between the fireball and the impact. Your burst is a lot of soft smokey looking particles, and your impact is hard edged, bright, and vibrant. Try and base your other textures off that impact and have some strong shapes in that initial burst. On the topic of the burst, I don’t feel there’s enough energy in it. The particles just kind of “puff” out and fade going roughly the same speed. If you’re using a sphere emitter, boost the radial velocity higher, and put a high drag on the particles or adjust the velocity/life to slow them down. Hand drawn and Blizz-style fx use lots of radial shockwaves like your ice effect too, so maybe see how one would compliment those initial burst particles. Your colors are very muted, without much contrast, especially in your trail and shell around the shooting sphere. Make sure those colors are pronounced and readable. Again, your impact is great; there are bright yellows and deep reds at the edges, so try to replicate that in your projectile. A last note on the topic of your impact is it just appears, at least to my eye which has only seen your effect a few times at normal speed. It’s just “Boom! Instant shape” and I’d like to see the texture grow around the block. As I said before, the colors and shape of it are great, and I like the dissolve out.
Second effect: Again, the initial burst is a bit weak, with just a few rings popping out. Flares and burst textures help sell explosiveness and force in fx. Try and find some examples of impacts and slow it down to check out how it’s all put together. Jason Keyser has some good references and videos on it https://www.pinterest.com/pin/567523990522163323/ . I like your trail and the animation in it, but the others are right it’s a bit too harsh and square at the end. Try multiplying it by a linear gradient to soften up that end edge. I’d say get rid of the floaty soul bits coming out of the trail, or make them more numerous and give them a soft kill (they play out their lifetime) instead of just popping off screen when the projectile impacts. For the cracks, same thing with your fire burst, it just pops on screen, so I’d recommend either growing the cracks out from the center to their full size, grow the width of the cracks to their full size, or both. For your portal, try drawing an interesting shape for the portal instead of just a plain oval, add in some value variance in your purple edge (lighter/brighter in spots) but stay away from blooming it out, Blizz and Riot never use engine bloom (to my knowledge). The smoke in the center of your portal pops too much. Try getting into the habit of scaling particles’ size and opacity up by life, and overlap their death with another particle’s life. I like the energy coming out and getting sucked into the portal, but that one block does get in the way of it. You don’t need to be constrained to using the identical “test room” for every effect, and I actually strongly recommend putting your effects in actual levels. Usually a commercial engine will come with pre built demo scenes, so try putting your stuff in those, keeping in mind the genre of the scene to your effects. You wouldn’t really have a sci-fi effect play in the middle of a forest, ya know?
Third effect: I think this one is your best so far. There are a lot of elements layered over each other and it feels punchy. Your ice crystals could use some size variation in the thickness of them, but that’s just my personal opinion. They do need more contrast and variation in the texture though,right now they just feel like blue spears. If you made the geometry, take some time to UV it and do some hand painting for the textures, like this https://www.pinterest.com/pin/520095456944189774/ . The snow bits and fog around the origin feel good, but your snow coming off the impacts is a bit too slow. Give it a very slight delay from when the crystals spawn, but keep in mind that they are shooting out with the force of the crystals growing, so they should initially be moving as fast as the crystals are growing up, but as soon as they pass that they should hit a lot of drag in the air and float down since they are very light bits. If you are working in Unreal, try adding an Orbit to them so they swirl around a bit on the way down. Also for little bits like that always remember to have a distinguishable difference in lifetime so some fade out much sooner than others, it gives it more life and character.
One last bit, try and use curves in your graph editor as much as possible. Ease in, speed up and level off or fade in and out all help sell and blend your particles into a cohesive effect, and sometimes adding curves and tweaking a curve handle can mean the difference between having 10 value changes over a particle’s life, and just two.
Keep at it and reference, reference, reference!
