Supply for help, where can i find a good Unreal Cascade (or Future Niagara) tutorial

[Mez]

This thread is an interesting read.

@Hudsoncat I’m going to throw down what I think I am understanding as where you are coming from, and then I hope to… re-aim that giga lazer ya got there. Your ambition is blatant, but your approach could use some finesse. Just so you know, I ain’t no pro (yet) , but I’m working on it. I’ve thought these thoughts, I’ve walked these shoes. Alright, so let’s parse this.

@Hudsoncat

I don’t want to be a professional, i don’t want to be the new houndini master, i just want to learn how to create spell effects for a game (frost breaths, plasma balls, rock avanlanches etc.), what should i do? How and where can i find a good tutorial for learning? Where should i go? GUIDE ME, GRAB MY HANDS AND TAKE ME TO THE SKIES. I just want to create spell effects, nothing more.

You don’t want to be a pro. You are not doing this in the hopes of a job, you just want to do it because VFX is t3h cool shit. We’ll be coming back to this in a moment.

Then you say “I just want to create spell effects, nothing more.”

Oh my. >_<

Let me translate that for ya “I just want to create [everything and anything]”. You know. Something small. You’re speaking to tech wizards man! It’s ALL magic.

@Hudsoncat

Please, imagine you are explaining to a friend of yours, better, figure you are talking with a kid, talk informal. Everyone that talks to me uses complex terms like “Oh good morning gentleman, today we are going to use a geometrical vertex that uses node-base modular parameters vector fields to calculate the vertex of shaders and uses axis pananan panananan…” … whaaaaaaaat? i didn’t understand NOTHING. Please, thanks!

The word you are looking for is “Jargon”. That said, if you don’t know what words like UV’s or Shaders are, then you MAY be mucking in deeper shit then you know. If you don’t know the generalist basics, this mountain you are climbing naked in a frenzy just got 20 degrees steeper. YES YES, I know… I have read the post where you line out processes of other professions. (I’ve done the same thing!) I want to reiterate, if you don’t already have a strong generalist understanding of Videogame Creation… MMMMMMboy.

@Partikel

Oh, a headsup, use CgHow tofigure out the general idea of how to do things, but do not take it as gospel as he’s known for promoting bad and nonproduction ready practices. Good that you found something that helps you though!

@Hudsoncat

Oh, Luos for example. He is an awesome guy, but his tutorials… are awful. They are long and you cant understand a bit. It is because he is more worried about how he’ll do the particle and what he understand than explaining for the public how to do.

…

As i dont aim to be a VFX artist, just create some fxs (Maybe to sell in marketplace or Asset store) i dont see how his particles are “nonproduction ready”, again, i just want to take an overview and general idea how to do things. Some complex particles that i always wanted to see how it was made he just did in a few min.

…

Of all the people…

…

I swear I’m getting Déjà vu over here. This is why I’ve been logging this stuff down.

So hey man, you doing EXACTLY what I was doing. You want to LEARN THIS shit NOW. Get all that Noisy Jargon out of the way, and just SHOW ME how to MAKE that! Luos… isn’t where you go for that, that ain’t his thing. Those two hours is the real time man. If you want to learn it right, @Luos_83 knows his stuff. You don’t currently strike me as a person whit the current MINDSET of wanting to learn it right. And…Ya know, going through your published intent… and I’m not done yet… I can’t help but be reminded of a classic.

https://i.imgur.com/mcIhIoi.png?1

Take it from a guy whos brain buzzes with ambition much like yours seems to; this shit will chew your ass if you go about it without discipline. It’s HELL-A painful, I know, but - and hey correct me if I’m wrong - this isn’t exactly something you can just blast your ass with, learn and master over night. Trust me on this, I’ve tried. That big wild shit you see that brought you here isn’t just the result of “knowing how to do it”, but is time and hard work too. Hours and hours and hours of work. We only see the successes, not all the failures.

And the best part about it all… it’s CLEAN. That’s the REAL hard part (at least it has been for me among my limit of technical knowhow). You can make the BEST Realtime VFX ever but your stuff drops the frame rate to 15FPS when the Goal is 30FPS or more, which we can do REAL easy, your VFX ain’t worth shit. Which brings me to “Maybe to sell in marketplace or Asset store”. Uh-uh. No man.

As I just stated, if your stuff drops the frame rate to 15FPS when the Goal is 30FPS or more, the VFX ain’t worth it. Don’t even bother.

CHOOSE ONE: “I don’t want to be a professional” or “Sell in marketplace or Asset store”.

Which is why when @Partikel (which you should know is KIND-OF-SORT-OF of VFX Badass) warns you about CGhow, you should heed it.

With ALL that said, I feel I should point you to something that may help you on your… Quest? Adventure? … RAID! On your Raid into Realtime VFX. There is no real quick and easy path; For better or for worse we don’t do Sith here…hopefully(?)… but… if you want to UNDERSTAND THE JARGON, which I think should be your FIRST GOAL, then I’ve got something to point you to. If going through the Epic Docs is too much, which I get, then here are some places where you can parse some magic.

tharle VFX

This is @tharlevfx site. He has alot of breakdowns & pictures for each. You’ll have to read… but it’s short and sweet, and should give you the quick on some of the things we use to make magic in Unreal 4. It’s ONE of many… but it’s a start.

Learning FX Workflow

This is post by @Madosho. It shows how he goes about making VFX in general end to end. Plus… UGH… that example is SO beautiful. I mean… look…

[VFX Portfolio] Solar Flare

Perfection. I dream of this quality someday.

And that’s it. THERE IS MORE (though never enough), but that’s where I think you should start. One step at a time. And hey, use that search function. There be gold in these here hills.

Oh, and welcome to the forum.