Hi there, newbie here.
I’m a programmer myself interested in animation and stylized VFX. I quite like writing shader and tend to make VFX based on meshes and materials. I always do procedural material whenever I can.
Here is one of my attempt in doing a sword slash, 2nd version is more recent.
I’m looking for advice on my work as well as learning new techniques. I would be very appriciated if you give me some resources or tutorial or breakdown on following topics:
sword slash
point impact
AOE impact
stylized smoke effect (little to no simulation, contrary to realistic smoke)
First off, I’d encourage looking around the website and searching for these things. You’ll find a lot of cool stuff! Erb’s sketchbook is great start to look at stylized stuff for example. Also check out the resources section. Check out pinterest for a lot of effect references you’re looking for. Record game footage, build your own library!
For your effect, everything feels a bit linear and slow.
At the start, the slashed feel very off timed and don’t match the animation. It throws you off and feels awkward and “wrong” to look at (at least to me)
At the end, she swigs from down to up and your slash spawns from up to down. It can work if done with more care and with more elements I think, but here it again throws you off and feels wrong.
Play around with timings, try something weird, something explosive with the keys. The erosion also feels quite slow and linear at the end.
Also I’d suggest trying Screen2GIF or OBS to record your videos, it’s free and very customization with great quality! You can also try ShareX.
Take a stroll around here, get cozy and make some friends! Post things and get feedback. There’s so many threads with amazing knowledge around here already, too.
Hey sifa, greetings.
Thanks for these advices, I already surfed around for awhile and had a list of favorite artists on this forum.
About the timing, I’m afraid if I make it too fast player would not know what’s happening. Yes I will try faster timing.
About the upside down slash, honestly I don’t know what to draw when she strike upward like this. I tried several concepts but the result was terrible. Then I use a downward slash with superquick timing, in hope that creating a sudden flash would forgive the wrong shape of the slash. That’s the best I can came up with.
