This painted style water trails

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Saw this really beautiful water painting style in Demon slayer.
Thoughts?
Any idea if it’s possible to make a shader, particle trails for this effect?

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whole page: /kimetsu no yaiba | sakugabooru

Anyways, /me being a fan of the series.

It should be reasonably possible to make this, as all of Tanjiro’s vfx are made in 3d (I think it was 3dsmax) and if you break it down frame by frame you notice a lot of things that should be fairly easy to make shader-wise.

It will be a bit harder when it comes to looking good from any angle, but since there is also a high chance a game will be made… it will be interesting to see how far they push it to match the effects seen in the anime.

while not really the same effect, a good learning approach could be:

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Should be reasonably doable.

Water trails are most likely a series of meshes with materials animated over them.
The foam in the beginning looks like it could be done with particles, but I suspect it’s a mesh with a flipbook material.
The foam at the end looks very much like a vertex animation on a mesh, although since we work in an engine you’d have to bake that into a texture. Something like houdini is probably best bet for doing that. Also edge detection and toon shader for that anime look, probably.

Might be slightly tedious to get everything to line up and look good with a camera which moves all over the place like here…

Seems similar enough to be relevant to this conversation.

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I’m making it by practice too!

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Its worth looking at the Unity Japantalk, underthis video. It tries to automate the mesh creating process.

is the water foam you have spawning just a mesh particle?

It looks like the water foam are just “regular” unlit billboard particles. They also shrink over time.
Just a good texture and a masked material is what you need to do these.

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omg, I was like: this is nice! gotta like it… oh, already liked it.

But yeah, I would a flipbook too. But making the realistic thing stylized is a great approach.

I’ve done that so many times too. I should follow this person, or, I should bookmark this, and I already have haha. Better than losing it to the endless sea that is the internet though!