Hello everyone,
I want to learn how to make real-time visual effects for Unity from effects created in 3ds Max and Houdini. I was a bit surprised that I couldn’t find a lot of valuable courses/tutorials about this on Google. I do know that a common way is to create sprite sheets, correct? It would be really helpful to see a video that covers this extensively.
This course on Gnomon seems pretty decent: Tutorials | The Gnomon Workshop. It is over 5 years old however and uses Unreal instead of Unity. Are the techniques used in the course’s preview video outdated, or are they still relevant for today?
Thank you!
Animating meshes and exporting them is common, however I can’t speak much on animating a mesh and baking that out to flipbook. Distorting the UV’s in some way may be a better choice if all you want is a flame as shown. This can be done in-engine in the shader you give your particle:
Shader Forge (Unity):
If you go with a flipbook method, after you have your sim or sequence of images (there’s tons of tutorials on how to create sims in Houdini for example), you want to create your flipbook. Here’s a few of the ways you can set up a sprite sheet:
Manually in photoshop (click for timestamp)
In Unity:
Using Gimp (Click for timestamp):
Using Sheetah (After Effects)
Hope this helps!
4 Likes
Thank you! A lot of helpful tutorials 
If you use Houdini, use a mosaic node in cops to create spritesheets. I am working on a course about a similar topic. I’ll post back when I can say more.
2 Likes
Out of curiosity, in what stage is this course at the moment? A course like that sounds extremely helpful, so I can’t wait!
