Sweet colors and awesome composition with the red and the blues, some weird fire clipping on the base of the mirror.
Did you also make the environment yourself?
Thanks!
And thanks for the feedback! If I may ask, what fire clipping are you speaking of specifically? There is a layer fire coming from the rectangular base of the mirror, are you referring to that? Maybe I should put down some flat fire on that base to help with that issue/give the flames some sort of base. Or are you talking about clipping that occurs with the parts that are holding the mirror up that aren’t the rectangular base?
Regarding the environment, it is a few 2D images parallaxed in the shader. I painted and pieced together some photos I have taken to create the environment and added in the rain, fog, and blinking lights to further sell the illusion. It will break down a little at certain extreme angles, but gets the job done for the most part!
I was refering to this part. I feel it just looks a bit bad when it just goes straight through, very minor detail
That environment effect really have great sense of quality, sometime in the future I really need to look into a similar effect! 
Ahh yeah I see. Thanks for the screen grab! It is always helpful to get another set of eyes on something! Yeah I will look at that clipping in the next iteration, should be a quick fix.
Thanks! I tried to add in a few more parallaxing elements, like a blurry post in the foreground but it didn’t quite pan out the way I hoped. I might take another stab at it however. I also set up a true portal into another scene, but that seemed like more work in creating a completely different 3D environment, so instead went the parallax route.
Spent some time today working on some stylized fire experiments without the use of flipbooks. Figured I would post the results here! These all use the same material with texture swaps and parameter changes. This is the same material used in the mirror portal video posted above.
Any suggestions or feedback welcome!
I tried to make it flexible enough so you can have a stylized toon version as well as a slightly more realistic version. It all really depends on the textures you use though. In these examples I am only using two main base texture shapes (one for the toon version and one for the slightly more realistic version).
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Wow, I would like to see how your materials are setup to create the fire wiggle the way it does.
Currently I feel like the fires do look like fire, my concern is that they look a bit stale, but in some cases I think that be a good thing (torches, campfire example)
For being just 2 textures (I assume you mask the fire) it does seem to be very performance cheap which would make great in mass producing environmental fx for different scenes.
Thank you for sharing
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Thanks for the feedback! @ChrisNordgren
I hear you regarding them looking a bit stale. My intention was to create something stylized without a ton of crazy movement in hopes that it would come together more fully within a particle system while still maintaining a somewhat stylized look. I’ll see how far I can push this in future iterations.
Regarding the wiggle, it was created based off of a trick fellow VFX artist Dare Matheson showed me. It is a UV offset that is distorting the U by using vertical sine waves that pan upwards. It looks like the following in it’s most basic form and can be used for UV offset or vertex offset:
Now you can beef that portion up by adding additional sine waves into the mix and providing controls to alter the height and width of the texture as well. You can lerp two sine waves of different speeds and length by a third larger sine wave to get some nice variety or provide controls to blow the fire in a certain direction to simulate wind using the same principles (for this you could use a float, multiply that by a similar mask that masks the base, and add this to the sine wave right before you add it into the R Mask. A negative number for the float will push it one way and a positive number will push it the other way).
As far as the look of the fire, I use two textures to form the basic shape. One that serves as a sort of blob fire with no holes in it and another that acts as the mask and defines the detailed shape of the fire (just as Chris guessed). The masked texture scrolls upwards and both have the same UV wiggle distortion added to them. For further variation you can add a little more random (non wavy) distortion to the masked fire to help change it’s shape a bit.
Let me know if that doesn’t answer your question or if I can better explain anything!
I’m continually playing around with this method and will post any updates if I am able to make any improvements to it!
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Love it! The slime has such a cool style! Great work and thanks for the breakdowns
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Sam - this stuff all looks great! I love the graphical fire, for example bottom row / 2nd from left. Looks superb how the tendril breaks off.
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As many people have said, the VFX in Zelda - Breath of the Wild are nothing short of stunning! They are really inspiring for those of us interested in stylized VFX. I found the fire particularly inspiring (I am on a fire kick recently ) and I wanted to try and figure out how to replicate that and create something with the same look and feel for learning purposes.
Just like the previous fire experiment I tried, this fire doesn’t use flipbooks and is shader created. Below is the first pass. There are a few things I want to iron out in regards to the movement, tiling, and a little blip that happens here and there. It has been a lot of fun to try and break that effect down and figure out how to create something with the same/similar style and movement!
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Worked a bit more on the Zelda inspired fire study tonight. New video is below! Tried to capture a bit more of the random movement you see in the gameplay videos and improved the colors.
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I updated the fire VFX on the mirror portal and thought I would post the final version here. I think I am calling it done playing around with fire
Going to try and think up another VFX experiment to work on next. Potentially another portal, haha (maybe a demon portal or something Diablo/Doom inspired). Or maybe some kind of laser blast or aoe effect.
As always, any feedback or questions welcome!
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Looks amazing Very dramatic, the colours are amazing
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This is some really cool stuff Sam I would special mention the effort for the stylized fire of Zelda, a very good recreation effort. Apparently Zelda ones are really upto next level in stylized category. The mirror portal is also special one. Will you try some heavy stylized explosion Zelda like? Would love to see
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Do i like this fire, Much like Zelda, is stylized material produced? Is the texture hand painted?
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Thanks Silver!
The fire is created entirely in the shader. Most of the fire and flame lick shapes you see are created through the use of a highly customized noise texture made in after effects and Photoshop that gave me the shapes I wanted. This texture acts as a mask of sorts as it scrolls upwards, and combined with some other masks and gradiants it creates the fire look. The end result sort of acts like an alpha clip would act, breaking apart and clipping down the image the darker the textures get.
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Thanks for the valuable info for this effect. That fire is indeed quite close to Zelda mate. What software you have used for it?
Hey, Sam!
Your fire is really nice 
! I would be pleased to know your approach of creating that material.
Great job!
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