VFX for mobile games

General Discussion
#1

Hello everyone! This is my first post ever. I’m a professional animator trying to get into VFX, and in my quest for knowledge, stumbled upon this site! You guys are crazy good and it’s a pleasure to meet you.

I’m trying to learn a typical VFX render pipeline in Unity for Mobile Games but I have not been able to find any decent tutorials. I’m Semi-new to unity so I’m looking for more beginner friendly stuff. I’m slurping up as much info from the tutorials I have been able to find but those have been the theory of how to make the effects look good, and more particle system stuff. I’m assuming VFX for mobile will involve more shader based FX than heavy particle work.

If anyone is a VFX artist for mobile games I’m dying to ask you some questions! If you know of any tutorials that I might be able to follow along and could pass them my way I’d be so grateful!

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#2

Hey and welcome!

i’ve been working on mobile for most of my career so I can share some things i’ve found. Generally it’s not that limiting now especially with how powerful a lot of mobile devices are. You probably want to avoid any depth fade and refraction as a general rule. I would also say go all out first and profile and then see where you can cut back. Try and share a lot of textures and pay attention to memory. A big issue with mobile games is usually memory so getting a lot of reuse out of textures you’re making is helpful

As far as shaders go you can get a lot out of some simple panning textures along with some distortion. There are also a lot of great ways to use meshes for vfx.

Some talks that were really helpful for me are:

I would also search these forums for things like blend add. There’s a lot of great resources on here already especially simple tricks that are broken down on Shannon’s thread. I’ll try and answer any questions I can though.

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#3

Thanks for these Videos! Loved the one about the VFX of Diablo!
So cool!
As far as textures go do you make them yourself? OR do you use photos and manipulate them into textures?
What has the pipeline been like for you? Do you ever do hand drawn 2D flipbook effects?

#4

Depends on the style I’m going for. Most of the time it’s just creating textures in photoshop though. I don’t do a lot of flipbooks for effects on mobile myself unless I need something really unique or think I can get a lot of reuse out of it.

Also in case you aren’t aware you can join the discord https://discord.gg/utKdUT2

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#5

I didn’t realize there was a discord! Thanks so much!

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