Vil's Sketchbook(?)

Personal Work
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Hello people! I am starting this sketchbook for at least one project I am going to work on and document it, with hopes of critique and feedback.

I wanted to go step back from flashier effects and focus on something simpler, basic and more readable while making it reusable and performant. My goals for this project:

  1. Create a pack of VFXs for different elemental projectiles consisting of:
  • Launch - Projectile being shot/cast.
  • Flight - Projectile’s traversal in space.
  • Collision - How projectile resolves due to collision.

  1. I want to focus on using master materials for each different aspect - trails, particles, meshes having their separate interchangeable material instances , while using same or very similar Niagara Systems. All materials made properly with reusable material functions.

  2. Making textures for each element separately.

This should be quite some work, doing everything from scratch. I will be starting with 4 elements, maybe expanding further in the future.

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I started out with Making an actual projectile, it’s materials and a basic motion to debug the trails. This will serve as the base point as setting up the materials gives me a clear view on what parameters should be adjustable, and which parts can be contracted into functions, keeping the material graph tidy and setting up for instanced shading. Each projectile will consist of 2 trails, one “ablative” mesh for the frontal area and 1-3 sprite generators, depending on what is needed.
Fireball

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Before continuing on with following effects, I wanted to make sure whether the master materials serve the purpose. With different textures and slight parameter changes I could iterate from fire to lightning pretty quickly, i’d say (only that i got stuck with making textures again)

Lightningball