Hi, This a water-light shield effect I’m working on, hope you like it and any feedback is very welcome 
Current State
I’m now working on the buildup stage, trying to give it an impactful light shield buildup
First Iteration concept art
Second Iteration Concept Art
After some amazing feedback from the VFX apprentice discord I decided to fix composition to make the water shield part of the effect a bit more centered
Looks very cool already 
wow this is amazing !! I know there must be some vertex offset about the water but how you make the dynamic so natural?
Thank you!, yeah It’s a combination of Blend shapes Frame by frame animation and a Vertex Animation Texture tool I’m working on in blender and unreal:
In blender it generates a new UV Map that orders the vertices in a line from left to right in vertex index order.
Then it goes through every frame to solve the biggest bounding box dimensions it can find and stores it in a variable.
Then for each frame it encodes a the vertex position in each horizontal texture coordinate normalized to the 0 to 1 range using the largest bounding box found in all frames
It also encodes normals normalized to de 0 to 1 range
For unreal it just decodes the positions and normals usign the stored largest bounding box and
I know there’s tools that already do that like houdini but I kinda wanted to walk through the process of making my own tool, so this is what I’ve got so far… I’m planning on detailing it a bit further and share the source code once I’m done working on edge cases and optimization along with the actual FX so it could take a little while
Very very cool! I love that concept illo. Was it just hand painted?
thanks for sharing 
~~ haha I guess i need to learn more about VATnext 
Beautiful! Nice work! keep going
I love how close the concept is to the final image! Awesome work.
Hi, thank you!, to achieve the looks of the concept I actually did some tweaks in a custom shader:
for the foam I’m using a simple texture I painted in photoshop
now for the “sub surface” color I’m using a fake light direction that is sampled in view space along with a normal map derived from the texture I did in photoshop
its unreal material graph? or some kind of theme?
I guess its the electronic nodes plugin,
makes your graph beautiful xD
Electronic Nodes in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace (unrealengine.com)
