Breakdown Time!
I said in a previous post how most of the effect can be broken down into Alpha Thresholding, UV distortion, Manipulating UV’s on 3D Meshes, Soulercoasters, and panning textures. Today I wanted to breakdown specifically the use of Manipluting UV’s, Soulercoasters and how they can be combined with panning textures for cool results.
Hopefully if anyone is new to VFX they can get some new tools for their real-time toolbelt.
First thing I wanted to show was Soulercoasters, most prominently seen in the Fel Healing projectiles.
https://gph.is/2S4IcYx
Side by side of the real material and a simple panning textures on the Meshes.
https://giphy.com/gifs/46zFtN0OSZE88EA3Pz
The main idea behind soulercoasters is that you make a 3D mesh of the projectile’s path and then use a panning texture to mask out everything but the projectile as it goes along the ‘path’. In this case, I made 5 meshes and applied the same material to each of the meshes.
To learn more about implementing them, there’s a great post from @Augie about them here VFX Basics - Mesh Soulercoasters
The same idea of panning and masking textures is used in the ‘Healing Wisp’, with the added use of UV manipulation to play with the timing of the wisp.
https://giphy.com/gifs/5hmJb0KdULSdn117OX
My goal with the wisp was to have it slightly ‘hang around’ the character rather than having it enter and leave at the same speed. To do that I scrunched up and widened the edges near the top and bottom of the mesh and largely left the UV’s the same, all to have it speed up and slow down during portions of the panning.
This technique with manipluating UV’s on a simple mesh is then pushed further in the summoning portal
https://giphy.com/gifs/dsVpeRZhKKwZFcWkiG
The spinning portal is made up of a circle mesh with ‘spun up’ edges and manipulated UV’s, when panned over, gives the vortex like visual. To see how to get a Circle mesh with nice UV’s check out this snippit from Shannon Berke’s mega post Shannon McSheehan - LoL FX + Knowledge Share - #64 by ShannonBerke
Hope this breakdown of some of the techniques was helpful to somebody! If anyone has additional questions on a specific part of the spell I’ll be super down to help. I won’t be posting full shader maps but I can definitely point you in the right direction 