Stylized VFX

These two VFX were done at Artside with the fantastic feedback of Nicolas Ceriani. He introduced us to Niagara and complex shader, animation and UV tricks. It was a real pleasure to discover all this new stuff. Right now I'm using what I learned in this course in almost all my Unreal projects.

The purpose was to work with both Niagara and shaders to create effects and train our timing skills, which is really important in VFX.

The first VFX I did was based on a quick concept that Clothilde Arlaut had just done for me. It's inspired by the Kirby universe.
For this one, I created some simple shapes (stars, diamonds, etc). I fully animated them using the Niagara system and some custom shaders. I also created a semi-complex shader to create parallax in the star and have a dynamic parameter to control the depth. When animated in Niagara it helped to enhance the bounce effect.

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For the Lightning one, I based my VFX on a concept made by Julie Lafeuille, which I reinterpreted. This was a different challenge, but I really enjoyed doing it. I created a small lightning VFX, using a panner on a custom plane.
For the forcefield, I used a panned texture that depends on the sphere's fresnel threshold. And for the ground damage, I painted the texture with some opacity variation and used a smooth threshold to dynamically dissolve it.

Once again, I am grateful to Nicolas Ceriani for this course, because I use what I learned here every day.