Ethan L. Lupinski

I used a voronoi texture to generate cells that would get the “wave” look of the material. Leaving the cells as they were would look more unnatural, I set the texture to the power of a Vector1 (VoronoiTex2D^(Vector1)) to soften the edges of the cells. I then applied a radial shear function to have the cells flow in a way that’s expected from water. I added a gradient noise on top to add to the movement.

To create light distortion on the surface, I sampled normal maps from the voronoi and noise textures, blended both maps together, then fed it to the normal of the material. I added additional public variables to be able to modify the strength of the map.

The base color of the shader and the color of the ripples are two separate variables. The ripples are just the edges of the voronoi cells being outlined. The ripples reflect more light than the cells themselves since I added a transparency to the cells.

I wanted to experiment with making attack effects when I started learning how to create visual effects. I started off by creating a step-by-step concept of how I wanted the effect to look. That way, I would be able to have a visual guide while I was building it up.

The idea was for an area attack. At the center point, the arcane magic in the area would be absorb and form into a ball. The ball would grow bigger until it reached the ground. Then it would explode. The area that would inflict the most damage would be in the blast going upward. After-shock damage would be indicated by a blast wave going outward.

I used Unity’s shuriken particle system to create the effect. I focused on using shades of purple to keep the arcane look. The textures used were either the Unity default particle or minor textures I created in Photoshop.

Several sparks visual effects I made as warm up exercises. I made three colored sprays and a single hit spark effect.

The dissolving text was built with a particle system and a sprite. The text itself is a sprite that I created using Photoshop. For the particle system, I used the font sprite as a clipping mask so that particles are clipped from the alphas of the texture. I then added noise to create the swirling effect. However, I reduced the emission count to zero so that I could control it through a script. I then added both the text and the particle system to an empty object.

I added a post-process volume to the parent object so that both the text sprite and the particle system would be affected by the post-processing. I added a bloom effect to the post-process volume to get the hazy look.

The script I wrote involved populating the particle system with particles at the user’s discretion (in my case, I chose 2000 particles). The script would run a coroutine that would populate the particle system at runtime. A timer is set to delay the start of the effect. When the timer runs out, the text sprite will delete itself and the particles will spawn in its place. The post-process bloom effect helps with smoothing out the transition between the text sprite and the particle system.

An effect I created while experimenting in Unity’s new VFX graph. I used a flipbook texture and a smoke sprite sheet so that the individual particles would be animated and look more life-like.

A simple explosion effect made using Unity’s shuriken particle system. I enabled collision to help with making the smoke and rubble behave a bit more realistically.