VFX Apprentice Course - Explosion
First 3D effect from the VFX Apprentice course: A stylized explosion. I invested a lot of time to give it a nice color, motion and volume (especially during the fade out). The main textures were hand-painted in Krita. Note: The environment textures are from the course project and the small guy is the default model from Unreal. I created only the VFX.
⭐My project files: https://simonschreibt.gumroad.com/l/amdpl
⭐WIP Thread: https://realtimevfx.com/t/simon-trumpler-vfx-sketchbook/4177/205
⭐Japanese Drawing Tutorial: https://youtu.be/xPcckGP5yso
⭐VFX Apprentice: https://www.vfxapprentice.com/
My final explosion. I've included the course goal so that you can see that I've changed the style and timing quiet a bit.
I used a similar shader on the ground ring and trunk of the explosion. They differ in details so that the trunk for example fades clearly from bottom to top while the ring on the ground just fades based on a noise texture.
I spend a lot of time in trying to fade without having the viewer notice the empty geometry shell of the mushroom cloud. A breakthrough was the fresnel based fading. It was more important than using several geomety shells.
I always had trouble making the parallax occlusion work. Now I know why: For some reason Unreal 4.26 has issues with using a linear (srgb off) grayscale map for this node. If you use a linear texture, you'll just not see any distortion.
I love traditional VFX and tried to incorporate its ideas into my work.
The main textures I painted (without showing versions like the height map etc). The trail is not really worth showing but I was surprised that my very quickly scribbled texture works well enough for the trails.
The same as the first video but without showing the course goal. Just in case you wanted to see my result without any distraction. :)
