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Hey Guys,

I was wondering if I could get some critique on the fx work I did for the mobile game Seek. This was my first fx project and I'm looking to get into it more to eventually pursue a career in the area.

http://vimeo.com/110815397

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  • fab-camp
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    fab-camp polycounter lvl 6
    hey,
    cant tell too much about vfx for mobile development. but I dig the atmosphere and style here!

    well at some points the polygon look of effects a bit distracting.
    also the low resolution of these signs feels a bit strange.
  • Bruno Afonseca
    Hey Amesy,

    Pretty cool to see vfx people here :) You have a good start there. My main gripe is that those effects are looking overly simplistic. Particle sizes are mostly constant, same color and same speeds. VFX, specially for mobile, it's just a bunch of very simple geometry so you gotta try your best to hide it's nature or else it looks really cheap. Which is the case in your trail particles that spin towards the camera, when you don't hide that very well it breaks the illusion.

    Even with limited resources you could always create some variation. Try to find some good reference of what you want to do and try to break it down into individual elements and apply those to your own work!

    If you're on facebook, there's a cool group where you can get really useful info:
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/realtimevfx/

    I'm also a VFX artist for mobile and I love it, it's a very cool area to be in and there's always demand for more. So keep it up!
  • tharle
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    tharle polycounter lvl 9
    imbuefx.com is another good website for fx stuff online, good tutorials and a friendly, albeit slightly quiet, forum.

    with regard to your work, here's mu thoughts:

    Scene 1 - this is obviously very stylised but still mostly works as a fire - the shape is cool but the spinning is a little strange, maybe some sort of vertically panning shader would work better to create movement, or having multiple smaller meshes that slowly float upwards.

    Scene 2 - the leaves here are cool and work really well but the line of cloud is a little strange. The way it rotates to camera as you move underneath it is very obvious and the clouds are all very uniform. Some variation in size/texture would help and maybe use 2-3 planes instead of just 1 that rotates?

    Scene 3 - The runes that appear around the spire just fade in via a linear mask, it'd be much nicer if you could mask them in such a way that the runes appear individually or maybe outline first or similar. Also they're very uniform in brightness, having some more glowy would add an extra layer of visual interest.

    The trail moving across the sky is nice but the bgi flat texture that appears when it hits the mountain seems to bink into view imo, it's be nicer with a slower opacity or alpha erosion fade or maybe just starting scaled down to inside the mountiain.

    The water shader is very simple but looks cool and works well for the style of the game, if you wanted to make it more complex then another layer of scrolling textures would be easy enough to add but it's nice as it is imo.

    The game play effect coming out the characters hands is a bit odd but that might just be becuase you're just using textures, not particles. Generally they're too uniform in size and speed though, - maybe adding some more layers of textures or possibly some uv distortion to break up the movement.

    Same with the scrolling points of light - they're very simple but if you had 2-3 layers of points moving at different speeds and with different glow intensities that would look a lot more interesting.

    Generally the effects are pretty good - there's some nice ideas there they just need expanding on to make them a little cooler - think about trying to create more colour/size/speed/intensity variation.
  • AmesyFlo
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    Thanks for the feedback guys, really appreciate how much detail you've gone into.

    The smoke trail was a huge issue for me as we needed to use beam particles to get the specific location, and I really struggled with getting it to look good with the stretching. The spinning with it was a real pain. If anyone has any suggestions on an alternate way to do this it would be awesome!

    The character's hands were another place where I was restricted by location, I was using socket emission from my rigs and trying to be as efficient as possible. Love the UV distortion idea, that would be really cool.

    Smoke and embers on the fire would be a nice edition too.

    I dunno if I'll get a chance to rework these, but I will defiantly try and add more variation and interest in my other fx.
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