How to Create Diablo-Inspired Hell Rift VFX in Unity | Level Up - VFX Breakdown | Beyond-FX

[Music] for today's level up tutorial we'll be focusing on creating this hell rft VFX in unity let's dive [Music] in hello I'm Benjamin day I'm a VFX artist at Beyond effects and for this tutorial you're already going to need to know a little bit of Houdini shaders and have a general understanding on how Unity Works more specifically we'll focus on how the stone shape was achieved this one right here in the right side and we'll also touch on the additional particles that's around the stone shape all right let's dive into the hoodini part so now we are here in Houdini and I just dropped a geometry node and inside of it I have this box that I subdivided a few times made it a little bit bigger and then I have this volume node and the scatter node to scatter some points and I'm piping this back into an RBD material fracture node and that's a fairly simple and straightforward setup to create a fract mesh what I'm doing after that is just some Pro processing on this mesh here I'm grouping the center pieces into a separated group I'm doing some U unwrapping and here coloring the insid to Blue and the outside pieces to red and after I'm done with all that I pipe this into an assemble node which gives my pieces what I'm doing is turning off in the RBD configure node the bullet data I'm setting the active to Z Z and I'm only setting it back to one for the group one which I made here so only the center pieces are going to be active in my do Network and that's one piece uh I have to create in the other side I have this sphere which I'm just transforming and this is the sphere that I'm animating I'm also piping this into my dop net so into the dop net you can see here is my sphere and I have this pain I merge them together and I pipe it into a rigid body solver I apply some drag to them and pretty much turn off the gravity and the other stuff because I don't want these pieces to fall to the ground right so whenever I go back and select my do net this is the result they just kind of float if I turn this on a bit so you can see what's happening I animated my sphere to kind of break through this um this smesh after we have that we can focus on the result we have here what I do next is just twisting the mesh over time I have another twist node which is set up a little bit differently which also twisting some of these pieces a little bit more and then I also bend them in order to create this shape I kind of taper the edges to make it a little bit more interesting and I created a group here where I Target some of these pieces that like Fly Away um it's easier to control if I just grab them manually after it's done and then I just scale them down over time so they are not an issue visually speaking and I also use a blast node where I select everything that's not inside my initial group one and that's my final thing that I'm going to export so in the same geometry node on the left side I have pretty much the copy of the system that I showcased previously the only difference is that whenever I'm grouping my fractured pieces I have them grouped a little bit in a different way where this gives me this ring shape and inside my dop Network I have gravity turned on which gives me this kind of result after I'm blasting away the center piece that's the other effect I'm going to export just to touch a little bit on how you can get this into a game engine there's multiple ways that you can do it you you can use alic or rbd2 fbx or what I did vertx animation textures after you're done with your setup you set the exporter up and press R roll which going to Output you triangulated mesh a few textures and a Shader which if you plug in into your engine hopefully it's just going to magically work so in my case bringing the effect from Houdini to Unity wasn't so straightforward I'm using the built-in render pipeline the out of the box vertex animation texture tool from Houdini didn't really want it to cooperate with me so what I did instead is exported it as almic and then I found this very cool tool in GitHub which turns almic files into verx animation textures you can find this tool in the description down below so assuming you know how vertex animation textures work I'm not going to go into details on how this part of the Shader was set up basically sampling the outputs of that tool and we just going to use that to animate our MH here so what I'm want to touch on is instead this part where I added some additional noise on top of our vertx animation um this is for making it less static whenever the animation is completed it gives a little bit more bubbliness more interesting motion so it's not just standing there doing nothing the other part I wanted to touch on a bit is how I color it uh more specifically how do I color the cracks as you can see here the cracks are glowy and emissive and looking almost like molten a bit whenever the animation starts and they kind of cool off whenever the animation ends so the way I achiev this is just some ver position based noise that I use to sample a gradient and previously in Houdini I colored my inner pieces of the fractured MH Tu blue so I bake that into my vertex colors so here I'm getting the blue parts of my vertex colors and I'm only multiplying my gradient with the blue inner pieces and I'm luring based on this information between this Stony gray color and uh the multiplied version which is a bit more molten and lavel like now we have our vertex animation working and I'm really happy how it turned out but it's not really a hell Rift yet it's currently more like just a bunch of rocks so let's see how we can achieve more of the hell riff look I'm going to un hiide my anticipation VFX and I'm just going to play it by itself this effect consists of a few different particle system emitters played together one of them is this ground crack that I hand painted I animate the fading in and I also animate the MS values so it reaches its highest point whenever the vertex animation breaks through the floor so it plays together very nicely I also have some of these directional rays that I kind of angled in a way where the portal is going to open up as you can see and the rest of it is just ambers and other flame shapes that I created these are very simple particles basically just a few noises and I'm controlling the color over Lifetime and scaling them over lifetime just your bread and butter little particles nothing too crazy okay so now we have our anticipation effect playing together very nicely with the vertx animation I'm going to turn it off for a bit so we can focus on some of these addition elements I added I'm going to turn them on one by one so first is this flame curve this is just a curve mesh I made in blender and then I'm scrolling a mask and a noise on top of it the next one is this flame shape which is basically a tube that I deformed in a way where it's bending and I have some vertex offset applied to it and the Flaming texture that's scrolling through it it's fairly simple I have two of these shapes on the ground which are really similar to the one that I just showed um these are looking like this they're fairly High poly they could be reduced but this is just for learning purposes and the start to show is if I can hide them and show this one is this Rift which again is a fairly simple mesh looks like this it has Parx occlusion mapping which drives this effect but now let's dive into substance designer to see how some of the textures were created to make this effect work all right so now we are here in substance designer and I just wanted to point out that I learned this technique from one of my talented colleagues called Pete Nichols and he also provided this amazing uh tilings uh Stone texture that I'm going to use as a basis of this effect first of all I'm splitting this split map into rgba because we only going to work in Gray scale so I'm just going to use the r Channel and if I zoom out you can see how these rows of nodes look like they do pretty much the exact same so I'm just going to zoom into one of them and show you what I did I use transformation node to change up the tiling and the look of the texture and I have a linear gradient that I pipe into a histogram scan to have a bit more control over how it looks I'm doing a bevel on the transformed Rock noise and I'm basically blending these two together piping it into an auto level snow to fix up my values and then I do another transformation node just for make sure this uh placed in the correc uh way and I do this pretty much the exact same way in all these rows I just change up the how the transformation node looks like and maybe some of the um histogram scans and maybe I do some extra histogram range at the end but that's pretty much it the topmost layer uh have another blending which is pretty much just substracting this noise I made up here from the texture so this is going to result uh this cut Edge and what I do after all these layers are done is pretty much using this High blend node and layer them on top of each other so you can see if I zoom out this is the bottommost layer and on top I would have this one and this is going to be the result so I just W my way up to the top and layer them on top of each other and my end result is going to be something like this and what I do after that is to transform it into a polar texture with caresan to polar coordinate nodes after that I do some additional blending on it again this magic node AO levels fix up all my mistakes and um other than that I just blend it with some paraboloid shape here to get the look that I need for my Shader I also adjust some of the values here with the Curve node but that's pretty much my output texture so whatever the darkest here is going to be farther away from the camera and whatever the highest value or the more white is going to be closer to the camera whenever I plug this in into my Shader in unity the other texture I'm creating uh using pretty much the same thing so here I have this Auto levels node but instead of going down this route I'm going to go up here I applying some additional noise to give some variation to the rocks and I'm using the levels node to um have more control over how I want to Bevel this so my bevel note has this output which I can now pipe into the normal node that's going to generate me some normal vectors and if I use this as as uh a basis for my color texture I can just plug in the light node which going to give me some free shading pretty much and I also use this curvature smooth node uh which combined together with the light node gives us a fairly Pleasant result I use a gradient map uh to color my little um rock texture and this is my other output which is going to be by color texture all right so now we are here in unity and you can see this is our parallx effect it looks nice and shiny and this is the Shader that we use to create this effect this Shader consists of two bigger Parts one of them is the rock formation and how we created the UVS to sample the color texture the other one is this sply Motion in the center in order to create that I use the same UVS that I use for sampling the color texture I basically use a turl node and here you can see what the thrl node does with the UVS and I use a rotator no to give it a bit more motion I plug this in and Sample my fire texture which sadly doesn't really show up very well in this preview window um but you can maybe see it here and then I use this uh with a gradient sampling to give it a bit more color here I have more control over the Mec values and I save this as my fire in order to figure out where do I want to put fire in this effect I have to create a mask which I did here I'm basically sampling the same parall texture here with the smooth step node I'm masking out the most bottom part I save it as middle mask and here whenever I'm compositing the effect what I do basically is luring between my fire and my rocks based on the middle mask and that's going to be my end result playing all three together gives us this look which already looks pretty cool and believable but the animation and how it looks is still fairly static so I added this last particle system which is going to loop with the played out vertex animation together so this gives it a bit more Vibrance I would say it looks very warm and if I play it together it's kind of aggressively animated so it looks a bit more dangerous what I did is basically repurposed a bunch of particle systems from the anticipation itself and added some Smokey elements and some orbiting rocks on top also there is like a very subtle heat Distortion in the center of the of the portal thank you so much for watching the video if you have any questions drop it in the comments below or you can DM me on Twitter or Discord I will leave my contact details in the video description and if he inspired you to create something cool share it with us we always love to see what other community members do again thank you so much and have a nice day [Music]

Channel: Beyond-FX

Views: 1,938

Keywords: beyond-fx, beyond, fx, video games, video game, gaming, behind the scenes, bts, making of, video game behind the scenes, realtime vfx, realtime, vfx, visual effects, visual, effect, how a video game gets made, how to make a video game, reel, effects reel, video game effects, ps4, xbox one, xbox, playstation, pc, ios, ipad, iphone, sony, microsoft, nintendo, switch, apple, android, unity, game engine, unreal engine, houdini

Id: T_FD9zNjNVE

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 20 2023