How to make Soulercoaster VFX on Blender/Unity! [Shadergraph]

hello everybody my name is leo aka noctuff and today i have a very cool tutorial for you guys because today i'm going to teach you guys how how i made uh a fan art for path of exile so this is the spell i'm talking about right here so uh it is the summon skeletons spell and uh yeah i'm gonna teach you guys how to make this and this is very this is a very interesting tutorial because uh it teaches a concept that is widely used on vfx which is solar coaster um i i don't really know how else to call it uh we don't really have a name fully agreed upon on the vfx community but most people call it solar coaster so this is what we're gonna be calling it today so you guys can see here this is the our uh basis here that we're going off of so you guys can see here i recorded this video and we have a side-by-side comparison so you know it's not a one to one copy but i think it captures the essence very well and most importantly it teaches this concept which is very important the concept of solar coasters also i'm going to be teaching some mandala effects which are very cool and very useful to make radial decals and things like that so um yeah and finally one more disclosure here we have a lot of disclosures i'm not going to be teaching this part this is a flip book of smoke i made this on blender so we're not going to be teaching this one in specific but i plan on making a tutorial on the future and also one more disclosure is that we're using some packs here from the unity asset store so the skeletons are not made by me these are the skeletons that i'm using so if you guys want to follow along you can get those skeletons for free and here is the environment that i'm using this is just for fluff uh just so you guys have something nice to look at and of course this video is uh you know made by the same guys who make this video game fight and fall it is going to come out in november so if you guys want to help us out and spread the word please add us to your wish list it will be very very helpful all of those links will be in the description below so you guys can follow along all right so let's start uh so let's go into unity here uh and let's analyze some of the stuff that we're working with so let's take our skellys and let's first dissect this effect so this is the effect right here and the meat of this vfx is the solar coaster in my humble opinion so this ghostly trail right here this is the extra umph and this is the first technique that we're going to be teaching you guys so this is a model right this is a 3d mesh and we're panning a texture which i'll also be teaching how i made over here and also we also have this summoning ring and this ring if we look here let me open the texture here so we can have a better look so if you look at this texture you might be inclined to think oh wow this texture is very complex this must have taken hours to make this is so hard to make look at the complexity look at the shapes this this looks very complex uh there's no way this was easy to make and if we look over here you guys are going to notice there's also a summoning ring in there um on the on the spawning but actually this is very easy to make with a special technique on photoshop so let's go through it shall we um uh let's let's let's start right off so the first things we're gonna do is we're gonna create a new folder and we're going to call this folder uh tutorial skeletons all right very cool and we're not going to do anything on it we're going to go straight to blender oops i have my i was setting up things before uh the show started there uh so let's go into a blender here uh i'm using blender 2.9 you just use any versions you guys want and um uh yeah let's let's begin so we have a blank blender project and we're going to create we're going to press shift a to make a plane and uh as probably many of you already know things have verts they have um uh edges and faces so we're gonna go into vertices manipulation here by the way i'm going off on the assumption that you guys understand the basics of blender here uh if you if you are completely if you are a complete newcomer to blender you might be able to follow along but it would be nice if you knew the ropes of blender starting off so we're going to delete those vertices which is going to leave us with only those two verts right here so the goal mesh that we want to make if i go into here the mesh that i'm using uh solar coaster oh this is huge but yeah this is the mesh that we're using right so we want to get something like this going don't mind all the pink this is because i just you know the scenery here is just for show so let's go over here and we're going to use uh the screw modifier so in edit mode with both of the vertices selected we're going to press g y and then we're going to press ctrl so it snaps you see it's snapping to the grid and we're going to put this right in the middle and we're going to press g again this time around the x because we're manipulating the x as is and with control pressed we're going to make this go forward so now our pivot point matches with the first first vertices here and we're going to take this other vertice here and we're going to press g x because we only want to change this on the x as is and we're going to make it go uh be a little bit smaller so now we have just a line right we have just a straight up line so what we're going to do now is that now that we have this line we're going to add a modifier which is going to be the screw modifier and we're going to have uh the circle but don't be fooled because this is a special circle so uh you hear you see here on the modifier settings let me make this bigger for you guys we have the angle the screw iterations we have all of those things we're going to increase the scroll and as you guys are going to see here can see here this thing is going to go up this is exactly what we want to do here uh so let's make like um let's make something like true maybe let's use chew on the screw here parameter and uh here on the steps viewport i think we want this is how smooth so if you guys can see here this is very blocky we want this to be reasonably smooth so let's get like um i don't know let's let's do 30 let's make it really smooth of course depending on the project you're working on and you know your budget uh you're gonna use different iterations um i think 30 is fine it's not going to be a huge amount of vertices and it's going to look super super smooth i believe i was using 20 or 16 on the video before so you guys can see that there was almost no distortion but um you know the the the goal here is to teach so yeah um yeah i won't make any performance concerns right now well of course i will but not that many so i think i want this to be a little bit smaller here so i'm messing with the proportions um because i want this to envelop like a skeleton kind of size so we can also mess with the angle so we want to make this loop more we can increase the angles but when you increase the angles uh you're stretching your steps uh through all of those angles so you're gonna make things blockier so you're going to have to increase the resolution which of course is more which is of course is more expensive so let's go back to 30. let's go to like 400 angles uh 400 400 degrees here i always i always have trouble saying the word degrees i think this is good i think this looks pretty good i think this is going to work all right cool so now we have our screw mesh and what we're going to do here is that once we're satisfied we can also increase the scale here uh because i think uh yeah i think the scale works so now what we're going to do is that we're going to apply to apply we we can go here in this little arrow and click apply or ctrl a i don't like this workflow personally i i think blender 2.8 was better when you just had a button i don't know why they removed the button but okay fine sure i'll deal with it so let's apply cool so now we have an actual mesh with no modifiers uh so when you press tab you're gonna go into edit mode which means that you can edit the actual settings of your mesh so we're going to go here into the edge selection mode and where we want to select this outer edge here so actually what i'm going to do i apologize is select everything and then control oops uh select everything and then ctrl shift now shift click sorry on those edges to deselect the outer edges here so as you guys can see now we have everything selected except from these and we're just going to delete those so we're going to go here and we're going to delete the edges so now we have a line wow leo incredible so now that we have this line here um by the way um i didn't do this before but like if you want different shapes this is going to drive the shape of your mesh so you can use other modifiers on top of this so a great example of this that i use a lot on my personal uh projects let me see if i find it here i think it's smash d form no it's not um where is it warp here you no it's not warp come on uh this place smooth warp i i think it was warp actually uh i don't remember what let me find it here array boolean decimate mask mirror screw solidify huh where is it simple deform yeah simple deform so you can see here simple deform you can add uh a plethora of different effects like this twisting effect is very cool uh you can mess with the angles you can mess with the as is of the of the twistiness so this is very useful you can bend it certain ways so look at this this is very cool so you can make all sorts of vfx using this technique and applying even further modifications to your vfx so this is just an example here but today we want we just want a spyro so let's just make a spiral all right so for now this looks very good so let's ignore this guy for a little bit and let's go into the second part of this modeling process so what we want to do now is create another plane and this time around uh we want to create two planes actually so we have plane one and plane two and now what we want to do here is get one of these and rotate it uh 90 degrees on the x as is and we're going to have this beautiful plane here so we have this x shape it's very important for you to get this x shape because it doesn't matter where you look this from you will always get one full plane worth of content right so this is kind of the bread and butter of the vfx so now we're going to select both of these and press ctrl j to stitch them together and make them one object only all right cool so now we want this to follow this so we want this guy to go and like wrap around this line so this is the bread and butter of the vfx so what we want to do here is go into this guy and we want to go to object convert to curve so now we have a curve here which means that we can use a very cool modifier the blender has let's make it a little bit smaller because i think the scale is too big let's make it a little bit smaller and now we can use a modifier which is called the curve modifier curve object this is our curve so let's grab our curve and drag it in here and you can see already this is following along so now if i get my plane here and i press g to move and i move along the x as you guys can see here that it follows this curve this is very cool very useful but it's not what we want right we want this to kind of envelop the whole thing so what we can do here is let's remove the curve modifier and let's put an array modifier what does the array modifier does very simple you increase the iterations and it just goes it duplicates the mesh towards that direction so let's suppose that for whatever reason you're following along the tutorial and it looks like this this is not what we want so you can just change the as is here uh and it's going to be fixed so in this case we're using the x as is uh so yeah this in case you get this issue this is what's happening and now let's go to add modifier and now we put the curve modifier now we drag our curve in and voila we have the mesh following along very nicely so we need to increase our count here uh because this is not good enough and in my opinion this is true blocky i don't like this this is true blocky don't worry we can fix this so we going to edit mode for our plane so let me rename this to curve just for clarity's sake and let's rename this to x let's call this x for now so let's go here into our cross into our x shape and let's press s to scale it x uh to scale it down the x as ease and let's make it smaller because now you guys can see that it's much smoother i think this is getting smooth enough for my taste let's make it even smoother why not smooth there why not all right now this is move as nice so now we're gonna increase our count here so it fills up everything right and one trick for you guys is that we're we're gonna add later on kind of a fade effect on the top on the bottom so a good practice is to make it slightly bigger than you need and then move it along the x as you see you have a little bit of a breathing room on the top and on the bottom [Music] which means that you're going to be able to make the fade you're going to have room to do the fade all right very cool so this is pretty much it now to finish this all we need to do is apply the the array and apply the curve modifier and we're done we have a mesh uh this curve right here is useless we're not going to use it anymore so let's just disable it for now so now we have our x thing here which is looking very cool and we still need to fix one thing though which is the origin point we want the origin point to be here right on the cursor so what i'm going to do here is that we can go to orthographic view and ensure that our mesh is somewhat centralized this one it just so happens that it is already right in the center so uh you can see here that it looks very much on the center right so all we need to do is to move this little sphere here to here so what the way we do that is that we go f3 and we search for origin point and we were going to go origin to 3d cursor and wemo so now we also want to apply our transformations very cool so now we have a mesh ready to be used uh so yeah now let's do the uv uh oh one more thing you probably don't need to do this but it's good practice in case you're using a lit shader with a normal map uh you know in case you're doing that it's it's good for you to go in here and you do a shade smooth so just to ensure that those faces don't have any normals baked in alright cool so now one more thing that we need to do here sometimes what happens here is that there might be double faces or double edges so we can do a merge by distance and we removed 200 vertices just by 0.1 millimeters so we can even increase this a little bit yeah 208 all right we removed everything we removed all of the noise and uh yeah that's pretty good so as you guys can see here in the bottom of the screen is very tiny but it's just 200 tris uh 100 faces uh 200 vertices this is very cheap this is a very cheap model and it's going to get you a lot of definition all right cool so let's go into the uv editor interface here and you can see that all of the faces are stacked on top of each other we don't want that we want the uv to go from here to here so the way we're going to do this is that uh we're gonna select this little button here so we have an equivalence between what's selected on both screens we're gonna go to the face selection and we're gonna uh press a when you press a you select everything we're gonna do u and we're gonna press uh light map pack and we're gonna make it uh yeah just those settings are fine and now we have a bunch of squares now here's the trick we want to select this all of those faces in this edge right here so you can shift uh you can shift shift alt click to select all of them so we have all of these little guys let's move them to the side and now we have in one part of the island uh all of these faces right here and in the other part of the island all of the top faces we want them to be exact the same we want the uv to be identical so this is a very important step what we're going to do here uh you guys can probably see all right so you guys can probably see here that all of those faces what the hell uh oh my bad so you guys can probably see here that my bed one second i'm sorry i apologize so we can probably see here that all of those faces are selected right this face is selected all of those faces are selected cool but only one of them only one of them this face right here has this white outline it means that this is uh the kind of the the father of the selection right we want the first face this one should be the father of the selection if we want the direction to be like this roop from top to bottom if we want the selection to go from bottom to top like this we want this face right here should be the first one selected uh all right very cool i don't know how can i delete all of the grease pencil drawings uh oh god i might regret this uh annotations note oh we can delete it here cool nice perfect all right so um in this case let's make it um from top to bottom right so we want to select this face so we can deselect it and select it again so it's going to be the father and now we're going to press u again and we're going to do follow active quads and then length average and then we press ok and we're going to get this strip here right so but you guys can see that this one is the first one selected so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to press r select all of them press r and do 90 so they're going to go vertically so i want this to go vertically and we're going to save this for later now we're going to go into the other faces here same thing we're going to deselect select it again this way it's the one highlighted and now we do u follow active quads okay and then we have once again the strip here in the uv we can move it around and what we can do here is do r 90 to make it go from top to bottom very cool so now we have those two strips we want to overlay them exactly on top of each other so it's very simple to do this we can select this very important first one selected needs to be the first quad right this one's the one highlighted and now you can see here magnifier yeah i'm going to use the magnifier for this because this is i don't know why this is so tiny but look at this little guy you see this little guy here this little guy here this ah you can click it i know i know i don't know why it's so tiny but this shows the positions of the uv as you guys can see here this shows the positions of the uv let me get rid of the magnifier here block so you can click on that little arrow to show the uvs and you guys are going to notice that we are on two minus three minus point three we want us to be on zero zero uh actually we can put us on point five point five which is going to be the exact middle right very cool so now we're going to do the same with our other thing once again deselect select make sure this is the first one selected and we're going to put this 0.5.5 and now they are exactly overlaid on top of each other with the same directionality and the same uv unwrap this is very very very important because later on if you have the tiniest little move to the right or to the left it's going to look weird when people look from certain angles they're going to see half of the texture from the uv that's overlaid in one way and a half of the uv that's overlaid in the other way and they're going to be like wait so what it's going to look like there's a gap or it's going to look like it's cut abruptly we don't want that all right let me drink some water here i apologize but yeah so now we're going to select all of these guys and we're going to scale them down just by pressing s and scale but they're still exactly on half on both sides which means that if we go in here into uv we have this option constraint image uh constrained to image bounds which means the the uv is never going to go past uh this box right here it's never going to go past this box right so which means we can select these and we can scale them up to our heart desire and they're just going oops and they're just going to be perfectly overlaid on the image bounds and now we have the perfect uv mapping for this mesh and we're going to call this now we can go here into layout and one extra thing that i'm going to do and this is purely artistical so this is already like the you already know how to do this it's the way you do it so now we're gonna rename this to skeleton solar coaster and what i'm gonna do because i personally think it looks better is that i will duplicate this ctrl c ctrl v i'm going to go into this guy i'm going to rotate it on the z oh oops i'm going to rotate it on the zed by 180 so you know they they are kind of like this like um against each other and i'm gonna select both of them and ctrl j to merge them so this is just because i want to choose tendrils instead of one you don't need to do this if you don't want but i personally think it looks better so let's rename this uh instead of being plain we're gonna rename this skeleton solar coaster underscore tutorial because you know it's the tutorial now we're gonna select this and with this thing selected we're going to go file export fbx let me drag this over and we're going to save this whenever it is you want in my case i have a folder here called models all right cool and let's go to the settings to the export settings so we want only the selected objects to be exported we don't want to export our curve we want the mesh to be exported and we want to call it skeleton solar coaster tutorial very cool export fbx um now let me grab this model and we're gonna drag this into the unity engine oops why is my folder acting weird all right very cool models skeleton solar coaster tutorial very cool i have it here so let's open up unity let's drag this guy oh not here let's go into our new folder that we made which is tutorial skeletons very cool and let's drag this over alright so now we have this mesh right here so yeah now let's work on the shader right but the mesh is already working so now let's make this shader so one interesting thing here is that for this shader we're going to need a texture and i'm thinking if i should or shouldn't teach you guys how to make the texture because this is going to make this video very very very long so i mean i think we should do it because i've got complaints uh well not complaints but feedback that people wanted to see the texturing process so let's do it so we have photoshop you do need a drawing tablet for this i don't think you can use this like on mouse it's gonna be hell so we're gonna go and uh we're gonna paint all of this black oops let's paint it like this all right cool let's paint it like this let's paint it all black and we're going to use our whites here with a very soft brush and very cool and we're going to make some squiggly thing right so if you imagine how a soul is imagine the soul sand from minecraft right oops sorry we're going to do that in a new layer because we don't want to lose our work so we always work on new layers so let's make a squiggly thing here and now uh so think about the soul sand from minecraft i think that's uh a really good example oops my bad uh so if you look here let me get like so let's try to find images of souls right uh yeah i think i think the minecraft example is very good like this is the most like you know like it's faces screaming you know like this this is kind of the idea behind the soul this is kind of the video gamey uh pattern that we have ended up with so first you make a squiggly shape then you create a new layer and you go to black and now you try to make something soul like so uh okay this is way too strong let's decrease the opacity let's decrease the flow so let's imagine something like this all right this is looking pretty terrible but trust me you can make it look better right cool so now we have a basic shape of what a sew might look like i think the eyes also being very dragged help all right very cool so this is kind of a soul-like shape and my trick should then get the smudge tool make it kind of big and smudge it around right this is already looking very solely and because i think it should look a little bit deformed so i think this looks good for example i think this is a very good um this is a very good soul like shape so what you would do is that you would need to make a bunch of these right so let's make something like this and i think this is the part where most people struggle let's rotate it flip it horizontally so we get some more like these and this i think is the part where most people struggle right all right this is way too big this looks a little bit off which is the part of tiling things uh so what's gonna happen here is that this is not gonna title perfectly we know that much so what we do here is that we turn this off we go here we control e to like everything so we have this big image and we do ctrl f and we do offset and we click on the offset and this image is 256 by 512 so we can put here 512 divided by 2 and we're going to get half of the image and now we have this ugly thing so what we can do with this ugly thing is with our smudge tool we can smudge it around and blend it you see the beauty of the smudge tool do you see the beauty of the smudge tool look at this look at this and now all of a sudden you can no longer see the seam and now we can get our previous face that we were trying to fit and we can fit it in here and now we have a texture well of course this is a very shitty one because you need to spend more time you know refining the edges mainly because those edges are looking like garbage and also i just used one variation of a sole face you would probably use one or two uh well two or three sorry so you can have a lot of variation but as you guys can see here this is a texture that works and you might look at like you might look at these shapes right here let me show you uh [Music] oh it's here cool so you might look at like uh these shapes right here and this shape right here and you're gonna be like leo that looks like garbage it doesn't look like a sole well but remember if you offset it it is a soul oh my god uh so um and in the video game this is going to be scrolling like uh it is going to be repeating it's going to be offsetting constantly so you're always going to be able to see that it's a soul um of course i spent way more way more time doing my texture than this um but this is the technique right if you have the technique you can follow along so yeah what i would do here what would i do to make this texture better uh first i would fix those edges something more like this you know i would cut into those edges and i would try to like make it kind of mystical kind of misty this is what i did right kind of misty i mean that is too much though uh because this is way too strong like this is not a soft brush you should always use a soft brush for this kind of work so if you guys can see here now this is looking far more misty look at this look at this so now it looks right you see there the edging the the edges are looking more like a like a smoke almost uh because souls when i think of souls i think of like more wispy things right uh you can also apply like minimize and maximize those sort of techniques so this is how uh i do this sort of texture right and as you guys can see uh this is very um you know there's no right or wrong uh and this is already looking pretty good not gonna lie this is already you know for something i did so fast i think it's looking pretty good for what it is um so yeah we're not gonna be using that texture though we're gonna be using the texture that i spent an hour or so doing uh and it's much more subtle even so this is what the texture looks like uh as you guys can see here i have like it doesn't look like much because uh you'd need to tile it but yeah this is the texture that i did all right very cool so now let's work on the shader um so yeah let's uh also one more texture that we need to do i forgot to mention is uh just a fade texture this is very simple i'm not even going to teach this because it's like just a gradient going from top to bottom with a little bit of smudging so you know it's not really worth um explaining so let's create right click let's go into shader and let's create a new uh universal render pipeline unlit shader graph this is going to be solar coaster soul shader it's kind of weird because we're doing a solar coaster of souls right so let's double click and open this up all right you can do this on hdrp urp doesn't matter um so we're going to make true textures to these this is going to be our soul oops this is going to be our soul and we also want a gradient so here on the soul we're going to put our soul of course our soul oh what's the name of the texture oh no i think it's ghost maybe yeah it's ghost and here on the gradient it's wacky grad the gradient that i use so much i love this texture all right so uh the first thing we're gonna do here is grab our soul into a simple texture 2d wait what why are you doing this to me what uh what ghost trail i i do not comprehend sample texture oh i think i got a simple gradient maybe redefinition of gradient um i'm not sure what this is guys i'll be very honest here red definition of gradient i think it's because of this name maybe okay that's weird apparently you can't name the texture gradient all right i didn't know this before now we know okay very weird and also here on the main preview let's use a custom mesh and let's use the mesh that we authored before so what's the name of the mesh that we put uh skeleton solar coaster tutorial so let's use this one custom mesh skeleton solar coaster tutorial what what's the name of it skeleton solar coaster okay it doesn't have tutorial on it skeleton solar coaster cool so now we have our mesh here uh also we want to make this graph uh unlit we want to make it transparent and we want to make it two-sided it's very important for it to be two-sided in this case all right cool so now if we uh going here and we want to add a time node right and uh we want to multiply this by a rate of penning i already taught you guys how painting works uh on the fire sword tutorial uh if you guys want to access that so this is gonna be the pending speed i'm gonna make a card right now for you guys to access that so let's put the pending speed in here and we're going to plug this into the tiling and offset and plug it into the offset node and we're going to plug this into the uv and here in the pinning speed we want to make it i don't know like 1.5 so it moves like this um also we want this should be tiling so we're going to make this three tile three times and let's plug it into the base color of our shader and the alpha into the alpha of our shader and now we have a very simple soul tiling effect so let's go into the scene here let's make a material out of the shader so right click on the shader create material and let's drag this material inside of this guy and you guys are going to notice that this is already looking pretty good right i mean look at this this is already looking um like the effect that we want um so yeah but it's not over yet hold on hold on hold on to your horses uh all right cool so we save this here we save this here uh so this is going to be our main texture sort of session now we want to put this into a particle system and we want to color it which means that we're going to be messing with the vertex color so each vertices can have a color so this is what we'll be drawing upon and we're going to be multiplying the vertex color by the texture so now we have uh the color of our particle will be this color and we're going to drag this over to base color right now that's is not doing anything but when we put this into the particle system it's going to do some changes now we also want uh to make those edges faded and that's where our gradient texture comes in so let's do sample texture 2d and as you guys can see it has a little bit of black on the top and on the bottom so this is what we're going to be using to make a mask so what we'll be doing here is that we'll be taking this and we'll be multiplying we use the green channel here for this multiplication because the green channel is a bit better a little joke then we're going to get the vertex channel here and we're going to split it and we're going to take the a which is the alpha which controls how translucent the image is going to be we're going to multiply this over to the alpha of the texture and the result of this we want to multiply by our gradient so it's a whole lot of multiplications here it's a chain of multiplications and we're going to put this into our alpha channel and now yours are going to realize hey huh this is looking very similar this is looking very very similar and look at that there's a fade now this is not over yet because if you guys notice here in this little fella look at this you can see that uh there's a progression right first it's just the very top part then it goes towards the middle then the top part disappears you see this is the meat of the vfx right here so uh this is the meat of the vfx right here so we're gonna go into the solar coaster and here on this texture we're going to drag this over and we're going to get this little guy little fella here and we're going to do another sample texture 2d and yeah it needs to be different this is very important these should be two different sample textures but it can use the same texture uh and uh what's gonna happen here now is that we want to pan this over but we want this to pan over only once which means that we want the rest of it to be black how do we do that very simple so here on the texture settings on the import settings of the texture we have this wrap mode we want it to be clamp the default one is repeat we want this to be clamp because what happens is the way this works is that it is going to get whatever value is at the very top of the texture and is going to fill this whole region up with this value and the same goes down so we want to have a texture at the very tippity top is black at the very bottomy bottom black so all of this region is going to be black all of this region is going to be black this way we have this pattern right here repeat only once sounds confusing it's really not go with me and you guys are gonna see what i mean so now we're going to the uv here and uh we're going to let's let's get like the tiling and offset right and let's put this here and you guys are going to notice that if i move my offset you see there's only blackness but if i go in here and i go into the settings of this texture and i make it repeat it's not going to be black it's going to repeat itself watch closely now if i go here what didn't save the settings i think yeah i need to apply cool so now if i do it here you guys can see that it's repeating we don't want this to repeat we want this to be black so we're going to go in here instead of repeat we're going to go to clamp and press apply this is very important because now we have blackness so when we move this thing through it's only going to show once very neat so but how can we make how can we make our particle system tell the shader to move the uv how do we do that well we use a technique called custom vertex streams so look at this the way this works is that if i drag a uv node we have four channels if i split the channels you guys are gonna see that we have the r the g the b and the a and we have many many uvs on a model so we can manipulate those values using the particle system so the r and the g are the red and the green as you guys can see the uv here it's a green gradient and a red gradient so those values can't be changed well they can be changed but you know they already have a purpose so we can't manipulate them because they're already being used by the engine but the blue channel is not being used the blue channel is virgin is a virgin channel and is ready to be used by us so what we want to do here is that we want to take the uv okay now that we have the uv here we want to add a value to the uv to be more specific we want to add on the y value so we're going to grab another uv right well we want to grab another uv and the trick here is that so this is going to be the first channel now here on this uv we want to split it and we want to use the blue channel and we want to add it in here but first let's do a proof of concept let's drag this in this edition and slap it in the uv nothing changes now if i create a float and i plug this in here and then move this flow to round you guys see what's happening our shape is moving around but we want to keep uh one of the vectors unchanged we only want to change the y vector the x vector we want to keep it unchanged because we only we only want to mess with the height we don't want to mess with the horizontalness so we add it into a vector 2 and we make the x zero since we're adding we're adding zero which is nothing the same as doing nothing so when we move this when we are in minus one the image is fully black when we are in zero it is white when we are in one it is fully black again so what we're going to do in our particle is that we're going to move this through in our particle from -1 to 1. so we want to do this using a custom vertex stream which is this b channel right here we're going to plug it in the y and the default value is one so you're not going to perceive any change but there is changes happening we want to do this where where do we want to do this on the alpha channel which means that we want to multiply again so we're going to do another chain multiplication we're going to grab the green channel multiply multiply this guy by this guy which apparently does nothing but remember it is going to do something once we hook up the particle system and then we're going to drag this and put into this multiplication argument so now as i said before if you look in here you're not going to notice anything different let's get our particle system and get it going so let me disable this and let's make a new effect particle system and now here on this particle system um let's call it solar coaster right all right so we have a bunch of particles here uh let's drag it over and let's do some changes to this particle system first things first renderer is going to be a mesh we want to spawn a mesh we don't want billboards we want mesh which mesh you mask this one that we just created right we can't even see them i think they're too tiny maybe maybe probably let's make them bigger start size let's make like 100 i think we can see them now yeah we can cool so now here on the render alignment we want to make it local so they're pointing up now very cool uh the material we can put the material from the shader that we just created so we have the spanning ghostly thing all right cool uh we don't want it to loop we want the duration to be one so now it spawns just once here on the emission we don't want to rate over time this we want to spawn on a burst and we want to disable the shape because we want to we want it to spawn always in the same place and finally no speed and the lifetime is going to be one so now if you restart it shows up for one second standing still so let's do some changes here let's change the color so the color i'm using here is this kind of weird like teal color right something like this i'm not gonna be too you know of course you would tweak this to get the best color possible i'm not gonna worry too much i'm just gonna get like a random color that looks somewhat good and we're gonna roll with it this is more greenish i kind of like this let's make it more clear maybe yeah i do want a little bit of the blue back and we can make it darker all right too dark too dark mate too dark alright cool so now let's hook up the vertex streams it's very easy to do so the way the unity calls it custom datas so we're gonna enable this custom data node we're gonna go into vector now here in the renderer we want to find this check box right here custom vertex streams and we want to click on it we want to add a little plus sign custom custom 1 x y z w all right very cool so now we have this now in here on the custom data we want to make this into a curve and we want to make this one and now we want to make this curve going from -1 to 1 over lifetime so when i restart it you guys can see that the animation happens because what's happening is that here on the shader remember that i showed you guys on this node that it goes as i manipulate this value here on the vector uh it changes the shape of the texture this is what we're doing but the only difference is that we're doing this through the particle system so this is a very very powerful technique and as you guys can see we have the first part of the vfx done now if we open this up here we have many many more parts so this is the first part and it is done now we have this little ring on the ground and this ring on the ground um is just the texture that looks very complicated to do but this texture is actually very easy to do it very simple to do once again we're going to open up photoshop you will need a pen a drawing tablet i think it's much easier to do this so let's get a new document going let's make it this is 1024x1024 let's make it fully black on the background let's grab a pen let's get the white color and now we can draw in here let's make a new layer so we can draw on the new layer and i personally like for that vfx i use this brush right here kyle's drawing box happy hb so this is the one that i used wait is it did i use the charcoal one no i think it was this one guys the ultimate charcoal pencil doesn't matter uh so we're gonna we're gonna use this one very cool and now it's a very simple technique actually all you're gonna do is click on this little icon here which is the symmetry and it makes those kind of things super easy to do and we're going to choose i chose personally dual azis and we're going to make this bigger cool and now when i draw something in here it is going to replicate respecting the proportions so if i do something like this it is going to replicate everywhere so what i did was something like this right and boom the texture is done pretty much but let's take this a step forward let's let's let's level up this texture and push it uh into the awesomeness level level it deserves so observe we can double click this here and this is going to be the layer styles we're going to go into outer glow and i'm using these settings right here you can use different settings i think those settings look fine and now when we draw oops did the symmetry got disabled what hold on brush tool okay sorry i don't know why it got removed from the brush tool look at this guys now we have a little bit of a glow in here so uh let's make let me remind myself what the texture looks like we don't need to make it look like what it does right but so this is what the texture looks like i'm not gonna mimic this one to one but let's make something that looks somewhat like this just so we can get like you know you know something like so it had a little sphere so let's make a little sphere here well this is not looking exactly like that but hey it's looking pretty dope right i think ooh this looks fun uh it had a little kind of cross hatching here which i think looks very tribalistic very tribal looks very cool uh and we can make something in the middle as well something like this you know in case you want to like make some cool shapes uh just experimenting randomly yields some very cool results this is a very strong technique and you can make lots of cool stuff here so you know don't be afraid to experiment look at this wow this looks very nice but yeah you can get um a lot of like um you know a lot of mileage from this technique um and uh it is very useful and i don't see people talk about this technique right which is very weird yeah i like this i think we're gonna do something like this yeah let's make something like this let's make something crazy i think we're going through overkill territory right now uh i think this is overly designed but i think it's also cool just so you guys can see right uh [Music] yeah this is the last piece of detail that we're going to add here nah do we add it yeah it's fine okay so this is going to be the final texture super easy super quick like five minutes and you make a cool texture out of this one and uh yeah so the goal of this tutorial was to mostly teach how to make solar coasters right everything else on this vfx i will teach at some point in the future i mean the sparks are the same sparks i used on the fire sword you know everything else i really taught just some capacity but this right here is the important part and this shader you can apply this technique to any shape you want right this is the important bit uh so this is the part that i wanted to teach the most and i also wanted to you know use the hook to teach this let's export this texture actually let's export this why not right let's export this texture here let's see how it looks in engine so i have this texture right here so let's grab this little guy and change it what oh i need to make this transparent sorry guys so we need to uh do this i have a script that turns it transparent very cool so now let's export it again i apologize for the for the inconvenience took me a little bit longer but let's delete this let's drag this over alright cool so look at this how it looks with this new texture you know it's very very quick to make it doesn't look as round as before i think you really want to make something that looks rounder but yeah this was the main goal that i wanted to teach you guys this was like the thing that i wanted to teach the most uh so there you go it is taught thank you so much for watching this video is huge i can see here it's over one hour uh but you know if you stuck around i think you're gonna learn a lot from this uh so yeah thank you so much for for watching and please guys subscribe to the channel leave a like comment your questions uh give me suggestions for future tutorials and most importantly please wish list fight and fall please wishlist fight and fall on steam it really helps a lot and uh yeah it drives us forward so thank you so much for watching goodbye

Channel: Piloto 3D Art

Views: 16,556

Keywords: Unity3d, Unity, Games, Game Development, Game Dev, Game Engine, sidefx, particles, gpu particles, compute, compute shader, unity particle optimization, particle swarm, particle system, blender, tutorial, vfx, visual effects graph, realtime visual effects, vfx in unity, visual effects unity, visual effects, particle simulation, fx, game effects, unity magic, handpainted, ghost, skeletons, blender tutorial, soulercoaster, blender vfx, curves blender, unity3d college, unity3d tutorial, unity

Id: VkWHCOCzwMI

Length: 63min 3sec (3783 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021