One Candle to Rule Them All
I worked on a project testing out an idea of creating a candle. Building on this idea I ended up kitbashing the world of Diablo and Zelda and I wanted to share a little on some of the effects that I did.
The Candle
With pretty much all effects, I like to start with reference and recently adopted a tool in my arsenal called PureRef and gathered real life examples to make my candle. There are a lot of directions you can go with even a simple effect like this, so it helps to think about the art direction, or style you want. Since I was just learning, I leaned on some YouTube videos for guidance.
First I modeled the 3D asset in Blender. In addition to the candle itself I added an extra card to be reused later as the flame in its own material slot. One of the goals with creating a candle was to be able to mass produce them and the foilage tool was a great way to do just that. Thanks to Ghislain Girardot for showing me the workflow. Using Alexey Fedorov guidance, I was able to create effective materials for the wax, wick and flame which made use of subsurface scattering.
The Spiders
I wanted to practice the skill of building crowds and what better creature to put in a cave than a spider? So I grabbed a free asset off CG thanks to Vladislav Simakov. Now the interesting part most VFX Artists know when it comes to animated meshes that need to be mass produced: Vertex Animation Texture (VAT). I have had experience in the past using VAT in Houdini but in an attempt to keep my toolset free, I wanted to work out of Blender. Thankfully Ash Oakenfold put together some great resources so we don’t need to code anything— but for some reason his video is private so I’ll share his workflow here.
Once a single spider is imported into your game engine, setting up the VAT material along with it’s particle system is fairly straight forward. This technique can be applied to virtually any mesh that you want to animate in bulk (birds, rats, fish oh my!) Thilina Premasiri did a great tutorial you can check out here.
The Gloom
I’ve been playing a lot of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and as I was doing this effect, I thought it would be cool to recreate the gloom that we see around the world. Turns out, there’s different types of gloom created so I tackled two in this project that I named them “mist” and “geyser”. You’ll notice that the mist can be more of a soft / transparent style OR a hard and defined style depending on where it is in the game. To get the color scheme I wanted, I ended up using a color atlas in the material editor and texture painted my values in photoshop.
The Blood
Finally the blood is done using a tutorial from Ashif Ali and I LOVE how he setups up the fake lighting in the material editor to give that glossy feel to it. As for the floating blood above, it’s actually a really cool effect presented by Sem Schreuder that I tweaked. Probably not performant efficient, but a fun chance to play with curl noises and vector fields.
Overall, this sequence was challenging and rewarding to make because it gave me a chance to be creative with my own vision and develop VFX skills and other adjacent awareness in the video game pipeline including cinematography.
