Niagara Experiments

Hello! It's been a while. I honestly forgot about this blog for a while, I've had a pretty busy year as since March I've started working full time in the games industry as a VFX Artist at Flix Interactive!

Since starting full time, as expected my time dedicated to personal work has disappeared a fair bit (there are a number of projects that I really want to finish but finding the energy outside work atm to do something else big is difficult.) I made the decision to use this lockdown time to mainly focus on my own wellbeing instead.

But recently I've really been wanting to push my skillset so I've been looking into getting used to new tools like Substance Designer, Houdini and Niagara in the hopes that I can create some more complex FX. This is something that will help me at work and I'm having fun just tinkering around with stuff, and maybe when I get back into my personal projects I might actually know how to do them a little bit better. :)

So below is a handful of FX I have been tinkering around with in Niagara. The first one below i created from following a tutorial by Overdraw.xyz on how to create FF7 Materia, this served as a good start for figuring out how to use custom inputs inside Niagara to get really interesting movement in a particle system. Also Houdini stuff!

FF7 Materia Orbs

 

The second bunch of FX here is me testing out ribbons inside of Niagara. I am currently working on a recreation of the Potion FX from Final Fantasy 7 Remake and I need some ribbons in that to get it to look right, so in the process of experimenting I created whatever these are:

When I complete the potion FX I will add another quick post showing it off. i love the FX from the FF7 Remake so there are a whole bunch I would love to have a go at remaking whilst practising Niagara.