Environmental Ribbon Visual Effects
In our game called Plushie Blaze, we had a world that is made entirely of fabric and plushie creatures. One challenge we had with this set of constraints was the facts that natural aspects of our environment also needed to have that have that fabric look to it and match the style and color choices we had in the game while also being performant in the Unity Engine. After trying Houdini simulations, a lot of the best solutions that worked for the style of our were custom shaders created in Unity using vertex animations to create waves or other motion effects on fabric like textured assets.
I used don’t shaped ribbons for this area and with the shader applied it worked out well to show it just moving in a circular shape
I really wanted the water to feel shiny and reflective as it’s what people would imagine the fabric for water would be chosen in that way.
This is the shader I created using Unitys shader graph system. It allows for basic maps inputs while also having the vertex animation applied to it on top.
This is the white water effect, it is just a simple geo shape with a wavy vertex animation applied on top of it. It turned out to be better to do something very simple in order to match the look of the waterfall ribbons.
I actually experimented with a few different looks, one of the them you can see in our game trailer. We have Houdini simulated fire ribbons as our main effect, but having something simpler will help balance the visual noise of the effect.
The challenge here was selling the fuzzy layers look that cotton balls have. I made a material in designer for booth the main texture and also the alpha that would be shown for the edges.
An example of what the cotton ball should look like in the final effect
This is the geo set up I used for the alpha outer rims
The cotton balls also have some shader work applied to help sell the shading and variability of each one in a VFX system
A Quick Look at my substance designer set up to get that Cotton effect as well as the alpha.