This project started as a personal project, where I played around with shaders and tried making some VFX. It grew and later became the project that my batchelors thesis was based on. The full title of the thesis is: Creation of stylized realtime 3D visual effects in the Unity game engine. I made 5 unique visual effects, complete with shaders, animations and individual environments.
I started with conceptual research on stylized VFX in games and how to make good VFX from a game design perspective. I then sketched, and prototyped the visual effects. I chose these perticular effects for two reasons: 1. they are often used in fantasy games or associated with them and 2. they gave me an opportunity to design them in a new, creative way and describe the development process in the thesis.
The project was created with Unity 2020.3.15f2 HDRP. I made extensive use of the new Shader graph and VFX graph tools.
I used blender for modeling the environments and meshes for the visual effects.
Krita was useful for making quick textures and particles. I also used it for sketching out the step by step exectuion of the VFX prior to development.
