Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• You can tell a lot of thought went into the documentation here. The final effect itself could have more contrast and presentation to push it further. The concepts are great, they clearly communicate the idea effectively. There are some textures here that look particularly similar. Look at adding more variation to the textures. A good way to tell if it needs more variation is to zoom out, squint and if they look similar they will be really similar on screen. Adding glows into the texture is a great way to add more range into what's shown. Pushing a flat texture to glow in editor often leads to going to white and flattening the texture out.
• A little too much text, use concise points and highlight keywords to allow an easier quick read. Strong understanding of the workflow and technical processes. Final effect could use a bit of emissive to really show the strength of this lightning, also some work on the timing could take this project further. Great work overall :)
• Excellent project and effort towards achieving a complex effect and its implementation. There are many key elements to the effect which is great to see, perhaps some of them could use a little color variation and more emissive elements to add some punch to the effect. Also would be great to see a little “after” element to finish the effect and tie all the stages of it together. Overall – great work and very cool to see hand drawn flipbooks. Also I really enjoyed reading the documentation and following the thought process behind the project. It was very interesting to see the stages of the project development, ups and downs explained. Thank you!
• Hey, nice work on this effect! It's definitely off to a strong start. Here's what I'm thinking: Give the orb a little more time to charge before unleashing the electric stage. This adds some anticipation and makes it more exciting. The electricity feels a tad slow, especially in how it steps in the frame of the textures. Speeding it up would make it feel more dynamic and fluid. Honestly, I think you could ditch the sphere around the enemy. The electrical circle you've got already gives a good indication of the area of effect. Keep a close eye on the timing throughout the effect. It can make or break the impact. Keep refining it! Can't wait to see where you take it next.
• I enjoyed reading the documentation, you covered a lot of ground there and explained your thought process for each stage. I can see you tried to add some technical skills to this effect, and in theory it sounded good, but the application of it was lacking in the final result. By that I mean that the effect doesn't look like it had many technical elements. The final visual on screen is the one that matters, how you get there is ofcourse important, but it needs to translate to what's on screen. The effect itself is well thought out and understands what it is. You convey that very well. The timing of the lighting strike is nice and snappy. The anticipation before that helps build up to the lighting striking the enemy. The hit impact and AoE needs work. The timing is far too slow for it to transition in. The transition out is just a fade, some alpha erosion with some world position offset here would have given a more interesting outro to the effect. The effect looks more like it's shielding the enemy rather than damaging it. Maybe having the enemy flash and react to the damage would have helped sell the narrative. Hand drawn flipbooks were lovely, really nice job on the lightning strike. The electric ring needed a little more frames. The style was also different to the lightning strike, having these be the same would help the identity of the effect.
• This has some solid foundations but still needs more work to really shine. The first thing that immediately stands out is the lack of luminosity of the FX, we are missing FX lights but also the emissive values are pretty low. If we think of lightning and electrical arcs they usually create a lot of light when they happen. https://youtu.be/ICL9gz1aYm8 The effects also make use of only one colour, using a few colours either complimentary, or contrasting can really help differentiate different elements by creating contrast in both tone and colour. Purples are quite good for electrical elements or bright orange to add some real colour pop. Another thing, especially when using GPU particle systems such as for sparks, you can have a lot more particles reletively cheaply. I would recommend changing this emitter to GPU. https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/Niagara/HowTo/GPUParticles/ It wouldnt be a problem to emit 150-300 GPU particles for sparks to really sell the effect, you can give these varying lives from 0.1 to maybe 1 second to give a lot of variety. Pushing the curl noise strength with a frequency around 5-20 will also make their movement more dynamic without being too jittery. I really like the beam texture and shape, this really stands out, but I feel like you really need to push the emissive value on this to make it really stand out. It should be the brightest element. You can even add a bit of a gradient along the beam so that its brightest at the target and less so at the origin. Using a gradient in colour could also add some extra interest. I feel like the spherical shape is a bit too clean and round for such an energetic effect such as electricity. Perhaps using some world position offset on the vertices to make them move a bit would help add to the feel of the effect. You can also use fresnel multplied to your alpha to make the edges more intense than centre so you can still see the bug inside more clearly. https://youtu.be/yTTez2pUSQQ God of War Ragnarok First Fight with Thor has some great examples of electrical FX
• First of all, well done for completing and submitting your project, you did an awesome job and I hope you’re proud! I think what you have is really nicely executed and is a credit to your skill and hard work! Things that went well: 1. Really good use of sprite sheets to get the lightning looking correct. It really helps nail the movement and it's great to see. The actual textures themselves are really well drawn too, it shows a lot of artistic talent really aids the effect. 2. Seeing you consider your timing is awesome! not many people who are early in their careers do, despite it being very important for VFX 3. I like how you didn’t go over the top with what you were looking to do and stayed small and polished, this only does good things for this piece as you were able to refine it a lot. 4. This clearly was well-researched and concepted nicely. Seeing you take into consideration what this effect would be for and how that affects the visuals (e.g. leaving the lingering effect on the creatures) is great! There are a few areas I would look to focus on in your future projects/ if you wanted to work back into this piece: 1. Personally, I don't think the timing and scale of your charge up and beam tell the player that there will be a lingering AOE effect where it hits. I feel it would just affect the target that was hit. AOE effects usually have some kind of visual queue to show where it will hit before it happens to help the player avoid those areas. Your effect lends more towards a basic ranged attack I think (which isn’t a bad thing!) but it means some of your visuals would be a bit confusing for the player and you’d need to refine it to go towards either AOE *or* ranged attack. 2. I'd love to see everything be a bit brighter and more saturated as lightning is basically raw heat/energy, I think that would sell the lightning more especially in the style you're going for! 3. I think you need a bit more impact on the hit too. bits of static flying off, more sparks on impact, a bright flash, and a bit of an impact animation on the enemy are all things that will help sell it. without things like this, I don't feel the weight of the attack, how much damage does it do? Is it a regular ability, ultimate, etc? Things like that need to be portrayed through the effect without telling the player that directly. Overall, this was a really nice piece to assess! I’m glad you were able to learn new techniques like drawing flipbooks and seeing your interest in animation/timing is great as it will 100% help improve your VFX in future! If you would like more feedback on this or future projects you can reach out to me on LinkedIn: ‘Ethan Gangotra’ and I will do my best to help! Best of luck with the rest of the university and with the rest of the competition!🙂 👏
• Your research, references and documentation are spot on! I like your mood and reference boards as well as the detail sketches. This is a great foundation for creating a compelling effect! The final presentation lacks a little bit of that finesse. The effect is quite simple and where buildup and beam show great promise of an evolution and transport of energy, the impact seems to fall a little flat. Try experimenting with more a violent/erratic reaction, break up the soft fade out and make it sparkle and fizz away. Also consider using camera shakes and light effect to tie your effect into the enviroment a bit more - its lightning overall, so some bright flash lighting up the surroundings can do wonders on the feel.