Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I like your of choice of effect, it thoroughly follows your concept and presents itself quite rounded off and polished. Room for improvement I'd see in the first half during buildup. Check out animation principles like anticipation or follow through for some pointers to make this feel more pointed and snappy. When going for a stylized effect, it's always worth making sure motion gets emphasized accordingly. Also think about how to tie in different levels of visual detail, bigger room taking shapes could be tied together with some smaller elements that inherit their forces. Small tip - always good to present work in context - so just adding a grey-scale dummy character and a basic environment would help to understand proportions.
• Amazing effect with some great ideas! Really like the release stage, great understanding of timing and easing. A little too much text on the document, use more key words and bullet points. You could also make the presentation theme the final effect a little better, but great research and strong understanding of technical processes. Amazing work overall :)
• The effect is simple but effective. I think you had a specific aesthetic and you achieved it. The timing in the effect could be pushed further. Push it until it looks broken and bring it back a little. The artist could also add more variation to the textures to help provide more nuance and detail to their overall finished piece.
• I enjoyed reading the detailed documentation and getting an insight into the process you took. The research, concepts, storyboarding is top notch and something I would expect to see at a production level. Great job. The technical breakdown of your work shows a very good grasp of techniques at your disposal when making VFX. Considering you were not familiar with Niagara or VFX makes it more impressive. Utilising dynamic parameters to access and change material values. The use of World position offset, flipbooks and noise masks. Randomising Mesh particles within one emitter to get more variation. These were only some of the techniques which showcased your technical grasp of building a realtime visual effect. Great job. All of the elements of the final effect worked well together. Visually, it kept a cohesive art style which help ground each element. The buildup and stages of the effect, again works really well. The only thing that requires improvement is the animation and timing of each stage. - The teardrop that initialises the effect, stretches from the centre rather than from the bottom of the sprite. This would help give it the feeling of speed, so that it stretches as it falls down. Currently it does stretch, but only from the centre. The speed at which it falls could be exaggerated more near the end before it lands so that it hits the ground a little harder - The next part of the effect transitions in slowly, it would look more interesting if it was much quicker to appear, so that the energy of the drop gets transferred to the circle spiral that appears because of it. - I would cut down the time on the anticipation where the grounded circle is spinning. But the idea was very good and leads to a nice transition of the tornado appearing. - The cloud "exploding"/Expanding has a nice feel to it, but the timing needs to be much much quicker. This is an explosive or highly energetic action, you can achieve that within a few frames. Everything proceeding this will then lead off of this timing such as the concentric rings/shockwave and sparks and debris burst. The shockwave should be much quicker, The overall timing here should be much earlier as well. You can "fake" this to look like it has better timing by spawning the shockwave and impact effects slightly before the lightning burst. The warm up of the individual effects are what slow the timing down. In a previz, you can either choose to fix the timing of the emitter or drag it earlier to quickly play around with timing. Overall, a really nice effort and impressive for the time you had to learn all of these new techniques.
• Hey, I like this wind and lighting effect you've got going on! It's a solid choice. Here are a couple of things that came to mind: Timing is Everything: Pay attention to the timing of the effect. It could enhance the overall feel. Shape It Up: Think about the shape language you're using. Making sure it fits the vibe you're going for can take it to the next level. Lightning Afterglow: It'd be neat to see some lingering lightning effects on the ground after the impact. Adds a cool secondary effect. More Lightning Strikes: How about having multiple lightning impacts? Picture this: the cloud hangs around for a bit, zaps out a few bolts, then vanishes. Adds some dynamism to the scene! Keep up the good work! Can't wait to see where you take this.
• 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 colour variation and more emissive elements to add some punch to the effect. Maybe a light particle emitter would help a well. I would also suggest revisiting the timing of the elements to make the effect more punchy and give it more impact. Overall – great work and very cool to see the effect from idea to implementation. Also I really enjoyed reading the documentation and following the thought process behind the project. Thank you!
• First of all, well done for completing and submitting your project, it is a credit to you and you should be really proud! It was great seeing you translate your material knowledge into VFX and I hope you enjoyed it and will carry on with it in future! This is a really well-executed effect! Things that went well: 1. Lots of great research and planning went into this project, including taking the time to concept multiple ideas so that you were able to scope your project accordingly 2. Substance Designer was used very effectively and in tandem with the Unreal Material Editor, this shows an in-depth knowledge of both. 3. It's great to see you starting to use Houdini! Even though what you made was pretty simple and could have been done in another software, the fundamental skills and getting to know Houdini will prove very useful in the future! Houdini is a really powerful tool that has amazing use cases for VFX and beyond. 4. I like the timing in the effect, it generally portrays what you are looking to do throughout the whole effect, although I feel like it charges for slightly too long from a gameplay point of view. I have never played LoL but I think an AOE effect having an 11-second charge up is too long no one would be hit by it. That's always something I'd consider going forward with VFX- 'How would this work in a game' 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. Your colour values feel a little dull for a league of legends style effect. Colour is so important in LoL and VFX is one of the brightest effects on screen as the game is so hectic and everyone needs to know what is going on at all times. I would also reconsider your colour palette slightly. Lean more into the blues as your primary colour as right now your purple is a little overpowering and doesn't really sit thematically with the wind and lighting in my opinion. 2. For me, the cloud is the main element letting down the effect. It is a bit too translucent and uniform. Layering it with sprites and splitting up the mesh into smaller sections that you can control individually will help you break it up a bit and make its creation and dispersion have more movement and randomness.- I'd also be careful with meshes like that, i feel like it could be optimised very heavily from a topology standpoint. Overall, I am glad you’re proud of what you achieved, you certainly should be! I hope you are going to continue making VFX in the future because you did a great job and it would be nice to see you go somewhere from this! 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!🙂 👏
• This piece has some really strong elements, the biggest thing for me is the lack of tonal differences or colour for different elements that would help make some parts pop. The build up effect works well before the tornado, but a bit of illumination intensity change or some subtle colour changes from cool blue to white or a little warm yellow could help show the build up of the effect. Using some complimentary colours for different elements will sit well together. On the lightning strike and impact, all elements have exactly the same brightness and colour making it difficult to read the indivdual elements or understand where to look. Adding a subtle gradient down the lightining bolt to the point of impact will help focus the eye onto this section. Adding some contrasting colours such as blue impact ring and orange sparks will really make this area pop. Alteratively using some blues and purples of different elements again to help them read differently from each other. The impact expansion feels a little slow and loses some of the snappiness that the other animation elements have. Using a curve that arcs upwards will make the start quite a bit faster and gradually slow which will add a nice "pop!" A really great foundation and nice nice animation squash and stretch, it just needs a little tightening to be a really great piece