Hey lovely person! 💘

Hope you're having an exquisite day!

This newsletter has now more than 600 subscribers! 🎉🥳💘

New article about a small optimization by making a wall appear different from one side than from the other.

New article about Nikki's surprisingly complex and numerous shadows.

Veronika Odynets shared a lot o her Stalker 2 VFX work where often Unreal and Houdini come together.

I really like that it's not just a "static" fountain, but it's animated to grow and shrink. Way more difficult that "just" having it in one state all the time.

Anna didn't just create a cool effect, but also shows a super strong animated concept and the textures and meshes used in this project!

Love the idea, colors and liquid feel of this effect. Great show of build-up, projectile and impact.

Beyond-FX shares cool Unreal setup breakdowns. For example, a Zelda-Style Explosion or a Shockwave.

Nice stylized build-up, beam and impact showing the use of clear shapes, nice colors, impact frames and post process like chromatic aberration.

Impressive demo reel which presents the used Houdini elements like Liquid VAT, Pyro Motion Vectors and Vector Fields.

If you're interested in making VFX in Blender, Azra provides several tutorials which surely can also be an inspiration on how to transfer the knowledge into Godot, Unreal, Unity, CryEngine or Ogre.

Complete guide on how to create rain with Unreal Niagara including the rain particles, geometry for the impact and collision.

I know, math appears scary. I shared nice artist friendly resources in newsletter #11 already, and here is another one. Yes, the author is called Simon, but it's not me!

I reported in newsletter #15 about a cool curl technique in substance designer. There is more!

Explanation why this weird behavior is not a bug but design.

Yes, this post is 13 years old but still contains a lot of interesting and valid information.

Impressive model with hand-painted textures.

Phillip Stoltz released his tutorials for free. It's not about VFX, but I have a thing for stone sculpts! Of course, this knowledge can become handy, when one is in need for a nice impact decal!

Thanks for reading! Have a lovely day/night! 💘
Simon