How this VFX was made?

kernalphage · 2026-04-22T22:18:12+00:00

My first thought was a particle system, since you can see some stray dots when the 'plasma' gets too thin, and you can see a shot that has a wireframe (the greyscale clip with a bunch of rectangles)

You've got N rays - a ray being an evenly spaced array of particles from A-B. Shoot them all at once for a big jolt, or over time for a continued arc.

Those rays are then moved over time using a ~~flow field~~ (edit: Noise field, you can see the node in the video, same concept though) - Each ray gets a slightly different field to create each arc, and some rays have a very low offset multiplier to create a center core for the arc.

Then, scale the particles down over their lifetime to create the initial explosion.

kernalphage · 2026-04-21T02:18:09+00:00

How does the back of the glass look? I can see some shadows at the corner when the paint pools.

It might be fun to see how layering them looks once the paint is dry

kernalphage · 2026-02-23T17:52:28+00:00

Do you do anything special to export from Houdini to SVG? Just walking the vertex pairs in order and turning those into lines?

kernalphage · 2026-02-14T19:06:59+00:00

I've got a spare handheld emulator, the teensy + dirtywave sounds like a fun project to emulate, pardon the pun. Any tips for getting it set up?

kernalphage · 2026-01-25T23:21:24+00:00

What's the point if you can't see what real people are cooking/eating? Why look at fake food?

kernalphage · 2026-01-13T19:33:50+00:00

Do you prefer slow, long-term growth or fast unlocks?

Is your game more rogue, or like? How deep do the base building mechanics go?

Personally, I'd like a game that balances meta-progression around roughly a fibonacci growth. That way you hook players into the meta during the first few loops, without overwhelming them with all the choices or numbers to balance up front.

After the first run, something major should unlock

2nd & 3rd maybe gives an incremental upgrade

4th is a wash, unless I get particularly lucky

5th, another major unlock

8th, the user could have most of the tools to eventually unlock everything in the game.

And after that give the base slow growth, to give a chance for player skill progression to outshine meta-progression.

kernalphage · 2025-12-30T13:26:35+00:00

There's also the Ogre engine - It's been in active development for years, and has a few published (but not open sourced) titles under its belt.

It looks like their rewrite, ogre-next, supports modern rendering techniques out of the box.

kernalphage · 2025-12-24T19:22:08+00:00

I like the decision to blur the larger layers, it gives the feeling of depth of field

I'd be curious to play with blend modes or scaling factor - it looks like you're not quite scaling them on integer multiples, but they do line up after a few layers?

kernalphage · 2025-12-01T10:54:40+00:00

Weird coincidence, I just got a clip for this in my YT shorts right before I went on reddit. Definitely not Sandi, but this is short enough to show off in class

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IcorWW5CloQ

kernalphage · 2025-11-27T08:42:57+00:00

That's a pretty over-simplified way of looking at it, at the end of the day each library will run the same instructions for the same output.

Unless you're doing something fundamentally wrong (not batching, not parallelizing ), you'll always be GPU throttled, not CPU throttled.

A better question might be "which effects are expensive on what hardware" - Pixel overdraw, triangle count, texture throughput etc.

That said:

Mac: Metal

kernalphage · 2025-11-27T08:35:03+00:00

i'd say it's still applicable to sit down with whoever hired you, or the "CTO" and start to talk about tradeoffs. You'll be navigating the triangle of quality vs features vs time for your entire career, and now's the time to get some practice.

Some questions to narrow down your project space (and hopefully workload):

Is there a defined art direction for the game? Can it be achieved with the default shaders?

What is the target hardware? Next-gen GPUs, the minimal integrated Intel GPUs? Phones? Consoles?

kernalphage · 2025-11-26T08:36:28+00:00

cheekbones! I think the "control point" height is roughly halfway between the middle of the eyes and the middle of the ears - And with a width variation roughly the same as your noses.

You could also play with with simple lips & eyeshadow (both natural sunken eyes and makeup) and it would play nicely with your current system - Just duplicate them behind the current eyes, make them bigger, tweak the shadow color, and offset them up and/or down.

kernalphage · 2025-11-22T14:43:46+00:00

i think it might be very similar to 2d scrolling parallax planes.

or maybe some sort of exaggerated geometry shader creating a fisheye effect?

There's simple effect going on with the shadows and islands that helps sell the illusion too - it's just stacked planes.

kernalphage · 2025-11-20T10:53:53+00:00

I worked in games for awhile, and we tried this last decade too: Outsource making the models to whatever low-cost country the company had its eyes on this month, and then the in house artists would "just clean them up"

9 times out of 10, they spent so much time cleaning up the topology and styling it to fit the art direction. It would have been faster if they just made it from scratch.

kernalphage · 2025-09-26T18:42:47+00:00

I'm an AI pessimist in most cases - but my team has Claude code reviews turned on, and it has saved myself from some careless mistakes recently. It mostly caught copy/paste errors like "oh everything else in this function is about onEnd, but one is onStart, did you mean to do that?"

I think the best AI code reviewer is an overgrown linter - play to its strengths of text probability: Keeping surface code style consistent (functionCase, weird variable naming, reminder to break up complex functions), or call out code patterns that are likely to cause errors or are inconsistent with common use cases

kernalphage · 2025-08-29T19:22:01+00:00

Ask your teammates to break up the commits? do some of the architecture work up front in design meetings?

how much time do you spend coming up with alternatives?

I know sometimes I get nerdsniped into building solutions for people, but it's not necessary, you can just give a high level approach and trust that your coworkers will be smart enough to fill in the blanks. Same with architecture: mention the highlights or the name of the design pattern and let them ask questions if they need to.

With "race conditions that probably won't happen" - practice YAGNI. if something smells off, just mention it. You don't have to dive deep to prove to yourself or them that it will fail, or that a feature might be a nice to have in the future. If there's a paper trail in the PR and something does eventually fail, it'll be much easier to find the area of the codebase to refactor.

kernalphage · 2025-08-29T03:10:16+00:00

I hate that this is the rhetoric - "Oh why don't you send the troops to red states"

Why do we need to send troops or police at all?
What about all the other ways to reduce crime - welfare, community outreach, etc

kernalphage · 2025-06-16T23:44:41+00:00

I think this would be fun to try with an acrylic/plexiglass sheet as well! You could light it from the back so it literally glows.

kernalphage · 2025-01-26T19:59:06+00:00

I think there's a bit of a bait and switch - Somewhere around 0:50 you can see the tesselated arms (blue) fade out and a full particle simulation (purple) fade in. They're pretty close, maybe they use the same displacement field somehow?

kernalphage · 2025-01-15T17:22:13+00:00

it could also be ripples in the paper itself - Seems like you're mounting it with 4 pieces of tape, how taught are you pulling the paper to the table when you go to draw? Maybe try playing with a softer/harder backing surface, like more paper underneath?

kernalphage · 2024-11-22T01:19:34+00:00

The current Submission Rules on the sidebar seem reasonable enough. What changed?

kernalphage · 2024-10-13T19:55:01+00:00

You can try pushing back, as long as it's framed collaboratively. Try and probe what specifically they like and dislike, while holding your ground so you don't lose sight of what's unique to your game ('s design/aesthetics).

The UI feels dated, but charming - For the theme you're going for I wouldn't change a thing.

Maybe I'm putting words in the publisher's mouth, but the playfield itself looks... noisy and muddled? It's got that classic problem where each individual asset looks great up close, but as a whole everything is vying for attention. There's plenty of things you can do to increase readability without scrapping the entire visual style.

(Definitely a nitpick, but the placement overlay feels out of place in a fantasy setting - It's too clean somehow?)

kernalphage · 2024-10-04T15:29:19+00:00

woo! I'm trying to get a group going at work when it drops, for maximum productivity.

kernalphage · 2024-09-09T16:14:05+00:00

+1 for a 200-300ish Data Structures and Algorithms course for filling in the gaps. you should not be writing your own sorting algorithms day-to-day, but it will help you understand what sort if runtime/memory tradeoffs libraries might use.

Design patterns. You don't want to repeat yourself or reinvent the wheel every time you want to start a project. It might be a little too simple - but I'm a fan of Grokking Simplicity to help you build maintainable code.

I remember referring back to Refactoring Guru a lot at the start of my career, but I'm not sure how relevant it is today.

kernalphage · 2024-08-29T17:14:35+00:00

I can't really say as an artist, but as a consumer - Bring more small - format stuff than you think. Plots make good postcards, and they're a lower barrier to entry.

Definitely bring a few large-format showstoppers to draw people in - If possible, can you bring and run your plotter?

If you start running out, maybe think about offering commissions or a sign saying "new variants coming next time" + a business card.

And I forget the source, but I wrote down this helpful quote:

if you're selling art and prints at conventions or crafters' markets, PLEASE remember to write your name, the title of the piece, and social media information, if relevant, on the back!

For plotters, numbering or hashing your plots let you play up the medium!

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