Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• First of all, well done for completing and submitting your project on time you should be proud of that! It was nice to see you try a range of different techniques and be ambitious with what you were creating. Things that went well: 1. You were ambitious and learned lots of new skills! 2. You looked into many techniques that may come in handy in the future e.g. niagara fluids 3. You achieved technical feats like getting your destruction baked and into engine -tip for the future, look into Vertex Animation Textures (VATs) they work through the material so in a lot of cases, do not need a BP to control them and allow you to go much more in-depth with the use within Niagara 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. Too much noise, you were ambitious but it led to having too much going on. it lost its coherence and therefore it would be hard for a player to understand what was happening 2. Too much noise also means that artistically it is suffering. Every element of the effect has so much going on that aren't able to get silhouettes and colour values get lost i'd recommend cutting back on the amount of small particles and making material effects simpler so they are not as noisy. You also have a mix of really bright and really dull elements, you should use colour values to draw the eye but it should not overpower the effect making things feel lowsy in comparison. League of Legends masters this. It may be helpful to look at images and videos of the LoL VFX in greyscale so you can see how prominent their silhouettes and colour values are in driving the visuals. 3. Timing is another big thing I'd look into, you have a really long build-up for a very short payoff. I would look at shortening the build-up and focusing on making it clearer to the player what is going to happen. In a game like LoL your build-up would be warning the player to get out before it hits them as well as showing the scale of the effect. I can't see how that's being portrayed in your effect it doesn't really tell me if it's damaging, freezing, protection etc. It may be useful to really break down the timing in videos of similar effects. look at the length of each stage and how those stages progress as they change. 4. Even though the knowledge of your Niagara fluids is good, it is nowhere near useable in 99% of production pipelines so it would be useful for you to experiment with other ways of creating volumetrics e.g. using sprites. When I run your effect the Niagara fluids tanks my fps to under 30, that's without a game running in the background so you can see how hard it would be to use in a game. 5. A small tip going forward- try not to have so many different emitters and blueprints etc in your effect and condense things down where you can. The overhead of tonnes of emitters can really start to snowball quickly and hurt performance a lot. But I am also aware that if you simplified the effect and nailed down the timings, the length etc it would already help in reducing these things. Overall, I hope you are proud of what you made and were able to learn a lot in the process! It’s great to see such an ambitious project and impressive that you were able to finish in the time frame, however, I would recommend taking on smaller-scale projects to really nail down your artistic principles before tackling challenging effects going forward. 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!🙂 👏
• The effect is quite complex in it's nature and takes a long time to complete, there's a lot of moving parts (literally) that added complexity. As a previz or concept for an effect, this works well and each stage is demonstrated clearly. Documentation has good information regarding the production of the effect. The pre-production and planning is a little sparse and it would have been nice to have something to show the initial plan for the effect and all of it's stages. Technical ability and workflow was also good. There are some details on some workarounds when you became stuck, such as using alembic exports for your animations. FBX would have worked better, the solution for exporting as an fbx would be to parent it to a null object. This would create a hierarchy of bones (parent > children) where transforms could be baked. The effect itself, as mentioned earlier, I would consider this the very start of an idea and trying to prove it out in engine. The quality and cohesion of the materials and particles are slightly on the lower end as is some of the timing. I would simplify the effect and see what you can remove or tighten overall so that it doesn't last so long. It all feels a little laboured and everything happens at the same pace. I think you can look for opportunities to make that far more varied and interesting, such as having the crystals move towards the out edges one by one sequentially but in a few frames. Finding the balance to speed up and slow down the pacing of the overall effect helps keep interest and build anticipation. The timing of the explosion is nice. I would reduce any clutter or noise and really look to simplify it by removing some emitters. For instance, the share amount of particles takes away from the star shaped explosion which was quite nice. Overall, this is a good effort for producing a complicated effect. Nicely done!
• Documentation is a little bland, could also use more research and analysis. Final Effect is exciting with a great narrative, a little busy at times but great use of camera shake and emissive. Great work overall :)
• You have chosen to create a very complex and long effect in multiple stages using many different techniques. In your research documentation you outline your motivation quite clearly and break down the steps accordingly. Where as the technical aspects of this effect are all there, I'm missing a bit a flow that ties them all together. This can be as simple as making sure the colours live in the same realm/accompany each other well - check how during the shockwave, the colour of fluid sim, the epanding circle and the cracks on the ground appear to be not close enough to be the same, but also not apart enough to be deliberately contrasting. Similar is to say about shape and motion. It looks like you are adding a lot of different things on top of each other, that don't really connect in a greater sense. Often it helps to try for elements to appear affected by the same forces in the world. But also make sure that they shape somehow accompanies each other. I like that you are using light and camera shake to tie the effect into the environment, this allows for a point of reference in the world, tells about scale and impact.
• Nice whole effect created here. This could be pushed further by tweaking the timing to have more anticipation, contrast and follow through. Push the effect further by refining the details of the elements there and bring them together more into a cohesive manner. It's wonderful the artists was happy to explore emerging technology and try to implement it into their project.
• Hey, I like what you've got going on with this effect. It's a solid start! Here are a couple of things that crossed my mind: Not sure if it's the textures themselves or how they're put together, but some parts feel a bit too noisy. Especially around the central effect and the beam leading to the player. When the effect wraps up and those particles explode, consider adding a touch of randomness to them. It can give the whole thing a more interesting vibe. Instead of just the impact, how about adding frost to the ground? It could add a nice touch to the scene. Don't forget about timing! It can make or break the impact of the effect. Keep up the good work! Looking forward to seeing where you take this.