"On the still waters of oblivion, I guide the wandering souls..."
Primary Reference
Showcase of the Stencil Masking; The objects are present but not rendered unless viewed through the mask, which is the actual X-Shaped Cut itself. This creates a sense of depth and scale, and makes the cut feel like a tear in space.
A Screenshot of the process of creating the Cut Mask. I both overlayed how the cut looks later in the reference, as well as lasso'd out how the cut looks at the very end, and then used that as a basis to draw a middleground between the two.
Work-In-Progress Recordings. I saved some of the various renders I took throughout the project's lifetime, letting me track my progress. I'm mainly just impressed with how much I managed to get done during the 2nd week/latter half of the project.
Showcase of the three flipbooks used throughout the VFX. They are used for the initial lightning bolts facing the cut, the spread out lightning bolts, and the small lightning sparks respectively.
The Impact Frame is created dynamically using a Post-Process Material, which is then just toggled as enabled/disabled using a Blueprint. I learnt how to do this from De Andre Martin's "Real-Time Impact Frames" post.
Niagara System Overview. The emitters are segmented off based on timing intervals, and the "Follow_Octobolt" is copied over to a separate emitter in order to work with the stencil masking.
"Existence is fleeting as the dawn's dew, destined for oblivion..."
Following last year where I tried to replicate Aventurine's Basic ATK for my University's portfolio course, I'm back this year to attempt to recreate something else from Honkai Star Rail. This time, it only took me around 2 weeks of working roughly-half time (I didn't exactly keep track, but it was less than 5 hours per weekday) to finish the project, which surprised me; I didn't expect to be able to make something so cool in such a short amount of time! I think I could have done a much better job on the actual Black Hole & "Galaxy" scene that's hidden behind the stencil mask, but I only managed to get the actual stencil components working on the second to last day so I didn't want to spend too much time on it.
If you think this project was cool, give it a like! I'm also open to freelance work now, so if you have some kind of project that could use VFX, please contact me!
