Question How do I make vfx for attacks in Anime style?

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/RaggedIdioticHellbender-mobile.mp4

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/bw7z14/sharing_my_latest_vfx_experiment_a_classic_anime/

I can't find any tutorials on how to make something like the stuff linked above. Any tips?

 

I am not pro expert/specialist, so don't take my words as determinant, but in my case it came from experience. What I mean by that - if you know how shaders works you start to see patterns used to make VFX like scrolling UV or masks.
It may be not obvious at the start, but good vfx is usually not about particles, but shaders and textures - style is just about proper assets, so the most important thing is to know how things are done in general.

I think the most useful learning materials are various breakdowns of other artists. You can find a lot of them on twitter or dedicated sites like realtimevfx.com and good example that might be usefull for you can be this: https://realtimevfx.com/t/niels-dewitte-sketch-14-wip/5152

About anime style vfx - these above are done mostly with two things:

1. Hand painted textures, colored flipbook or black-white used as mask in shader and as you can already guess this requires any painting skills, but it depends how texture is used and often procedural textures can be used.
2. "Procedural" effect in shader - this is what your first link shows. For example there is some texture of slash scrolled through flat disc mesh and alpha erosion (or other mask) is used to fade the slash. You could expose scroll and erosion amount from shader to vfx graph and use some curve to do something with it over lifetime.

In short my advice would be to learn shader tricks and check a lot of breakdowns and learn how things are done in general. In case you are completely new to VFX this and this might be useful.

 

not to necro but you there is actually some good tutorials on Youtube channel. Ex: https://www.youtube.com/@GabrielAguiarProd

However, I agree, there's not a lot tutorial on that

 

There is a lot of knowledge around, but most of them requires you at least basics of shaders to implement the idea - my whole point is that most of the time vfx is not just spawning bunch of particles. As example you can find a lot of helpful tricks here:
https://realtimevfx.com/t/niels-dewitte-sketch-14-wip/5152
https://realtimevfx.com/t/make-noise-textures-with-world-machine/12451
If you understand them, it's not hard to create your own anime slash without any tutorial.

 

Most people start with Unity little to no VFX skills. I mean, it's entirely different skillset (with a lot of university today have dedicated 4 years program / course to achieve Bachelor degree in VFX).

For example:
Some people came from Cinematic industries, with Videography degree. (they good at cinemachine and timeline)
Some came from Audio industries. (maybe good at FMOD or audio manipulation)
Some came from Animation industries. (good at mecanim)
I personally come from IT Industries, (Mostly doing code / programming)

So it's hard for us to learn even basic things such as shader graph.
So yeah, for amateurs like me, we saw VFX as just spawning bunch of particles.

Basically, For VFX, you would need to learn:

1. Basic modelling for VFX mesh (can use free programs like Blender)
2. Understand UV Wrapping, or tiling.
3. Understand Texture
4. Understand Material (PBR)
5. Understand Basic Shader Mechanism
6. Understand Shader Graph in Unity
7. Understand perlin noise / any other noise and the differences between them.
8. Understand Visual Effect Graph in Unity (Or shuriken if you need feedbacks from particle)
9. Understand Animation Event to call the right particle when animation is playing
10. Understand basic code to call the right sound for the particle

Most of us beginners only know step 9 and step 10, we don't even know how to do step 1

And most of the tutorials I found only teach step 6 and step 8.