Ultimate VFX - Massive Visual Effects and Particle System Collection

Hello again,
I need some more clarification regarding previous versions:

What exactly has been changed in v3 that breaks Unity 5 compatibility? I'm asking because I've ported 3.0 and 3.1 quite (in my opinion) successfully to Unity 5.6, but of course I have not tested all the prefabs. What kind of bugs may wait for me?

 

@DrInternet

Hello!

Sometimes this will work, other times you'll get prefabs that will outright be broken, and other times you might get some middle ground where the effect itself will not function exactly as intended, because of some new features that didn't exist in previous versions that a certain effect used. When you download from the Asset Store, you'll automatically be served the version that matches the minimum version of Unity with which the package was uploaded. So for v3.1, that's Unity 2017.1.2.

 

Hello, i am fairly new to all this VFX stuff. I just bought the package and was wondering if there is a tutorial to create a lightning blast?

 

@Censureret

Hello, and welcome to the world of VFX!
I'd recommend checking out my ongoing tutorial series. Here's one for lightning that might help you get started:

There are also several lightning-based effects in Ultimate VFX's main demo showcase that you can check out and deconstruct to get an idea of how to start customizing and making your very own effects.

My channel has a lot of VFX-related content in general, so hopefully you can learn something and get the best value possible from your purchase.

> VFX YouTube Channel

 

Hi. I've just purchased this pack which has a lot of content, but I bought it for the realistic fire and explosions. From what I can see in the prefabs they are mainly just a sprite and non modifiable. Is there a way to get more variety from those assets? One problem is my game is top down and the fire and explosion effects don't lend themselves to it. Any ideas how I can get more from the asset?

 

@DanMarionette

Hi Dan!

The majority of the explosion prefabs use texture sheet animations as particles in one way or another, which is generally a standard practice in almost all games with similar effects. The realistic explosion textures were added relatively recently, so I haven't had as much time to start adding more complex effects with those, however, you can easily reference and switch up the materials while using some of the older explosion prefabs, like this:

You can go from stylized to very cinematic (Michael Bay...) in just a few clicks!
Here's a tutorial on how to build something like this from scratch using Ultimate VFX:

For the exact look, you'll likely want to tweak it further so that it better fits your game. If you have any videos or screenshots, maybe I can offer some tips?

 

The look of your realistic explosion is nice. I'm a blender user and have been experimenting with the the smoke sim to create these effects. What I'm trying to do is instead of having the whole explosion in the texture sheet, is to try an isolate an individual 'fireball'. Then build the explosion from particles in Unity. The effect won't look quite the same, but perhaps with building the prefab with multiple particle systems and several varying rendered fireball texture sheets we could maybe get close.

 

That sounds like a good approach! If you have any examples from existing games, I can try and start a breakdown to figure out how something like that could be done. The closest examples I've seen to what I think you're describing were in Kingdom Hearts, but they didn't really look like the full explosions.

 

Something along the lines of these,

 

That's an amazing example, thank you! Right now the closest to something like that are the nuke effects in UVFX's main showcase:

You can see them at 0:13, but they use the older, more stylized sheets. I definitely want to try out the same technique with the newest sheets.

EDIT: Did some tests!

 

I was watching your channel and what you do is more than beautiful. Every thing is amazing except the explosions are close to magic spells not real explosion. I'm here asking you to not change "action package" keep it because its good for fable games. I want you to make new package that more close to army or military fire and explosion. muzzle fire, cannon fire, smoke and so on. Good Luck with what you do and thank you for presenting "Ultimate VFX" for us.

 

Hello Mirza,

I did some beta testing of my game yesterday. On two PCs.
On one PC everything was great (I7 with GTX 1060).
The other PC has a lower Performance for both GPU and CPU (I5 with GTX 960).
Especially in a Scene with many particlesystems (in a throneroom with 6 torches and 6 firebasins, each has a particle System of your beautiful pool of stuff) it had a huge Performance slowdown.

I would like to have a Setting like "Use simpler particles" in my game.
Do I have to copy the particles Systems prefabs, and make a simpler Version of each one myself (a new prefab "simple" for every single particle System I use) or is there some other / global way to make particles use less Performance?

Thanks a lot! Great asset this is

 

got error with the last version 3.1 unity 5.6

Assets/Mirza Beig/Editor Extensions/Utilities/Particle Scaler/Editor/ParticleScalerExtensions.cs(80,27): error CS1656: Cannot assign to `scale' because it is a `method group'

 

I'm not sure if this is the sort of solution you are looking for, but maybe you can test the frame rate and based on that adjust the maximum particles?

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ParticleSystem.MainModule-maxParticles.html

 

@Quast

Thanks for the feedback! I just recently finished up with a new prefab taking Dan's suggestion in account. It'll be in the next update. I need to focus more on moving prefabs like this into the Action VFX expansion folder.

> Realistic/Stylized Explosions (Video).
> Same effect, without camera movement (Video).



Disabling the trails gives it a much less fantasy-style look.

 

@Firlefanz73

Hey there!

Without some more details, it's hard to tell. I have a mobile game with several active torches (albeit custom prefabs) and post-processing running at 60fps on mobile. I've had around a dozen active at one point in earlier development with no noticeable peformance impact.



Can you post a screenshot of your scene?

@hopeful has a potential solution for you, as it can also be something like overdraw.

 

Hi! Are you the same person as the comment on YouTube?

v3.1 is not for Unity 5.6. If you downloaded directly from the Asset Store, I believe you'll have received v2.7. You can check the README for Ultimate VFX under _DOCS to confirm.

It looks like an API change is causing this issue. Were you given a prompt to upgrade by Unity?

Based on your comment on YouTube, it also seems like you may have downloaded a later version of Ultimate VFX into the correct version of Unity, and then downgraded to an older version of Unity, resulting in an instance of the asset that isn't supported on the older version.

Is this maybe what happened?

 

Looks good. I will test that tomorrow, thanks a lot!

 

This is good. No need to rush, Take your time. Could you add to Action package some new particles for muzzle, RPG and cannon fire, and different kind of explosions ?


P.S. Correct me if I'm wrong, do I see in your images one kind of explosion and shape of fire ?

 

I bought this asset just to support the author. Amazing work.

 

Yes this is what happen exactly . So any solution for run it with 5.6 or stay with 2.7 ? thank you

 

Hello,

if I have a particle System that is outside of the Maximum camera area, will it stop spawning by itself or do I Need to turn it off myself?
Setting MaxParticles works perfect, I attached them with a factor to FPS, that's a perfect solution.

 

Great idea! I'll see if I can start adding in new prefabs to Action VFX today. For the realistic explosion, there are two that were added in the latest versions, and I either used both or re-used the one to create the prefab video you saw.

 

Awesome! Although I hope you get a great deal of use out it, too. Thanks for the support.

 

Unfortunately, downgrading isn't officially supported by either Unity or Ultimate VFX. If you use Unity 5.6 and download the asset from there, you should get a proper compatible version. You can also just delete the particle scaler. But that's only going to fix the problems you see. Some prefabs may also silently break since Unity 2017 added new features.

 

Do you mean the camera's far clipping plane?

I'd read up on this article here about culling and performance: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/12/20/unitytips-particlesystem-performance-culling/.

It depends on the settings of the effect.

 

It seems that something along these lines ought to be a standard utility. My memory on it is very fuzzy, but I think at one point I had a utility from the asset store, maybe, that did this. Probably long deprecated. Or maybe it was a setting under Quality.

 

New prefabs for Action VFX incoming!

- Updated explosions video.

 

Hey MirzaBeig, I was wondering do you have any tutorials on adding VFX to weapons? For example, a sword having fire or lighting elements or effects.

 

@supermoore1025

I don't have a specific tutorial for that, but all it requires is adding a prefab or effect/particle system gameobject as a child to the target item.

Edit: Here's an example using Mana Station's free Elven Sword! I randomly spawned explosions because it's in the scene I was working on recently... and it just looks cool.

 

Hey

Hey thanks for the response. The demo looks great.

 

I've finished up with the full weapon effect tutorial! You'll be creating what's in the thumbnail.

 

Hi!
I'm really really thankful for the amazing asset you develope.
I want to ask if is it possible to add sometime a dissolve shader to make particles or other things disappear? Thanks!

 

Yes, I can maybe do that.
I've been using Amplify Shader Editor lately and it's really great for particles, too.



But I need some feedback on how it should work. I can either generate noise in the shader itself, or I can have the user pass in a noise texture - both can be used for the cutoff. Which would you prefer?

Pass in noise texture:

PROS:

- Faster.
- More control on the look of the dissolve.

CONS:

- Uses more texture memory.
- Limited variation.
- You have to make the noise textures (I can, of course, include some).

In-shader noise generation:

PROS:

- Easily tweak the properties of the noise from the material.
- No texture required -> less texture memory used.

CONS:

- Slower.
- Look is limited to the noise algorithm used.

 

My answer to such questions is typically: how about both?

But the noise from texture sounds like the best bet, and is more in keeping with the general theme of UVFX, I think. That is, high quality, big textures.

I believe there are free noise textures in the asset store, FWIW.

 

It's just a bit more work on my end to develop and maintain the shaders and it makes it somewhat more confusing if people don't know which one is best for what use-case.

For noise textures that will be used for dissolve, the dimensions can be kept small since it's only going to be used to sample the values from a single channel in the [0, 1] range.

Once I go through my backlog I'll see if I can work on something like this! Unity had a presentation several months ago discussing the use of a new feature: custom vertex streams. And it's exactly suited for something like this.

Something to note, though. UVFX actually does have shaders that can be used for dissolve. The "ghostPortal" prefabs use them. I'm sure I can make them better (or make better versions) by using Amplify! The way they work now is that I use the input vertex colour to clip from a range based on the alpha. All I need to do in Shuriken is have the particle fade out.

For the newer version I can base it on the lifetime by passing the value to the shader using the new custom stream feature. I already have some good experience with that from making some experimental shockwave/anime shaders.

 

Hello Mirza! Purchased the pack a few weeks ago. We are developing for mobile and have many effects from your asset pack. Like a lot.... It's going to take up quite a bit of memory about 16mb per sprite sheet.
Anyway the sprites and prefabs can be optimized for mobile? Thank you!

 

@Ray2016

Hi! Have you tried reducing the compressed resolution of the textures?



Disabling Mip Map Filtering and changing the quality to low will also reduce the size.

I also have Shuriken to Spritesheet, but it's a different asset and you can probably get by without it.

 

Hey! Thanks for the quick response. We are creating asset bundles so the texture size won't be reduced with the suggestion above. I think our artist will have to upload the sprite sheets into photoshop and reduce them there.

 

Hello Mirza,

maybe you could add a new gui drop down in the unity menu where the Quality of all sprites could be changed?
Or could it be possible in the Code for all to let the user decide?

That's an interesting idea in my opinion...

Thanks!

 

The problem I'm foreseeing with that is that it can take a very long time for several large textures to finish compressing (I don't think it's possible to have a cancel - or I'm not aware of it), and the way UVFX ships is that I've already "pre-optimized" most of the texture settings for desktop publishing. Some of the textures are larger than the compression settings they ship with, and even though some are 8192^2, all are set to use a maximum of 4096^2.

 

Any news about explosion prefabs ? I'm still waiting

 

@Quast

Oh, yes! Check this out. I'm not at my main dev machine, but I'm doing lots of experimental work for better explosions, taking cues from Star Citizen.

 

Really great. I love it, and I hope you will continue to focus on real explosion like that we see on games like "RS siege and Call of duty".

 

Absolutely. That's part of what I'm looking into.



The new particle shader I'm working on allows emissive fire against a smokey backdrop. It allows you to keep the smoke dark, but brighten the flames separately. Using HDR and bloom, you can get a really nice look.

It also has another "secret" feature that I don't think has been brought into the asset store before, but they mentioned using the technique in one of the newer Adam tech. demos. Unfortunately, I'm forced to work slower because I'm using my old laptop =/

 

beautiful. this what i'm talking about.
Thank you MB.

 

Hey Mirza,

If I remember right there was something about a particle based energy or progress bar?
Do I remember right? Is there a prefab or a sample, and how is the Performance of it?

Thanks

 

@Firlefanz73

Hello! Yes, it's the prefab, "pf_vfx-ult_demo_psys_loop_loading". It's a very simple circle-loading loop particle system, so performance shouldn't be a problem.

 

Thanks a lot!

 

Hello! I sent an E-mail this morning with this question but I thought it would be prudent to put it up here too.


The gizmo in the scene view is where I put the particle prefab, but there is nothing there. Also, the prefab enters the scene very pale in the hierarchy. This isn't the case with all the prefabs, but most are not showing up for me. I'm using the newest version of Unity. Do you know what might be causing this problem?