What are these effects

I am working on a Japanese Style game. Wapanese to be precise.
I have seen many older Playstation games with effects like these on player attacks.
I want to use this exact type of effect you see when the player swipes the sword,
or and when they hit.

They almost look like solid images fading in and out, made with just a few textures and not
a typical particle emitter. But they happen so fast, i can't see what is really happening.

I want effects just like this. I have no idea how they are done.
I have never seen anything like this on the marketplace or any tutorials explaining how to do that effect.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks

 

Those are done with mesh particles. Hand built arcs with shaders to pan / scale textures across the surface based on some particle value (using the alpha, or custom data, etc.).

 

"Weapon trail" is what you're looking for:

 

That's the more western / modern way of doing it, but not how it's done in the videos he linked.

Note, that's not to suggest the western way is better, it's a style choice. It is also more expensive to do it dynamically so old PS1/2 games rarely did it this way, especially since with lower framerates or very fast animations like a lot of action games use there aren't enough frames to make a nice trail.

Some 1 v 1 fighting games would use the trail technique because you could allocate more CPU & GPU time into generating the nice trails. But for action games it's often better to just have a hand made slash shape and spawn it.

 

Yes, that is exactly what i want. It is a style choice. We want that look. I know how to do trails and particles the western way.

Do you know where can i find an example of these mesh arcs, textures used, and shaders?

 

As I saw the first magical weapon trail in the vid, I remembered soul calibur
on the dreamcast. I'm definitely going to watch the rest of this vid later.

 

Try this rabbit hole:
https://realtimevfx.com/t/chinese-vfx-awesomeness/690/15

 

Thanks,

It is totally a rabbithole, every link off of the page leads to something chinese and really hard to follow. But a great starting point. That guy Cheng Gang who made the tutorial does some of the most incredible VFX work I have ever seen.