Jinxbomb
When people find out I’m a VFX artist, it’s always like, ‘Ah, so you’re the one doing all the explosions and cool stuff!’ And honestly… they’re not wrong. I mean, what kind of artist would I be if I didn’tblow something up? But seriously, I get it. Explosions are actually a great way to learn a bunch of important stuff. Timing, shape, color, you name it. So for this project, I just wanted to play around with all those elements and see how cool I could make it, of course, with my own little twist. Most of the work was done in Niagara, complemented by post-process effects and some Blueprint scripting to support the functionality.
Jinxbomb by KangaroOz 3D
Houdini explosion
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Niagara system
Wind impact
As the final touch on the project, I created some firefly particles to add a more magical and cozy atmosphere. To keep things optimized, I made sure the fireflies spawned around the slime’s position that was set up through the Blueprint system. (SKRIV OM BLUEPRINT)
Smoke
Here, I created particles that use the same offset shader I mentioned earlier to give them a sense of life and motion. When the particles die, a splash effect is spawned at their position. I set this up using a collision event in the Niagara system. The splash particles are driven by a shader that scrolls a texture, which is then eroded by another texture. This shader is applied to a plane mesh that rotates 360 degrees to give the illusion of an outward burst.
Clover
What even is a slime that spawns flowers if it doesn’t also leave little clovers wherever it goes? Exactly the same question I asked myself! To save time, I reused the firefly emitter and tweaked it to have the same kind of random spawning. I then grabbed the actor’s position and did a sphere cast against the distance field to determine where the clovers should appear
Glitch effect
What even is a slime that spawns flowers if it doesn’t also leave little clovers wherever it goes? Exactly the same question I asked myself! To save time, I reused the firefly emitter and tweaked it to have the same kind of random spawning. I then grabbed the actor’s position and did a sphere cast against the distance field to determine where the clovers should appear
Blueprint system
For this project to even work, I had to rig and animate the slime. And honestly, animating a slime is the perfect way to dive into the fundamentals of animation, like squash and stretch, anticipation, timing, and more.
I rigged the slime in a way that allows me to easily grab the side controllers to create squash and stretch effects and the same goes for the head
controller.
Problem & solution
I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to make, I just knew I wanted a character with some kind of effect. Then I stumbled upon the slime… and honestly, I couldn’t resist! I worked efficiently on the connection between the Blueprint system and the Niagara particles, and also spent a good amount of time in the shader to create the outline effect and give the slime its signature wiggle.
Slime by DennisFan
Enviroment by luoxiaohei
Congrats on making it to the end, welcome to my bloopers!!
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