Waterfall VFX
Personal Projects
Alex Fraser
Bachelor of Games & Interactive Environments - SoftwareTech Major with Distincion
My waterfall VFX was predominantly made as learning experience, to see if VFX could bridge my love for programming and art
Waterfall VFX
Personal Project:
Waterfall Summary
Since my Capstone game, I've been looking to get into VFX and Technical Art. So I decided to use a challenge by Harry Alisavakis to start learning. I began by reading Joseph Gilland's Elemental Magic, an excellent book on the fundamentals of SFX. I have some plans in the future to start a project for the sake of learning some more!
'The wind Rises' by Hayao Miyazaki
Processes
To start the project out, I looked around for some references. I found a Gif I liked from "The wind Rises' by Hayao Miyazaki. Since this was my first real Shadergraph work, I decided to keep it simple. Analyzing the elements from the source, then attempt to recreate each piece before bringing it back together.
To start, I sketched out what I thought each element that made up the work. I came up with the river foam, the edge, the fall distort, the river foam shadows, edge elements, and finally, the splash.
Waterfall Elements
Using a tutorial from , I learned a method of creating perpetual shapes. Combining a gradient texture with a noise texture, then passing it through a smooth step function. The tutorial increased the gradient to make a smooth fade-in. However, I animated the noise texture instead, creating a moving water-like element. This process was applied throughout the project and was a huge help.
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As for piecing each element together, I wanted each component to be separate, to allow reuse later in other places. Here's an exploded view of what the waterfall looks like minus the splash.
