VFX Apprentice
@vfxapprentice
💥 Stylized visual FX training for video games and animation. Join the rapidly growing community and start your FX journey today.
New in Asset Library: a set of Unity and Unreal projects for DnD-inspired spells by Mario Belén! Learn the industry-standard workflow, follow the habits of VFX Artists with production experience, and hone your craft of VFX - all in one place. #vfx #gamedev #techart #realtimevfx #FantasyArt #DnD
If you’re struggling to make your 2D or 3D VFX feel punchy, try the vocal trick: before launching your particle systems, voice the sounds your effect should make out loud and record it. #VFX #GameDev #Animation #TechArt
A reminder that today is #VFXFriday - a perfect time to share a piece you recently finished, or are working on right now! Here are some works shared in our community these past few weeks 👏 #GameDev #VFX #RTVFX #DigitalArt
Block-ins are the most efficient way to practice timing in your effects: no textures, no materials, only punch. Use a "block-in" method to focus our attention where it counts - on player satisfaction. #vfx #gamedev #visualfx #realtimevfx
Super excited to announce a new challenge we're hosting on our Discord server: discord.gg/jXQSwasgu Spend a day on the beach with us and use water, beach, sand, and summer themes to make an amazing effect! Accepting submissions until the end of summer ☀️
Pro-tip: Use the "heartbeat" test. Does the motion feel faster or slower than a heartbeat? Faster motion often signals danger, while slower movement feels calmer. Having these ideas in mind makes VFX design much easier - and much more intentional. VFX by @dianasimonyan.bsky.social
To make magic feel distinct, artists rely on shape language and color psychology: - bright flashing colors can feel magical - darker purples and bubbles can feel poisonous - sharp shapes often feel dangerous - rounded shapes feel friendly or healing Concepts by @soniafirsova.bsky.social
Instead of: "magic purple explosion", try: "a purple cloud that expands and breaks apart, pulling magical smoke behind it". It forces you to consider how the effect behaves physically, which makes the final result more readable and believable. Concept by Shawn Johnson.
An explosion shouldn’t instantly disappear without a trace - that’s why dissipating smoke, lingering particles, and light rays help sell the effect. One thing that makes effects more interesting is describing them in physical terms before even sketching the concept.
For fire or water, we rely heavily on nature. But magical spells are much more open to interpretation because we don’t encounter them in real life. Even when creating magical effects, artists still need to ground them in believable motion and behavior. VFX by Daryna Masiahina
The first milestone in creating an effect is concept art. It helps define the idea and determine what the effect should look like. There’s one challenge, though: the concept is a still frame, yet it needs to represent all phases of the effect in a single image. #vfx #conceptart #gamedev
"This was one of the first effects I ever made, and it's more focused on timing and cinematics" - Gustavo D. Rosa about his Water Slash effect. You might remember it from the #VFXAPoolParty challenge 🎉 Available right now in the All Access Pass: www.vfxapprentice.com/vfx-apprenti... #vfx #gamedev
Start building a visual mental library: every study adds another piece to it. Eventually, when approaching an effect you’ve animated before, you have a plan for how to tackle it. Training your eye to understand nature so that your imagination has something solid to build from. #vfx
So, how to interpret a real-life 3D phenomenon into a flat 2D drawing? The answer is shape studies through tracing: it isn’t a bad thing when learning - it helps you understand how these shapes behave. As you repeat the process, you start recognizing the patterns yourself.
There’s an endless amount of real-life footage available online, and the more you study, the better you become at understanding shapes, motion, and energy. First, you naturally focus on every tiny detail. Over time, you begin seeing broader shapes and movement patterns instead.
When it comes to effects, most people want to jump into drawing - and that excitement is excellent. But one of the most overlooked fundamentals is grounding your work in real life. Whether it’s fire, water, smoke, explosions, or lava, the key is simple: reference constantly.
A visual effect tells a story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Today, we're diving into the building blocks of VFX - they work together at the hands of the artist to create compelling visuals for our effect. #vfx #rtvfx #vfxfriday #techart
If textures are the visuals and meshes are the canvas, shaders are how we manipulate them. They control positional movement, scaling, tiling, color changes, distortion, and erosion effects. The shader is the math and logic, the material is the interface we use to control it.
Some common meshes for effects include spheres and cylinders, but custom shapes like spirals and stretched semicircles can add extra volume and motion for slashes, shockwaves, and swipes.
Fun fact: textures are often black and white because color and opacity can later be adjusted inside the particle system. Meshes are three-dimensional objects onto which we apply textures. Think of wrapping a flat map around a globe - the image gains depth and dimension.
Textures are often the first building block of an effect. They’re the visuals we see at the beginning, and there are several kinds used for different purposes: An effect is usually made from many textures working together, not just one.
We’re launching a round of surveys this week to ask you how we can improve our school. Everyone subscribed to our newsletter will receive the surveys, just make sure your notifications are enabled in your account settings! Every contribution counts 🤝
With an intuitive understanding of how hues blend and interact, you can use color much more effectively in your VFX. 💪 A simple exercise: Try color matching using RGB values. Think of a color you want to recreate, guess its RGB values, and then test yourself in the color picker.
Alpha controls transparency, while HSV stands for Hue, Saturation, and Value: - Hue describes where the color sits on the color wheel. - Value describes how bright or dark the color is. - Saturation describes the purity or vibrance of the color.
