Paladin VFX (Inspired by Baldur's Gate 3)
This was my attempt at recreating some of the Paladin class VFX (Divine Sense, Aura of Warding/Courage) seen in Baldur's Gate 3. I created the effect in Unreal Engine 5. I used third-party textures for the smoke materials, background bloom, and circle effect, and custom textures for the ripple effects. Character model and animations from Mixamo.
Updated version with assets from the Paragon Agora and Monolith asset pack.
Updated version with changes based on feedback from a professional VFX artist. Character model and animations from Mixamo.
Updated intro.
For the shield texture I used an image from the BG3 wiki as a template to draw a copy using photopea and added fading with an eraser tool. Image source - https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Oath_of_Devotion
New background effect. This was made with two fountain emitters (one large, one small with a wider spread) with stretched particles with a dissolve material.
These soulerscoasters were made with a custom mesh imported from Maya and a scrolling material, created by following this RealtimeVFX tutorial - https://realtimevfx.com/t/vfx-basics-mesh-soulercoasters/1987.
A voronoi texture (third-party) was used to make the updated ground effect. Radial Gradient Exponential was used to soften the outer edge and a Vector to Radial with a panner to move the texture inwards.
This updated effect was made with a cylinder imported from Maya and a material that had distortion and a reverse fresnel applied to soften the edges.
Updated particle burst. I increased the range for the velocity and drag to create less uniform movement and changed the colour to a warmer gold to match the rest of the effect.
Updated main effect.
Cylinders imported from Maya, applied a material with a dissolve that was scaled with dynamic parameters. The tallest cylinder was scaled inwards as the effect came to an end. All the cylinders had a reverse fresnel applied to soften edges.
Cylinder material with dissolve and reverse fresnel.
Shield mesh with a glowing fresnel material. Velocity was added and drag applied for the movement.
Custom simple shield mesh made in Blender and imported into Unreal.
Smoke for the main burst. Two emitters, one using a ring shape with initial high velocity and a lot of drag, and the other more spread out and with a slower outward velocity. Third-party texture used for the smoke.
This effect used an invisible particle with a short lifespan rotating around a point that scaled inwards quickly. A ribbon emitter with a flare texture spawned from the invisible particles to make the trails.
Particles covering the character mesh.
Build up sequence.
Third-party textures used for the smoke material.
For the background of the build up sequence I used a third-party flame texture and stretched it to create a softer effect, duplicated it and added different velocity speeds to create the effect of movement.
Custom texture used in the background of the hand effect.
Stretched particles with custom background texture attached to the character hand.
For the particles building power, I scaled the velocity to make them slow and then move in quickly. I stretched the scale on the y axis so they stretch as they move in, and increased the z velocity slightly so they loop up just before they fly in.
Main effect.
For the ground particles I used a ring shape and added velocity and drag to create the desired movement. The lines were stretched particles in a cylinder shape with added velocity.
Background bloom in main effect.
The ripples on the floor were created with a custom texture attached to a mesh plane and slowly scaled up and rotated. The outer ripples had a reduced alpha and fewer lines on the texture to create a softer look.
Custom texture used for the main, brighter ripples on the floor.
Custom texture used for the outer ripples with fewer lines/detail.
Intro effect added to animation using anim notify.
Intro effect at 0.25 speed.
Main effect added to second animation using anim notify.
Main effect at 0.25 speed.