Rhei'a the Infernal Vanquisher VFX for Seekers of Skyveil

These are Visual Effects I made for Rhei'a the Infernal Vanquisher for Seekers of Skyveil.

A core part of her ability kit revolves around her unique resource, Heat. She generates heat by using abilities, which increases her defense and speed, represented by the fire aura around her character and between her armor plates. She can then activate an ability to drain her heat but burn targets around her.

A fun part of this project was setting up the blueprint and working with the character/tech art team to create the fire effect between her armor plates.

Another ability is her Slam, she has 3 different shapes of attacks where she hits the ground and generates a shockwave of shattered rock. I used after effects to generate a crack texture as well as the diffuse/spec for the rocks. This is then turned into geometry in maya, and reduced down in polycount.

In order to make the animation of this cheap, rather than being a skinned mesh, each individual piece of rock is given its location through its vertex color, then shader math animates a shockwave that offsets its position in sequence. Many thanks to Omar Garcia for helping create the maya script to automate these colors.

I used the same texture I generated to create a decal on the floor, so it looks like the rocks settle back into cracked/burned ground after each ability.

A similar technique was used for her Ultimate ability, Rush. In this case I made the texture tile over a sphere, and animated the shards jiggling. We then rotate the sphere in the opposite direction of her movement, giving the illusion that as she moves around it is forcing up and disturbing the earth.

Though this project was relatively aggressively timeboxed, I am happy with the result. Niles Tucker painted the crack texture used in her Hop ability (1:20), the fire flipbook used at 0:35, and Moonsoo Park created the round crater texture at the end of her ult (first seen at 0:48).