Nema's Magical Blast VFX Breakdown

This is a breakdown for the magic blast effect I made for the game Nema! I could definitely clean it up a little bit but for the timeline I had to work on it I am super happy with it.

At its core its just some cylinders rigged with 2 bones (The beam's start and end points), and a particle system so its a pretty simple effect. To implement it in game the only thing we had to do was set the End joint to where the player shot and dissolve the beams out after some time.

Play Nema here: https://justice-shultz.itch.io/nema

In game video of the beam

Final Effect

Particles that appear at the end of the beam

Weight Painting for the beam + You can see how simple the rig is

Vertex Color is used as a mask so the ends aren't too offset from where they should be

Random vertex offset using scrolling noise makes the effect feel much more intense and alive

For fading the beam out I used a very basic dissolve. We set dissolve to 1 when the player fires and lower it to 0 after a duration

I used scrolling noise sampled in screen space to offset some voronoi noise and then multiplied by whatever colors I wanted and added in highlights to brighten it up