Among the Magic Media team’s extensive portfolio of game VFX scenes, Sword Strike stands out as one of our most visually stunning pieces. Action games have never gone out of fashion, and combined with the progressively more striking possibilities of video game visual effects, an action sequence like this one would fit right in with any modern action title.
Our game VFX artists collaborated to bring Sword Strike to life not for any one particular project, but as an exercise in exploring new ideas with action sequences and to keep their skills sharp for creating pieces of this nature.
Sword Strike’s Timeline and Origin
The idea for Sword Strike came up in a conversation between two of our game VFX artists. One of our artists had been working diligently on a lighting setup at that point, and they thought it was the perfect opportunity to craft a third-person action sequence around their already-in-progress lighting and game VFX work, which would act as the ‘finale’ of the piece. Additionally, our artists realized it had been some time since there was an opportunity to craft a game VFX sequence of this kind, so it also acted as a refresher for third-person action sequences.
Our game VFX artists took a different approach when developing their Sword Strike concept. Usually, concept development for most art and game VFX would begin with a rough idea the artists would gather references to help develop it further. This time, we already had a focal point in the pre-existing lighting and game VFX work one of our artists had been actively working on, so it was more of a matter of working backward from that to build a sequence around it.
As Sword Strike wasn’t for a client project, our artists only had one week to complete their work on it before other projects would take precedence, a timeline our artists were more than capable of meeting before their skills were needed on new client projects. Considering the short timeline, it’s a testament to our artists’ ability to work together as a team and produce high-quality game VFX work despite the constraints.
Sword Strike’s Attacks and Game VFX
With Sword Strike’s slash attacks, our game VFX artists considered two possible approaches. One is to use a ribbon effect that is attached to the weapon, and the other is to use a mesh that follows the attack animation to create the effect. The ribbon effect works more effectively when used in conjunction with smoother animations, so we opted to go this route as the animations we used were nice and smooth and would produce the best results. The mesh approach is perfectly viable but yields better results when used with rougher animations.
The slash attacks seen in the attack combo have some added lens flare, sparks, and hits attached to make them more eye-catching and visually pop. The majority of their work went into creating the final slash. Our team used multiple ribbon effects on it to help make it as flashy as seen in the final sequence, in addition to multiple shaders which allowed our game VFX artists to achieve the exact movement of the textures they wanted. The lighting was created using a beam emitter and a custom lightning texture with some dissolve effects on it. Our artists said that had this game VFX sequence been created for client projects they would have taken a different approach to some things, the beam emitter was fixed and not procedural, for example, which wasn’t ideal but not a concern for this project where time was limited.
Tools and Software Used for Sword Strike
Unreal Engine 5.3 was used to render the sequence. Substance Designer and Photoshop were used for textures, and the models, animations, and the scene itself are third-party assets. The models, for example, are from Paragon by Epic Games. The use of third party assets greatly helped our game VFX artists expedite the process and to maximize their focus on the game VFX aspects.
While there were some challenges throughout this project, namely retargeting the animations which took a bit of time, the project went smoothly and yielded high-quality results.
Contact Magic Media today to learn more about our game VFX services, in addition to the dozens of others we provide for gaming, entertainment, and tech projects including full-cycle game development, art production, and more. Reach out, and let’s create magic!
