Welcome!
It’s very interesting that you’ve chosen to go down the route of a freelacer in Game VFX. I’ve only heard of one other case of this. How do you do it? How do you get over the problem that most studios only have inhouse tools? Do you work on site or remotely? It would be ace if you could share your experiences.
Some feedback! The following is just my opinions. Read and do with them what you please.
The Fire:
I assume the fire is based off two fire emitters, one smoke, one embers and one smokeburst.
Using two emitters for the fire isn’t very efficient. You get more overhead this way. Also it makes it very obvious that you have one tall and one short emitter. The shape then becomes static. If you use the sprite scale and movement to shape the fire it will look a lot more dynamic. Also, the fire texture animation looks like it’s playing at 5 times the normal speed. Try adding depthfade to the fire sprites to make it less visible where they intersect with the ground.
The Embers have a very obvious orbit. Make the offset bigger so they flow more back and forth rather than spinning around an offset.
The smoke is very solid (as in, I can see and count the sprites). A small fire like this wouldn’t generate smoke like that. Try to make the fire “turn into” the smoke instead of emitting it from a point in the middle. initial position and transparency usually helps with this.
The colourfade is nice.
Another trick I often use to give it more life is to use a local force to fake a bit of wind. It’s very rare to see a real fire with smoke rising dead straight.
The smoke arms that come flying out now and then. It’s a cool technique, but save it for explosions and collapses. Fires don’t do that.
The Healing thing:
Nice! I’m liking the colours and movement.
I think you could use a bit more transparency fade on the coloumns as they disappear to mask the pop they have now. The fade would also help you mask the stepping on the edges of the coloumn.
The finale could use some more work. I don’t understand whats going on. The nice glowing energy disappears and instead we get a sphere with a scrolling texture that scales out and explodes in a flat plane of sparks? Why no blinding light as the energy is released? Why no residual sparks falling down afterwards? Give the end a bit more love and you have a winner.
Plasma Explosion:
The colours and the ground stuff is lovely.
The biggest problem with this one is timing. You have a nice start with it being scaled up within a rame or two, but then it just fizzles for abit instead of giving you the Oompf of an explosion. This could very well be an artistic choice you made so it’s fine. Just saying what I would have done.
In General:
If I was looking I would first check to see if you could make the type of effects I would have you working on.
For example, if I was making a realistic shooter, I’d want to see explosions, muzzleflashes, fire and weather effects.
If I was making an MMO I’d want to see colourcoded effects, pickups, spells and general magic.
And so on.
My recommendation is that you pick a game type to focus on. Make a suite of effects and polish them. Once you are happy with them, try a new genre.
Best of luck to you, and keep us posted with your progress!