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To start the new year off right, i thought i'd make something properly FROSTY.

I really enjoyed this project, really honing my timing skills and my understanding of how particles can move through 3D space. I'm happy to have this as the project starting 2025.

I thought the idea of a magic user siphoning moisture from nearby sources to create a shield of ice was a super cool concept, so i really wanted to sell that idea, almost like a water bender needing water from nearby as opposed to creating the water out of nothing like most magic does.

The water is actually a ribbon that's moving along a spline rather than a curve mesh, i think it turned out pretty nice though i had to be careful not to have any super sharp turns in the spline. This required me to build a niagara module based on the old Spline Location module from the VFEXtra plugin, but rather than assign the particle's direct location to the spline, I tied the simulation position/spawn position of the emitter to it. this allowed me to still use the shape location module to make it so the particles weren't just spawning directly on the spline. this mainly was used for the bubbles on the water as the actual ribbon was just spawned on the spline

The water splash was probably one of my favorite minor details of this FX, i really broke down VFXA's goo explosion and recreated it to sell the idea of the water being RIPPED out of the river. I also toyed with the idea of pulling water from the moisture in the surrounding air, but i felt like the river being the source fit better with the "water bender" idea.

The actual shield is multiple layers of spheres with a few different materials attached, similar to the VFXA shield spell lesson. I added a stencil buffer mask to show the character within the ice shield to help with theoretical gameplay scenarios, and also as a homage to Aang in the iceberg in ATLA. The outermost sphere is just a fresnel material with the edge dissolve and the stencil mask. With the second prominent layer being the cracks/rocky texture, followed by a sphere with inverted normals and the sort of icy wind texture on it.

The magic circle was made by me using a disk mesh and its literally just "ICESHIELD" in the Dovakhiin font, using the dragon language from Skyrim. Then i applied a gradient to it so it would start from the inside and expand outwards, and a little bit of a gradient on the lettering to soften the edges.

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CREDITS
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Environment by VFX Apprentice
Character Anims by Sakurai on Fab: https://www.fab.com/listings/a63386b8-7cad-42cd-8b81-a9de147e1f08
Ice meshes kit-bashed from Infinity Blade Effects, edited by me, with new materials/shaders by me.
Dovakhiin font: https://www.dafont.com/dovahkiin.font