This is a Valorant-inspired Finisher, created with the goal of making it look and feel like something that could exist in the actual game over the course of four weeks part-time. I took on this project to sharpen my skills in traditional VFX work, particularly focusing on timing and building up to a climax. I also wanted to dive deeper into material creation, as it's an area I've wanted to understand and improve in.
A huge thanks to Vilgot From Borg for the sound design of the effects!
I wanted to create this misty, ghost-like effect with wobbly edges and some colored, smoky fire, all leading up to a impactful climax. The tricky part was getting the timing of the buildup to flow nicely into the more static phase, where the fire lingers and the runes start glowing on the ground.
I’m really happy with how the explosion turned out, it does a great job of transitioning the character from solid to ghost, and the shockwave adds a lot to the overall feel. I also threw in some flakes during the character dissolve to give the effect more texture, instead of just having the character fade out.
Build-up and ground effect
Climax explosion
Character fading away
Hit character impact point
The most important part of the whole effect comes from a specific material setup that I ended up reusing in pretty much every material. It’s a simple setup, but it adds a ton of life to the overall look.
Instead of just having the main texture pan or rotate, I layer in an extra panning or rotating noise onto the UVs. That extra bit of movement adds some nice randomness and variation, making everything feel more dynamic and alive.
Key material function
Masks I made in Photoshop
Valorant uses template animations for most of their "Finishers" to keep a consistent style across them, and I wanted to try replicating one of those animations myself. I decided to animate my character from scratch in Blender, using actual Valorant animations as reference and I think it turned out pretty well for what I was going for.
Even though the animation is one complete action in Blender, I later split it up in Unreal to have more control over the timing and how it fits into the effect.
Animation