SLASH_03
_SHOWCASE
Slash 03 is a stylized blade-slash VFX piece inspired by the iconic Fushigiri skill from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. This project focused on building slash trails with ribbons, controlling texture motion through custom UV workflows, and extending animation montage notifies to support layered translucent materials more reliably during the attack sequence.
Another major goal of this study was capturing a strong sense of weight and impact through the combined use of camera shake, post-process materials, and carefully tuned ribbon motion.
"It is through this power that it creates life."
_ANIMATION_NOTIFY
For this effect, I intentionally avoided using a complex blueprint setup or Sequence to drive the timing. To iterate quickly and achieve the result more directly, I placed all of the visual elements onto the animation montage through Animation Notifies, and used a simple blueprint only to trigger the montage itself.
Since the effect was built with the older Cascade particle system, it was not practical to keep all ribbon elements inside a single particle system. This introduced potential issues with translucent rendering order, especially when multiple ribbon layers needed to overlap in a controlled way.
To address this, I created custom Animation Notifies for different ribbon layers, allowing their sorting order to be adjusted directly within the montage. This gave me more reliable control over the layered translucent effect and helped preserve the readability of the final slash.
_SHADER
The shader work for this effect is mainly built around the ink material, which acts as the primary visual layer of the slash. The base of the material is a brush-like opacity texture, giving the ribbon a stylized, calligraphic shape instead of a clean synthetic edge.
To control the reveal timing of the ribbon, I animated two horizontal black-and-white masks along the U axis, both using Clamp sampling mode. This allowed the slash to appear in a more deliberate and art-directed way, with visibility controlled directly through the material rather than only through emitter timing.
Because texture tiling in Cascade tends to stretch across the ribbon as it grows, I also customized the overall U-axis control of the opacity mapping to keep the ink shape more stable and readable throughout the motion.
_PARTICLE_SYSTEM
Since this effect was created with the older Cascade particle system, the available particle-side controls were relatively limited compared to more modern workflows. For that reason, the particle system itself was kept intentionally simple rather than heavily customized.
The setup mainly relies on a basic trail renderer, supported by Spawn Per Unit for more stable ribbon generation during movement, and Dynamic Material control to pass timing and visual changes into the shader.
Most of the final look was therefore achieved through material treatment and effect timing, while the particle system served as a lightweight foundation for the slash.
