VFX Breakdown – Water Projectile
This effect came directly from a community request over on 1mafx.com. It focuses on creating a stylized water projectile that blends performance with natural motion.
Here’s a breakdown of how we approached it, and how you can apply the same techniques in your own work.
Getting Started
We began by previewing the final result and then broke the effect down into key components.
The first step was building the core meshes in Houdini:
- A base mesh for the main projectile body
- Additional meshes for splashes and droplets
- Extra polish meshes for clean visual falloff at the end of the projectile
These elements give the water effect both structure and a natural, layered motion. The workflow is reusable across other water-style effects.
You can check out the mesh creation process in these free Houdini tutorials:
- Water Projectile Meshes Part 1: Watch Tutorial
- Water Projectile Meshes Part 2: Watch Tutorial
Adding Texture Motion
Instead of building new textures in Substance Designer, we reused a WPO (World Position Offset) texture originally created for the Fire Projectile tutorial. This texture drives motion across the water mesh and helps give the illusion of depth and fluid motion.
Interested in how it works? Here’s the texture tutorial:
- WPO Texture Tutorial: Watch Tutorial
Bringing It All Together
The full tutorial walks through combining the Houdini meshes with:
- Particle-driven splashes
- Droplet meshes
- WPO-driven materials
The goal was to keep things readable and optimized while still achieving a believable water effect that feels game-ready.
Explore the Full Tutorial
If you’d like to build this effect from scratch, the full walkthrough, including meshes, materials, Niagara setup, and polish techniques, is available to Tier 1 members on 1mafx.com.
You can also join the mailing list to get more breakdowns like this and stay in the loop on upcoming releases.
Create this VFX
