Slash Sword Trail VFX for hack and slash games | Godot 4.1

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If you want to make games like Hades, Devil May Cry, Transformer Devastation or any other similar games this tutorial is just for you!

Arif uses Blender in conjunstion with Godot's Powerful visual shader to conjure the slash vfx.

Chapters:
00:00 What the tutorial covers
00:30 Creating the slash mesh in Blender
04:20 Lowering the polycount when converting from curves
05:55 UV setup
10:11 Godot visual shader session
13:24 Animating the Shader Parameters
18:47 a short coding session
20:40 Integrating the slash to character animation
23:28 Rambly Closing thoughts

[cassieg]

Your videos are extremely insightful, from both a technical and artistic aspect, especially to someone who is dabbling in Godot currently. Thank you for sharing your processes :)

[TheRealKeyvan]

I vastly prefer this solution to the particle trails I've experimented with. Great video. :)

[gamedev]

That's a cool tutorial, thank you!

[sidremus]

Great video! As a VFX artist I always appreciate if folks throw some love to Godot. Not that much content for it out there (that's not the same two shaders)
A small note I have, at around 13:40 the VectorOp node isn't really necessary to scale the UVs, as the UVFunc actually already provides this exact functionality.
But either way, it's still the very good way to make this sorta effect!

[sawyunwe]

A great tutorial. Thank you for sharing.

[herbert]

Thank you so much, very helpful content :)

[tartifletteman]

Thanks a lot man for sharing your knowledge, you help a lot :D

[Raw_]

очень крутой туториал, спасибо автору за столь подробное объяснение

[gonderage]

ON JAH THIS IS WHAT I NEED RIGHT NOW FR FR
ive been too lazy to think about doing vfx since idk the workflow for it, and everyone's like uSe ShAd0rZ!!!" but i didnt know about doing things with meshes

[andykopylov]

Your tutorials rock! Can't wait for 3d trail tutorial for dash, already tried a lot but still looks bad :(

[hogandromgool]

I've been looking for this tutorial for over 3 years. I'm so far through my came dev journey I'm almost ready for release but I still couldn't figure out a bunch of things like sword trails

[sweetbabyalaska]

Damn those animations are clean! I'd like to know how you blend them into forward movement and make them look so smooth

[chocolandtv]

awesome, can you make a tutorial how to animate UI with some cool VFX in Godot =D??

[lukabrasi]

VERY helpful video! do you mind if i ask how you set up your combo system to seamlessly flow between the moves? I tried making something similar with oneshots but it's not the solution i'm looking for

[nsd]

Amazing tutorial!! But man, please how you made this fade effect of meshes with camera proximity?! this is so cool!

[KaletheQuick]

Oh, woah! What are you doing for the fade effect on those platforms? It looks great!

[saint-frog]

How did you make the slash mesh glow and vibrate so much? I didn't get the part where you changed from the muted color 18:47 to the vibrant one in 20:50.

[wgvukvs]

Please make a video on hollow purple vfx

[ChrisSwafford]

Do you have a tutorial on making a game like this? Great video. Thanks!

[mauricestardddude]

I really gotta inform you that the coding in this is pretty bad
Not because it doesn't work but because it misunderstands how animation players work

The play function of the animation player is meant to START an animation

However with your process function you are calling that animation unnecessarily every single frame (though appearently godot doesn't restart it if it is already playing)

Another thing is that Animations in Godot actually stop themselves when they finish

So you basically only need to call the play function on the animation player once and then that's it (and you also gotta make sure the animation isn't set to repeat itself on end but to stop)


What you actually wanna do is give the slash node a function which calls the animation
And instead of setting the slash variable to true via animation you call that function


The only other thing I'd like to add is that you MIGHT wanna be caution with the animating of shaders, though honestly I am not particularly sure about that
The issue I see with that is that you are animating something that'll need to be thrown from the CPZ onto the GPU which is a bit of a costy thing to do if you're doing it a lot

In this case it is of course pretty unimportant because it's like 8 Byte per frame, but just be a tiny bit cautious and try thinking of another solution if you got 1000 meshes that you wanna animate
(Also as counterargument on how unimoortant this tangent is: for some quick joke I made a shader which uses an image... And I animated it to be a rickroll, so every single frame I threw a picture to the GPU... It wasn't an issue, there is usually a lot higher load on the CPU to GPU pipeline, just don't do it for every single mesh and you should be fine)


Other than that this is a REALLY good solution and one of the best Godot tutorials I've seen
I'll probably be using this on quicker projects (though on more polished ones I'd probably prefer something with a hand-drawn animation instead of a shader animation)