This page contains all of the VFX projects I have worked on and includes descriptions of the work and the projects they belong to. If you would like to see a curated list of effects, feel free to visit the “Favorite Effects” page located in the menu at the top of the page.
Realism Campfire
October 2020
This project was done in Unity using the HDRP render pipeline. The particle systems are all created using the VFX Graph, the the sprite sheets being made in Substance Designer. This project was done as a practice in realistic effects as well as a way of recreating an effect I made a few years ago that was lost to a corrupted hard drive.
Stick Fight Study
March 2019
My reference for the explosion effect
This project was done in Unity and was a study on the explosion effect from Stick Fight the Game. The stylized effect felt rather unique and seemed different from other things I have attempted, and some changes were made to the timing to make the explosion feel a bit quicker and more sudden so it had a little originality in it as well.
Void Grenade Effect
February 2019
This project was done in Unity and was heavily inspired by the Shadowshot attack from the Hunter’s Nightstalker subclass in Destiny. The attack was to be used as the effect for a “Void Grenade” that when activated would pull enemies towards the center point, and then throw them outwards while dealing damage on the explosion.
Unreal Engine Practice
October 2018
This project was done in Unreal and was intended as practice for the engine since most projects I have worked on have been in Unity. The goal was to create shaders for the water and particles, as well as some particle systems to maintain skills with Unreal’s Shader Graph and Cascade systems.
Black Hole Shader Study
May 2018
Prototyping a physically accurate black hole shader in HLSL 
Playing with the radius to see what kind of effects it can create
This project was made in Unity and was done to practice HLSL coding as well as a way of exploring my interest in black holes. Eventually I wanted to create some form of mechanic around it as well as add some form of depth buffer to fix the issue of the black hole rendering in front of the player but I ended up getting too busy working with Honor Brawl to complete the project.
Honor Brawl | Lead VFX Artist
March 2018 – June 2018
The final test of the scenic water shader for the project 
In level tests of the water shader 
Early test of the water shader 
Teleport effects for ice and fire mage enemy types 
Campfire effect test 
Test of the parallax effect on world select portals 
Active world portal door test 
Locked world portal door test 
Machine boss death explosion which was repurposed later in development 
Fire spell projectile 
Ice spell projectile 
Effect test on TNT enemy prototype 
Effect added to floating “elevator” platforms 
Magic Aura for flying enemy 
Highlight shader used for seeing allys through walls 
Effect to show the path enemies will take in the coming wave 
Early test for effect from store purchases 
Location Marker for ally placement orders 
Healing effect test 
Effect test for an enemy detecting the player (was later removed) 
Effect test for an enemy suspicious of the player (was later removed)
This project was done in Unity and the team had gone through a lot of different changes in genre and style throughout the development before eventually settling on a concept they liked. This allowed a large amount of prototyping in different styles and testing new ideas in a short amount of time, as well as experimenting with new things like writing shaders from scratch, AI-controlled particle effects, and PFI for stealth-based mechanics.
Pantaloon Pyro
March 2018
This project was made in Unity and was initially a joke between some friends where they had challenged me to make some kind of effect out of their pants. The initial effect that was made was using a picture taken of their pants after they had been randomly tossed on a bed, and a further challenge a picture of the pants laid flat was used, as well as a picture of our friend’s face. This whole project was done in around an hour from the initial challenge to the finished product.
Atlas Levels: Portals | VFX Artist & Game Designer
February 2018
This project was done in Unity as quick prototyping of some mechanics. This was the first time I used render textures in effects and clearly, it wasn’t quite perfect, but this prototype laid the foundation for the World Portals done later for the project Honor Brawl. This is an effect that I fully intend to revisit in the future to combine the art made previously, as well as the functionality started in this project and completed in the Honor brawl project.
Breifcase | VFX Artist & Level Designer
January 2018 – March 2018
This project was done in Unity and wasn’t extremely heavy in VFX, the extent of the effects work was mostly a Cel Shading shader and some minor environmental effects to give the space more life, like the leaves from the tree in the gif above. The project ended very early in development so many things were still in block out and early stages of functionality.
Slam Heroes | Lead VFX Artist
November 2017 – March 2018
This project was done in Unity and I joined the team to make them some attack effects and some environmental effects. The attacks called for more layered effects than what I was used to at the time which provided a great learning experience, but the project ended up being terminated by the team and was never completed.
Boost Hawks | Lead VFX Artist
October 2017
This project was done in Unity and my work was focused on projectiles, explosions, impacts, and some additional effects not shown. I created the effects to compliment the the different projectiles in the game as well as the impact effects and death effects of enemies. The GIF makes the lighting of the explosions and the red flash of the player taking damage far more dramatic but otherwise the effects appeared as shown. Most effects in the game were my responsibility, however some other effects were handed off to others to meet time constraints such as the ship trails and the background as it was meant to move and feature nebula like effects.
Portal Study
July 2017
This project was done in Unity and was my initial work with particle systems. The effects themselves are actually not the “milestone” of this project as I followed a tutorial that is linked below. The major point of this project was that all of the sprites used in the effect were made by me from scratch using Microsoft PowerPoint since at the time I did not have access to the Adobe Suite and it was the program I understood the best.
Link to the Tutorial mentioned above:
Unity VFX – Portal (Particle System Tutorial) by Mirza Beig