Originally posted by Mr_Simba
Appreciate the breakdown. I don't really know how the backend on y'all's stuff works so in taking a mental stab at it I would've assumed Aphelios was about 2-3x the VFX work of a normal champ, but sounds like it's even more than that.
I kinda would have assumed the VFX would "blend" together so to speak; if he's using guns X + Y, the different VFX profiles for those two guns would be used in tandem, hopefully with some system in place to tie VFX to be tracking bones or what have you, such that the workload would be heavier than normal but would still kinda just click into place so to speak. But that's all very idealistic and likely misses the complexities required to make the VFX truly look good and fit in with each animation for each champ.
Out of curiosity, does any of that difficult come with shortcomings in the system/engine (e.g. something which leads to a lack of VFX reusability across animations), or is the VFX system robust and it's just the nature of the be...
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No worries! I totally understand that from an outside perspective, the amount of work would look much lower than it actually is. :)
I haven't worked on Aphelios myself, but have looked at his setup, and I'd say it's a bit of a mix of many different factors. The way his spells work makes it so different keys are necessary for things to merge well together. As StarWeaver noted above, there are special VFXs just for interaction between guns, and when you have five guns that can interact with each other, it quickly multiplies the amount of VFXs that need to be made. Then you have to think about all the little bells and whistles everywhere in his kit (all the small cast and hit effects, the different missiles, the turret, etc...), and it just adds and adds and adds more keys to the workload.
I often joke on Twitter about how I really do not want to ever have to work on an Aphelios skin, and that's the reason why: he's basically five champs in one, and that's quite the am...
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