Dreamlike Water & Ice VFX Created with Blender, Material Maker, & UE5

VFX Artist Harry Johnston unveiled these magical-looking VFX of water freezing into ice, with fascinating glowing effects and fluid animation.

The artist creatively combined cartoon-style graphics with 3D, drawing inspiration from elemental reactions and combo attacks. To create the setup, Harry Johnston used a combination of industry-standard tools. The artist crafted visual effects in Unreal Engine, with meshes modeled in Blender.

As for the appealing painterly textures, Johnston hand-painted them in Photoshop and used procedural generation in Material Maker. The magical effects were modeled in Blender and animated in the Unreal Sequencer.

Take a look at the concept art and check out a breakdown with more details here, along with the artist's other amazing works:

As for Material Maker, a free node-based tool for creating materials, take a look at these fantastic works crafted using the software by 3D Artist Mingwei Lim, also known as CMZW or celestialmaze, including a smooth animated fire, a glowing fish pond, and more:

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