Fireball Effect

The fireball is the most iconic spell a mage can cast. Being able to ignite fresh air is certainly not easy.

In this series, you’re going to learn to design a fireball so your virtual mages can impress their friends and blast their foes.

The fireball builds upon the techniques you learned with the explosion. It’s a multilayered effect that uses animations to trigger simultaneous particle emissions and adds extra features as using 2d lights to simulate light emission.

You’re going to learn to:

• Use particles physics to simulate fire
• Layer textures and particles to properly shape a VFX
• Make a 2D effect emit light.
• Use animations to simulate fire ignition and fading.
• Reuse particle effects to save time.

To achieve a good looking effect we need to understand the underlying details that compose the Fireball. For that we are going to break down the fireball in two segments and go in depth to understand their design.

With the visuals in place we are going to create two animations one that ignites the fireball turning on the emission of its particles and animating some properties that together with Godot post processing achieve our design. And then another animation that fades the fireball, turning off the particles emission and prepare the effect to disappear.