Looks Hela - Empress of the Cosmos

NOTE: current version is broken due to missing files, update is pending hub approval. Stay tuned.

Updated. Please let me know if there is still any issue


Hela - Empress of the Cosmos

With actual animated VFX from the game!

See for yourself in video preview below:




First of all huge thanks to Foost and Hunting-Succubus for their help on overcoming my biggest roadblock in achieving these effects. VaM really has an amazing community and I couldn't gotten this far without their help.

Well, this has turned out to be quite a project. But I am really glad it ended up looking quite nice. I think I can still get some extra mileage if I spend a bit more time, but I really wanted to post it ASAP.

For the intended look, please make sure you get all dependencies. Also shout out to Stopper for the amazing Clothing plugin manager so I can go with the geoshell rather than going with the actual skin shader replacement.


About the look:

As usual, the head and body are game accurate. The VFX skin is a clothing item named Hela_Eoc_VFX_Geoshell. If you don't want the VFX, just remove it. The Cape also has VFX.

All clothing from the skin were ported except the weapon and the orbs on her headdress. They both has some VFX element to it and require some additional work to get right, I just leave them out for now.

Base skin texture is the ported from the game.

Known issues (PLEASE READ):

1. if you load the scene/clothings for the first time, the VFX skin and the cape may not load the textures correctly. If that happens, just reload the plugins on "Hela_Eoc_VFX_Geoshell" and "Hela_EoC_Cape" clothing items, or just reload the scene altogether

2. Since the skin VFX is bound to screen space, the size of the black hole can vary based on the height of the screen. The default look in the scene is based on my own game resolution with is 2560 * 1440. If yours is a different height, the blackhole can appear bigger/smaller. To adjust this, go to the clothing "Hela_Eoc_VFX_Geoshell" -> plugin -> ScreenSpaceTextureAnchorOverlay_Clothing plugin, then adjust the "Overlay Scale" slider to change the black hole's size.

3. Similarly, if you take screen shots with any resolution other than your VaM game resolution, the black hole size will change. Either change the size from the plugin to compensate for it, or stick with the in-game resolution

4. In VR, the effect can look a bit trippy up close. If it is giving you trouble, you can turn down the Alpha and Overlay Alpha from the clothing plugin, or just take off the Hela_Eoc_VFX_Geoshell


I don't know if any of the above can be resolved without restarting from scratch with a different approach, I tried a lot of ways but I think it is the best version I can do now. If any issue you encounter that is game-breaking please report here I'll see if I can fix.


Lastly thanks to all the creators in the credits as always.

Hope you all enjoy.

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Now, for anyone that is interested in how the effect is done:

It consists of 3 parts, the clothing item, the clothing plugin, custom shader assetbundle.

The plugin is loaded by Stopper's clothing plugin manager onto the clothing item, then it loads the shader from the assetbundle and replaces the default shader of the clothing item.

In the shader, it basically does two things:

1. calculates UV of the mesh and bind it to screen space, and anchor the center to the Person's bone position (in this case, chest) and a bunch of other calculations. This gives the texture a pseudo-parallax/"texture swimming under skin" effect.

2. runs an overlay pass that animate a changing glow effect of the blackhole and the stars, and a slow scrolling effect of the star background.

Then it is just a matter of fine tuning the different parameters.