The Weeknd
“Blinding Lights,” VFX, Lighting, and Environment
This sequence is a “Fear And Loathing”-esque Vegas nightmare. It starts on a literal stage, and devolves from there. Visible in this clip, I made:
The full venue environment, layout, and atmosphere.
The spotlight beam and flare effects (there was no volumetric lighting available in this version of Unity).
Backup dancer chromatic echoes effect.
The city layout, and the shader that forms it.
Vegas-style “Chat Signs” that display attendees’ messages.
Dice and Cards VFX.
City Veins Modular Dissolve Shader
I love this shader! It is really fun to use, and quickly inspires new ideas.
It is based around a set of Modular Dissolve shader functions I cooked up to facilitate easy set up of various coordinate space input configurations. One UV input creates a gradient for directionality (typically radial or axis-aligned), a second UV input maps emissive and dissolve textures into the gradient (typically triplanar projected or UV2). A multitude of UV coordinate space inputs have been bundled up, and can be simply snapped into the main mat function for ultra-easy use. Some nice additional features include vertex offset, emissive traces, and audio reactivity. The functions can be snapped together easily in any shader, and I added a helpful debug toggle that turns the shader opaque and draws an emissive gradient visualization for easy tuning of the main area of effect.
Doja Cat Chromatic Echoes
Doja Cat appears with guest vocals at one point. Same idea as the backup dancer echoes. It is literally additive dupes of the character, offset on the timeline. I added some depth fade to the shader to keep it looking good against the body. Full character dupes was an expensive way of doing it, but we could pull it off on the hefty broadcast PC rendering the show.
