I’ve been playing a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3 recently and was inspired to start creating again. I love playing caster classes so I wanted to create my own spell. I call this the Chromatic Beam, a concussive force of pure light. Visually, I was inspired by the “Light vs. Dark” event on Real-Time VFX, specifically this post by Ilya Pavlov.

For this project I learned how to create custom nodes in Substance Designer to help make the chromatic aberration effect for the textures. It uses a Pixel Processor node to offset the red and blue channels with adjustable distance and rotation. The “Burst” texture was then made circular by converting the UVs to radial UVs.

Texture Breakdown
Texture Breakdown
Pixel Processor in Custom Node
Pixel Processor in Custom Node
Radial UV Conversion
Radial UV Conversion