I've checked this video: Surface Tension: Liquid Effects in The Last of Us. But after watching the video, I have difficulty imagine the way to create these blood effect.

So he said the blood has 2 parts: Animation & Shading

So here I imagine (I'm not an expert so the chance I imagine wrong is very high)

The animation part, you can use Adobe After Effect & Photoshop to create, I think the final result is a particle effect:

1. Get a green screen blood effect video --> BloodFx.mp4

2. [BloodFx.mp4] --> [Adobe Photoshop] --> Images files.

Then use Photoshop and some other program to tailor the images files, check the video in the spoiler below (I put it in the spoiler in case the image of the video too large for this page)

About the shading part. I vaguely imagine like this:

1. Write shading script (HLSL)

2. Use a sculpt software to sculpt the blood and use XNormal to generate the Normals.

But how can this work with the particle effect from the first part?

What is this blood, it's 2d sprite particle effect or it's liquid entity (like water, the sea or the whisky you can see in Micheal's glass in GTA V). What software require to make this blood effect?

Thanks for reading.

The blood effect of The Last of Us just impressive

The effect is a 2D animation used as a billboard, a particle, it is a really common way of doing this.

On 4/27/2018 at 3:32 PM, 123iamking said:

1. Get a green screen blood effect video --> BloodFx.mp4

2. [BloodFx.mp4] --> [Adobe Photoshop] --> Images files.

This is very accurate except for one thing. It's a bad idea to use a movie file, instead you should use sprite sheets or just a collection of images.

Using a video codec like mp4 can cause a lot of problems when you try to retrieve the next frame. Animated particles mostly use sprite sheets. It's because the video compresses the images of each frame and makes extracting it a bit of a problem.

On 4/27/2018 at 3:32 PM, 123iamking said:

About the shading part. I vaguely imagine like this:

Lots of good splash shaders exist, you could even skip this part if you are using a engine like Unity or Unreal, with little tweaking of the secular shader it is easy to make a blood shader.

On 4/27/2018 at 3:32 PM, 123iamking said:

But how can this work with the particle effect from the first part?

The only tricky part to this is creating the original blood splatter animation. For this 3D software with water simulation would be best.

I recommend you watch a few videos of splatter effects and then try to copy it using Blender(a free powerful 3D software).

Thank Scouting Ninja, I have to dig deeper about this.

On 4/30/2018 at 12:53 AM, Scouting Ninja said:

On 4/27/2018 at 8:32 PM, 123iamking said:

1. Get a green screen blood effect video --> BloodFx.mp4

2. [BloodFx.mp4] --> [Adobe Photoshop] --> Images files.

This is very accurate except for one thing. It's a bad idea to use a movie file, instead you should use sprite sheets or just a collection of images.

Using a video codec like mp4 can cause a lot of problems when you try to retrieve the next frame. Animated particles mostly use sprite sheets. It's because the video compresses the images of each frame and makes extracting it a bit of a problem.

About this, I think you misunderstand about the mp4 part (sorry, I should have posted a picture for easier to understand). I mean the BloodFx.mp4 is just an green screen effect like this video. I input this video into Adobe After Effect (sorry I mistake in the first post, I stand correct: [BloodFx.mp4] --> [Adobe After Effect & Photoshop] --> Images files), then the output is Image files, then use Adobe Photoshop to tweak the effect. So the final asset to put into game is image files (sheet image), not the mp4 file.

7 hours ago, 123iamking said:

About this, I think you misunderstand about the mp4 part

During production of a effect it should never be compressed into a video format, was what I meant. It's OK to use image formats like PNG that doesn't destroy data but often you would render to a TarGa(TGA) image.

When capturing real life footage, don't use a video camera. Use a burst capture camera. It's OK, if this is JPG because the images will be so large that you have to scale down. The scaling will help remove noise.

Keep these in a folder during production. Then at the end make a sprite sheet from the effect, this could be PNG or TGA and use that in game.

If you work with movie files, the compressing and uncompromising can ruin images. It will also alter timing and change other data causing mistakes and small problems that snowball into large problems.

All special effects software will allow you to render as images. Because this is the standard when making effects. A effect is also large in size on a computer, but be careful when zipping files because it does happen that a image corrupts; have backups.