
Challenge: Add some magic to your scene
Exercise
Beginner
+60XP
30m
Unity Technologies

VFX have the power to add intrigue, mystery, and whimsy to your environments. In this tutorial, you will attempt to add a sense of magic to your scene with fireflies, shooting stars, or some other effect of your choice.
By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to demonstrate your new skills in particles and visual effects.
1. Overview
Now that you have a pretty good understanding of how Particle Systems are made, you are ready to create one entirely on your own.
On a digital project, VFX artists are usually given creative license as they bring their effects to life. In this challenge, your goal is to introduce a bit of whimsical magic into your scene using a Particle System.
2. Determine a creative direction
Your task is to introduce a feeling of magic into the scene. As a VFX artist, you might have some creative freedom in how you make that happen.
Think of magical or whimsical environments you’ve seen in games or movies. What made those feel magical?
For inspiration, watch this trailer for Ori and the Blind Forest, a game made with Unity that is full of these types of magical, surreal scenes.
From this example above, you might be inspired to create magical fireflies or shooting stars in your scene.
3. Create some magical particles
With your creative direction in mind, add a new magical Particle System into the scene. You could add fireflies, shooting stars, or some other whimsical element to the scene.
By the end, your scene might look something like this:
You should expect to spend at least 30 minutes on this challenge.
4. Challenge criteria
To successfully complete this challenge, your magical particles should:
- Make your scene feel more magical.
- Include some element of randomness (direction, lifetime, spawn rate, etc).
- Change color over time (opacity or hue).
5. Next steps
Congratulations! You have completed the learning required for Core VFX.
You have the core skills and knowledge for one of the primary creative domains within the Unity Engine.
Now you’re ready to apply these skills in other projects! We can’t wait to see what you make next.
6. Submit your project
When you’ve completed this challenge, please submit and share your project. This isn’t required but it’s a great opportunity to share your progress and learn from the work of others.To submit your project:
1. Review the specific guidance for this challenge (above) and check your project to make sure that you have achieved the challenge criteria. Remember, there’s no deadline on submissions; you can take the time that you need to do this.
2. Take some screenshots or a screen recording of your project.
3. Add a submission title and description.
- Make sure to include the screenshots or video recording. If you have additional details to share about your process or the project that you have created, you can share them in the description too.
4. Set who can view your submission:
- Public: Anyone who views this tutorial.
- Private: Just you.
5. Select Save and preview submission.
6. Check your submission preview and then complete the CAPTCHA test and select Submit and continue.
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VFX
A magical blue firepit surrounded by snow, with glowing fireflies floating gently around it
Mystic Rune Rain — Collision-Driven Magic VFX
For the Creative Core VFX challenge, I created a magic rune storm using Unity’s VFX Graph. Glowing randomized glyphs fall from above with varying size, lifetime, movement, and spawn behavior. Rather than having the runes simply disappear when they reach the ground, I used collision-triggered GPU Events to create a multi-stage magical impact. Each rune produces a bright impact flash, an expanding animated magic circle, and a burst of scattered energy particles at its collision position. The effect uses flipbook animation, randomized rune selection, turbulence, gravity, color and size over lifetime, collision detection, GPU Events, and secondary particle systems to turn a simple falling-particle concept into a reactive environmental effect. This project was a great opportunity to experiment beyond a basic Particle System and learn how multiple VFX Graph systems can work together to create one cohesive effect.
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