Jade Empire's visual effects are granular to a fault. Take the "ready" effect of the Viper style as an example. Those pulsing rings of green light around the character's hands are not a single, but two separate visual effects: one that can only be applied to left hands and another one that can only be applied to right hands. Since some compound visual effects have a lot more than just two components, the developers have introduced a new way of combining them: visual crusts.
Visual crusts take several effects from visualeffects.2da 
and combine them into a single one that can be assigned as a whole.
The above screenshot was created with:
CreateCrustEffect(GetPlayer(), 46, -2);
Video[]
Most visual crusts cannot be illustrated through pictures, so here's a video that showcases all of them:
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