A precooked explosion texture will show always the same look and motion. You get high quality realistic results but no variation whatsoever.
REALFLOW 2014 KEYFRAME PARTICLE SOFTWARE
Once they manage to ease the steep learning curve they’ll get more people using it, just exactly as happened time ago with Allegorithmic’s suite.īut all this software is mainly focused on precooked asset creation (textures, meshes, animations) that we’ll use later in our game. Having the vast range of possibilities the software offers I can see Houdini becoming a standard in the game industry, at least in more realistic projects. The guys at SideFX are making an awesome work, especially in their latest release getting closer their amazing software to game development. These are just a list of examples of the tools In order to create:įire/smoke/explosions: Fume FX, Phoenix FD, Maya fluids, etc.įluids: Phoenix FD, RealFlow, Blender, etc.ĭestructions/Rigid bodies simulations: Rayfire, MassFX, etc.Īnd for all above: Houdini. This is partly thanks to the amount of software we’ve had access during the last years to create amazing textures. Especially in cutscenes we are reaching similar quality to movies VFXs. The more powerful the technology becomes the less limitations we have to achieve realistic visuals.
REALFLOW 2014 KEYFRAME PARTICLE 1080P
The game in which I created more environmental effects was Gears of War 4, where we were working on the multiplayer maps and we had to take care a lot about the performance hit on these effects because the game had to run 1080p at 60 fps. Examples of environmental effects are waterfalls, mist, rain, etc.
Here, the VFX Artist in charge of environmental effects becomes almost an environment artist and most of the collaboration will be with this team. There are other game genres, like for example shooters (specially realistic ones), where the environment effects are equally important to the gameplay ones. Similar game genres where the gameplay effects are more “important” would be fighting games or rpgs, amongst others. This is one example of “conflict” between two disciplines because if they are very strict, fire won’t feel like fire so you have to come up with alternatives to convince them that the player won’t notice that a tiny lingering fire won’t cause any damage. As the fire lingers while it’s dissipating, it will not follow the damage area completely and designers will come to complain about it. Gameplay designers define a damage area for the attack and then you have to create the effect on top of the debug cylinder. For example, let’s put a flamethrower as an example. These kind of tasks require a big understanding of the game mechanics and involve constant communication with the design team, with which you have to constantly negotiate. For example, in a game like Castlevania (hack and slash), 90% of the vfx tasks consisted on character powers, magics,… that really make an impact on the gameplay. It depends a lot on the project we are working on how these are divided. When talking exclusively about VFXs, I would talk about 2 major types of tasks: gameplay effects and environmental effects.
I’m assuming a new role within the company trying to bring the specialization to mobile game development, where usually roles have been more of generalists. It was very challenging/rewarding going back to work on proprietary engine and being able to implement new features, shaders, etc.įor personal reasons I moved to King in Barcelona and at the moment I’m working on games currently in development as a VFX Specialist. I was part of a team of 10-12 people including FX Artists and graphic/gameplay programmers. It was a huge responsibility working on such an iconic game but I think it paid off because, after working on Gears of War 4, I decided to join Rockstar North (Edinburgh) to work on such a huge game as Red Dead Redemption 2. I took over tasks such as Unreal Script, shaders creation, etc. It was my first experience working with commercial engine (the original Unreal Engine) from start to the end of a project and it gave me another perspective of how VFXs should be done.
I was hired at Splash Damage (London) in 2014 where we developed Gears of War Ultimate Edition. When we finished the game I decided to move from my comfort zone and try in a new country to join a team of 4 VFX Artists.
0 kommentar(er)
