Any Professional FX Artists who can help? :)
polycounter lvl 6
So I have a few questions for those of you who have worked in the Games Industry as an FX artist. It would help me immensely!!
First, What programs do you use at work?
If maya/max, how do the particles created in this program convert to the game engine for use?
If used to create particle sprite sheets, does it come straight from maya/max or is there another program that needs to create them?
Do you use after effects for Game FX?
Do you have a demo reel I can reference for my own?
How long does it usually take you to make certain FX at work (on average)?
What do you mostly do at work daily?
Thank you soooo much for your time!
First, What programs do you use at work?
If maya/max, how do the particles created in this program convert to the game engine for use?
If used to create particle sprite sheets, does it come straight from maya/max or is there another program that needs to create them?
Do you use after effects for Game FX?
Do you have a demo reel I can reference for my own?
How long does it usually take you to make certain FX at work (on average)?
What do you mostly do at work daily?
Thank you soooo much for your time!
Replies
Most engines use a separate tool that is not inside your 3D app. There are exceptions to this - Naughty Dog's particle tools are inside Maya, and Skyrim uses the gamebryo particle systems that are built inside Max.
You might use fluid sims to create animated smoke textures/flames/etc within your 3d app, and then either export to After Effects or Photoshop to edit and compile your sprite sheet.
Yep! Useful for creating textures.
I do not, because I am very lazy. If you want to see some of my VFX work, play RAGE or other games I worked on. heh.
Highly subjective to the task. Building an elaborate explosion or weapon effect from scratch, and you're looking at days or weeks to get everything super fantastic. Most of the time though, you'll be starting from some kind of existing effect and modifying it to suit a new context.
Painting textures in photoshop, creating fluid sims for textures inside a 3d app, building particle effects in engine, placing effects in the environments, writing shaders, tool scripts, punching yourself in the face trying to make it your VFX run on tiny budgets because the rest of the team forgot VFX actually cost resources and aren't free.
It's been a while since I've done exclusively VFX work, but I did it for 7 years and I kinda miss it. VFX is super fun, challenging, and in my experience, good job security as long as you're good and stay relevant.
Thanks for contributing your advice. I'm starting to get into FX more as well. I work in mobile games, so sometimes we have to step out of our comfort zone and tackle tasks we don't usually do (I'm a character artist by trade). Are there any books or online resources you highly recommend for VFX artists?
Aside from two specific books, books will be completely useless for VFX. It's all about motion and modern techniques. Books on game VFX (if they even exist) will be out of date by the time they're in print.
The two I find an exception to this are:
[ame="http://www.amazon.com/The-Animators-Survival-Richard-Williams/dp/0571202284"]Animators Survival Kit[/ame]
This is a classic animators bible, and while it might not seem like it straight away, it's crucial foundational knowledge for building anything that moves. VFX are half fancy shaders, and half animation. You could take the best looking explosion particles Battlefield and make it look terrible by getting your animation curves wrong. It's all about the feel.
Conversely, you can make a really snappy and solid effect using nothing but solid circle textures if your motion and timing are spot on.
[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Elemental-Magic-Volume-Special-Animation/dp/0240811631"]Elemental Magic[/ame]
Another traditional animation book, but focused entirely on hand drawn effects animation. Absolutely priceless info for the same reasons as above.
There are some good tutorials over at ImbueFX
Unfortunately there's not a lot of info out there - mostly it's a numbers game. At any given studio, you might have two or three VFX artists. A lot of the day to day work is specific to that job, so there isn't a lot of incentive to go out and preach the gospel of VFX fundamentals. Accessible tools like Unity and Unreal are changing this, which is a good thing.
A lot of the stuff you learn will be from other guys on the team with more experience, passing the torch. Everything useful I ever learned about VFX came from my buddy Tim Elek (now master VFX swordsman at Epic)
Just look at this handsome fellow.
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP4FrN7JeW8[/ame]
Once you get into the rhythm, create most of your texture library, learn the tools and tech, It took me about 1-2 day to do the actual Effect.
Then I was asked to optimize them to help the frame-rate on a near-daily basis.
Yeaahhh.. can you reduce the particle count to under 2000?
Yeahhh... you can't use more than 2 textures
Yeaaahhh.. you can only really use 3 render passes
Yeahhh.. you're gonna have to reduce the size of your texture
Yeahhh.. sorry we're gonna have to remove soft particles
Yeahh.. can we make the decay 7 seconds? It's lingering a bit too long
Yeahhh.. can you umm.. can you get the particle count to under 1500?
yeahhh.. we're gonna need to remove the gravity
YEahh... actually your texture size has to be under 128x128
yeahhh.. that shader is way too complex, can you remove like half of it?
yeahhh.. We can't let you have more than 2 emmitters, so cut that down please,
Yeahh.. can you remove keys? The animation is a bit too heavy..
Yeahh.. can you put it actually down to 1000 particles? we want like 50 of them on screen.
Yeahhh.. we need this to decay faster, it can't be longer than 5 seconds.
Yeahhh.. actually we can only let you have 1 emitter,
Yeahh.. is there any way you can do this with one texture?
yeahhh... we need this down to 750 particles, framerate is crap on the bridge level
Yeahhh.. the decay should really be down to about 4 seconds
Yeahhh.. lets see if we can optimize that shader a bit more
Yeahh.. so like 500 particles is the actual goal..
Wow, thank you sooo much this is extremely helpful!
How big/small do your sprite sheets usually get? (how many images per sprite sheet)
And in order to compile your sprite sheet in photoshop, would you just render each frame and place them manually in their x/y positions on an image? (i'm asking because usually when I do something manual like this, someone comes by to tell me theres a tool to do it for me haha)
^This hahah