Pivoting into VFX and UI

HedgeMom

Hello lovely video game peoples!

I'm an indie dev out in Seattle, and I'm looking to take the next step into the game industry. I've worked for indie games like Read Only Memories from Midboss and What Pumpkin's HiveSwap, but I'm trying to either get more steady freelance work, or just get into studio work.
Some VFX examples

I originally started out in TV production for cartoons out in Burbank and have been doing animation and art for indie devs. I've done a little bit of everything, but I'm looking to focus in on Visual Effects and UI design since it's it is more in demand and I feel within my range. 

What are the Engines, processes I should know, and is there good resources to learn them from?

-I searched thru the forums for resources and found some good stuff on the 3D VFX side, but I could use some more!
From my research it seems like Cascade is a terrific source to learn, as well as unity particles, but past those generalities, I dunno what. 

-UI is very new to me, and beyond the principles of design I don't know specifics of what makes a good portfolio, and what I should study.

-I saw almost no love for 2D VFX here on polycount, which is weird because I know there's work for it on the smaller scales! Does anyone else know how to build a strong portfolio for this?

Thanks so much for everyone's help, I hope to hear from you! 

Kevin Albers

fx work: Cascade.  Indie/Unity games generate very little money compared to AAA games, and for AAA games, they often use UE4 or their own engines. You can't do stuff using all sorts of propreitary engines, so Cascade for UE4 is probably the best portfolio-creating tool to use.  If you want to make non-trivial money, learn cascade for particle work. 

UI work: Adobe photoshop and illustrator. ActionScript used to be a big thing, but that may be on the way out. The tools may be less important for this specialty.  If you can deliver cool stuff using whatever you like, you might be fine. Track down good UI creator portfolios and do stuff in your own portfolio that is as good. Learn how to implement UI graphics! If you don't want to code UI stuff, consider becoming a UI artist somewhat unrealistic. Studios need people to design AND IMPLEMENT UI stuff. Sometimes they just need someone to create a bunch of icons, but that is not super common. This is all just a hunch, by the way. I'm more familiar with particle needs compared to UI needs at studios.

Chimp

Do they? I'm not sure AAA actually use UE4 all that much - from what i've seen unbranded UE3 is still very popular I guess cos studios are set up, it works and don't break what don't need fixing. It's mostly popular with indie artists in particular cos its easy to pick up for that.

That said though, knowing UE4 is a must anyway. Learn Unity too, its by far the most popular engine in terms of number of projects so good work to be had there. Don't bother with Cry or Lumber imo.

As for UI, learn Scaleform.

HedgeMom

Kevin Albers said:

fx work: Cascade.  Indie/Unity games generate very little money compared to AAA games, and for AAA games, they often use UE4 or their own engines. You can't do stuff using all sorts of propreitary engines, so Cascade for UE4 is probably the best portfolio-creating tool to use.  If you want to make non-trivial money, learn cascade for particle work. 

UI work: Adobe photoshop and illustrator. ActionScript used to be a big thing, but that may be on the way out. The tools may be less important for this specialty.  If you can deliver cool stuff using whatever you like, you might be fine. Track down good UI creator portfolios and do stuff in your own portfolio that is as good. Learn how to implement UI graphics! If you don't want to code UI stuff, consider becoming a UI artist somewhat unrealistic. Studios need people to design AND IMPLEMENT UI stuff. Sometimes they just need someone to create a bunch of icons, but that is not super common. This is all just a hunch, by the way. I'm more familiar with particle needs compared to UI needs at studios.

Kevin I have been super interested in also learning the implementation, but I literally have no clue where to start! Would you have any suggestions on resources for that? I'd really appreciate it if you know anything related to it

Chimp said:

Do they? I'm not sure AAA actually use UE4 all that much - from what i've seen unbranded UE3 is still very popular I guess cos studios are set up, it works and don't break what don't need fixing. It's mostly popular with indie artists in particular cos its easy to pick up for that.

That said though, knowing UE4 is a must anyway. Learn Unity too, its by far the most popular engine in terms of number of projects so good work to be had there. Don't bother with Cry or Lumber imo.

As for UI, learn Scaleform.

I've heard about scaleform before, do you have experience in it? I'm curious how user-friendly it is, I like autodesk and they bought it so it gives me hope it'll be easy on a newbie like me

Kevin Albers

Chimp's suggestion to learn Scaleform is probably a good start for UI implementation. I always heard lots about it (good but mostly bad) when I worked on big projects. As I recall, everyone seemed to hate it, but teams were stuck with it. I'm not sure if something else is becoming a new standard for UI middleware, or if Autodesk is somehow making it non-terrible at this point.

I think some UI stuff is prototyped as web stuff, so learning html 5 might be good as well. And of course there is work out there doing UI stuff for web sites (for now. this is eventually going to be automated, so the job market may shrink pretty soon).

Kwramm

from my experience UI artist can be a bit of a niche job, and the expectations change from studio to studio. Big studios often have strong processes for UX and you really do just UI work. Smaller studios basically dump the entire process on the UI artist, and you will do UI concepts, prototypes, implementation, testing and you will also be responsible how usable your UI is - in this case, ideally, you work with QA and also help them define how they test the UI and what sort of feedback you need and what metrics they should collect.

RyanB

HedgeMom said:

-I saw almost no love for 2D VFX here on polycount, which is weird because I know there's work for it on the smaller scales! Does anyone else know how to build a strong portfolio for this?

Lately, the AAA and wannabe AAA studios have been asking for film VFX level work.  Houdini is often mentioned in job ads.  I would say that if you are considering VFX for AAA games you might as well go for film.  Expect to do a lot of highly technical work.

Mark Dygert

There is a lot of cross over and that line keeps getting fuzzier and fuzzier as real-time tech catches up to rendering and in some ways has surpassed it. 

What I like about film and pre-rendered work is the linear pipeline and total control you have over how the story and shots play out. You aren't tossing your animations into a blender with a few gallons of random player input and hope it all works out ok. You also aren't giving control of your camera to a monkey who spends 40 of his 45 hrs of game time, tea bagging potted plants. You know your motion, you have complete control and you can make it look great. 

With that said, I really like how far the industry has come in the last decade and how much freedom game developers have to focus on important things that really make games great.

jStins

HedgeMom said:

I've heard about scaleform before, do you have experience in it? I'm curious how user-friendly it is, I like autodesk and they bought it so it gives me hope it'll be easy on a newbie like me

Did I actually read this sentence or has the coffee not kicked in yet?

Anyway, good suggestions in this thread. There was also a killer 2D VFX reel posted here recently in case you missed it.

http://polycount.com/discussion/186273/2d-fx-reel

Eric Chadwick

More here
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Special_Effects
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/User_Interface

Burpee

Ash Thorp as some pretty great course on Learn Squared about Ui and stuff

HedgeMom

Thanks so much for the help everyone! 
I took your advice and ran with it without thanking everyone for their input!