games fx artist and workflow
hey guys
I am looking into games fx art and how it works,it seems to be harder to find any tutorials on the topic.
Does anyone know of any guides(work process),portfolio's or good tutorials.
Oo and if it makes any difference I use Maya.
Much appreciated
steve
I am looking into games fx art and how it works,it seems to be harder to find any tutorials on the topic.
Does anyone know of any guides(work process),portfolio's or good tutorials.
Oo and if it makes any difference I use Maya.
Much appreciated
steve
Replies
There aren't many resources for vfx in games, because there just aren't that many people doing it. The general consensus I've found is that most projects have one or maybe two guys on effects.
There isn't much info out on the web about it, so your best bet would be to open up a game that ships with an FX editor and start learning how stuff works.
Quake 4 shipped with the FX editor, BSE.
Unreal games use Cascade, which ships with Gears of War and UT3.
Valve should be releasing their particle editor for Orange Box very soon, which should be really cool.
As for your question about Maya, you should be fine. Whatever you use to generate your textures doesn't really matter, because it's just going to end up as either a static sprite texture, or an animated filmstrip to be used on a sprite.
Basically, in the end, you'll be using your engine's specific particle tool to handle all the motion and look of your effects, and your 3d package is for generating texture pages (Afterburn, Fume, Maya fluids, etc.)
- FX artist can mean doing cinematic work. Sculpting high poly meshes using Zbrush or Mudbox then rigging complex characters while working with advanced material types along with cloth, hair & fur.
- Or it could mean you heavily use a particle system and 2D talent to create effects like smoke, explosions, glowing force fields, dancing lights and fancy spell effects. Almost every place has its own way of handling FX and you'll find tutorials on doing specific types of effects and you'll more then likely need to look outside of the standard game modeling/texturing resources to find them. since FX artists are closer to the types of artists you'll see working on films or TV you might have to infiltrate those circles to see how certain things are done.
- Another definition is almost as technical as programing, and you aren't required to have great artistic talent but a strong aptitude for working code and whatever proprietary system(s) they are using. Knowing MEL won't hurt and might even be required.
You could focus on how a particular engine does effects and gear your portfolio to only using that engine but I think that is limiting, both in what you'll learn and the number of jobs you can apply for. The mark of a good FX artist is being creative enough and knowledgeable enough to pull off anything toss your way. Often whatever your regular rank and file modelers/animators can't pull off you'll be asked to do, and its going to be some weird stuff, but usually never boring.
A bonus of being an FX artist in some places means, you get to pick your poison depending on the type of FX needed, so you aren't always stuck to using one app. But that normally means knowing how to pull off those effects prior to asking for the needed app. I have quite a few links to how-to's but they are all in 3dsMax I'm sure they can be done in Maya but I haven't ever tried using Maya for those types of things and never bothered to look. Stock Maya may not have what you need and you'll need to hunt around and find a good plug-in. which is what makes 3dsMax attractive to some studios it comes with a lot of things you can use to create FX right out of the box. I hear there have been some improvements on the Maya side of things so maybe it offers more then the last time I looked it over.
I guess the best thing to do is to look at the games you play, and try to figure out how they did a few effects and look for help on those particular effects as you work to recreate them. Also search for job definitions of FX artist and see what comes up. There is a big demand that most schools aren't filling, instead they crank out Maya/Unreal graduates like the day is long. The schools that do attempt to fill that need have trouble coming up with curriculum that works and often just offer film FX courses.
Things I think you should read up on:
Particle FX
Cloth
Hair
Advanced materials like particle spawning, light emitting and just learning what else you can pull off besides bump, spec and diffuse.
Good luck I hope you find what you're looking for. If you're in the market for some 3dsmax links I'll be happy to vomit them out.
thanks for the solid info.
I found this little portfolio tip: http://www.moonapples.com/art_portfolio_tips/
Slum, i have unrealED 3 so i will check it out.
Vig, i would appreciate those links to thanks.
www.allanmckay.com
Allen Mckay is a god among particle effects gurus and lucky for those of us who suck he shares a lot of his knowledge. He covers the basics of particle effects and takes you pretty far in.
Paul Hormis
www.hyperent.com
His videos are great he's an expert at rigging and working with cloth. Even the few free tutorials he has on his site give you a tiny window into his genius. Cloth isn't just for cloth...
Facial Rigging using a control board
http://www.aldenfilion.com/tutorial/face_rig/facial_rig.htm
Fire using particle effects (there are TONS of these all over the place)
http://www.spoono.com/3ds/tutorials/tutorial.php?id=5
Water Fountain using Particle effects (Originally from autodesks AREA section but you have to log in...)
http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Creating-a-fountain-with-particle-fx/32543
http://evermotion.org/
A really good site with a great collection of "Making Of" articles, tons of info to be gleamed.
http://tutorialoutpost.com/view/7915/particle-shockwave-in-max/
Shockwave using simple shapes with some particle effects also tossed in.
some nice stuff in there.