'Splosions & effects - a vfx artist's tale
Hello all,
I've been lurking here for quite a while and wanted to finally post & say hello!
To make a long story short, I've been a vfx artist on the TV/Film side of things for almost 7 years now. I've always had a strong passion for gaming, and ever since I almost got hired on at TimeGate (RIP) to work on Section 8 back in the day, I've wanted to have my hand in game art.
I've become more and more fond of working with explosions, smoke / fire, and general atmospheric & particle effects. Having just finished playing through the newest Tomb Raider recently and seeing some pretty good atmospheric work, I said to myself, I want to do that!
Enough blabbering, onto the 'splosions! The QT's look the best but I went ahead and put them on Vimeo as well if the QT's are too slow to load for you.
These are some examples from the personal library that I've started building.
http://www.blackburrowcreative.com/Examples/FumeFX/ExplosionsLibraryA_v001.mov
https://vimeo.com/79953945
http://www.blackburrowcreative.com/Examples/FumeFX/GenericExplosion2_v002.mov
https://vimeo.com/79953946
http://www.blackburrowcreative.com/Examples/FumeFX/GenericFire1_v001.mov
https://vimeo.com/79953944
I know a lot of engines use their own particle systems and I've started to look into flipbooks and such to get more familiar with current techniques, so I have a lot to learn. I've seen some of the crazy volumetric stuff coming from Nvidia recently and am hopeful that smoke/fire/atmospheric effects can really start improving soon.
Whilst not a reel I would ever use for anything game-related, I think a lot of my skills should transfer over quite nicely to the game-realm. Here's some examples from my tv/film side if you're interested -
**WARNING** If you watch(ed) Breaking Bad and haven't finished season 4, the first shot on my reel is spoilerific
http://www.seanjoseph.com/demo-reel.html
Thanks for looking and I look forward to C&C on my way to better 'splosions & effects!
(if anyone here is well-versed in this sort of thing, I'm always willing to hear any info as it seems to be one of the aspects not as explored as much char modeling, texturing etc.)
I've been lurking here for quite a while and wanted to finally post & say hello!
To make a long story short, I've been a vfx artist on the TV/Film side of things for almost 7 years now. I've always had a strong passion for gaming, and ever since I almost got hired on at TimeGate (RIP) to work on Section 8 back in the day, I've wanted to have my hand in game art.
I've become more and more fond of working with explosions, smoke / fire, and general atmospheric & particle effects. Having just finished playing through the newest Tomb Raider recently and seeing some pretty good atmospheric work, I said to myself, I want to do that!
Enough blabbering, onto the 'splosions! The QT's look the best but I went ahead and put them on Vimeo as well if the QT's are too slow to load for you.
These are some examples from the personal library that I've started building.
http://www.blackburrowcreative.com/Examples/FumeFX/ExplosionsLibraryA_v001.mov
https://vimeo.com/79953945
http://www.blackburrowcreative.com/Examples/FumeFX/GenericExplosion2_v002.mov
https://vimeo.com/79953946
http://www.blackburrowcreative.com/Examples/FumeFX/GenericFire1_v001.mov
https://vimeo.com/79953944
I know a lot of engines use their own particle systems and I've started to look into flipbooks and such to get more familiar with current techniques, so I have a lot to learn. I've seen some of the crazy volumetric stuff coming from Nvidia recently and am hopeful that smoke/fire/atmospheric effects can really start improving soon.
Whilst not a reel I would ever use for anything game-related, I think a lot of my skills should transfer over quite nicely to the game-realm. Here's some examples from my tv/film side if you're interested -
**WARNING** If you watch(ed) Breaking Bad and haven't finished season 4, the first shot on my reel is spoilerific
http://www.seanjoseph.com/demo-reel.html
Thanks for looking and I look forward to C&C on my way to better 'splosions & effects!
(if anyone here is well-versed in this sort of thing, I'm always willing to hear any info as it seems to be one of the aspects not as explored as much char modeling, texturing etc.)
Replies
https://www.imbuefx.com/
While your explosions are nice, you wouldn't be able to get them into a game like that. You'd have to break them down into separate elements like fire, smoke, shockwave, debris etc, and the fire and smoke are (usually) animated textures.
Look at games like Battlefield 3 and 4, Call of Duty, Halo and so on for good examples of what real time vfx looks like and then try to deconstruct them, try and figure out how they've achieved the look.
Good luck.
fumefx is a useful tool for a game fx artist but only for generating fire and explosion textures - as urgaffel said you can't just load fluid sims into a video game engine (yet).
Thanks for the info! That site you recommended is exactly the sort of info I'm needing.
Awesome, not bad for a little AE 'splosion. Is that just a bunch of stock footage & particles cobbled together?
Indeed. I cut a mushroom cloud from an explosion video, looped it and used 'Particular 2' to animate the sprites like an explosion. Looks nice ingame.
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From what I can remember it involved exporting a sim from FumeFX/Houdini/Maya (can't remember which program t hey used...) and then importing it as some sort of magic volume thing into UE4. The impression I got was that it involved a lot of scripting and a bit of programmer time to get it working and it would basically only be used in special places, for example cutscenes etc rather than gameplay since it was quite costly. Having said that, I wouldn't be completely surprised if we do see some sort of sim vfx making their way into games at some point. People are already doing it with object destruction so volumetric vfx will follow eventually.
Anyway, they released a few videos where they are demoing UE4 features and one of them was based around vfx, well worth a look even if it is a bit light on the technical details
*edit*
Oh yeah, I know that Battlefield 3 (and possibly 4?) uses a 25 frame looping smoke animation (made in Lightwave) for a lot of their effects which then gets lit by the environment lighting probes. So we're not talking massive sprite sheets for explosions except in very rare cases.
I hope we start seeing more of things like Nvidia Flame Works. To where really simple things like torches, small scale smoke, small flames etc. can be generated on the fly as they're relatively simple. If you need something huge, it would be awesome to have it pre-simmed, then just have it run through the sim cache and render it through the volumetric solver. To me that would be the much needed leap from what is currently being done for most effects. While people are getting pretty good at faking it with sprites and such, there's always that little bit o' weirdness to it.
Here is what I'm referring to if you guys hadn't seen it yet (go to 14:40) -
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To help with efficiency you could output very generic effects and use different shader gradients in-game to get wildly different looks.
While it is pretty cool it still looks very sim-y and fluid like. Having said that, Capcoms Deep Down uses something along those lines for their dragon fire that they've been showing off.
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I think the biggest problem with that kind of stuff will be to make it look less like a sim, and also to have it affect the world with scorch marks etc. Interesting times ahead though for sure.
Thanks for hosting the class! It was a lot of fun and I learned a ton of awesome stuff. Unfortunately since the Sunday following that class I've been working 16 hour days to push out a bunch of shots for an upcoming show.
My goal for this coming year is to get some assets into a game in one form or another. Saturday's class made it feel a lot less daunting and showed me that I am closer than I thought I was. Should be fun times.
Whelp, back to work!
Thanks again!
- Sean