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During our Collection project, Ana told me to look at Lucia's work, since she works with lights and my collection had this theme.
One thing that is very interesting is the fact that she says she likes to work with light, natural light in fact, because it is so unstabble, she can't predict it, even by making models and experimentating, you can't predict it.

Also she does not limit her work in the environment, it blends in, you don't know where it starts and where it ends, and by doing that, you recieve similar feedback from someone who doesn't know art, and someone who knows art and her work.

Lucia is a brazilian artist, and works with interventions on public spaces using light, and how it affects our perception.

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Lúcia Koch, 2008 - Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural (PT)

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From the list of artists we had to pick one from, Saul instantly got my attention, as he worked in title sequences for movies, which interest me very much, just like movie trailers or credits.
In the video linked below he says "...why not make it move...", he is talking about the title of the movies, which were almost ignored and basically extra time for everyone to sit down and grab popcorn.
According to him, the involvement with the film should start from the first frame. So the title is perfect for that, if done right, you can make a sequence that creates a rhythm for the film

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Saul Bass: The Art Of The Title Sequence

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Animated typo

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Example: N for Nintendo 64

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Leopoldo showed us this last year, now that i know of Saul Bass it reminds me of his Title sequences.

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This was my first idea, i got the relation with the scale here as well as in some other videos, but this one is the most relevant.
it really strikes me how big things are, and how big we THINK we are.

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Displacement/distortion effect

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"Light and shadow, reflection, colour and motion - these are the primary elements of visual art."

This project was the most relatable to me yet, because i'm interested in visual effects, and so an image is the smallest part of a video, a frame. With that in mind i started researching types of effects on photographs that did not use digital  modifications.

I stumbled on high speed photography for example, used in physics shots, the slow motion ones, for example.
Or diorama, which makes a real world image look like a miniature by focusing on particular spots on the image so it looks like they are actually small.
Unfortunately i dod not read about it before taking the 60 photos.

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Photo Fakery: A History of Deception and Manipulation by Dino A. Brugion

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Photo Fakery: A History of Deception and Manipulation by Dino A. Brugion

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I enjoyed reading about photo manipulation before the digital era. I already know how it's done and how to do in photoshop, so it is interesting to see how it was done before.
Deceiving our eyes is easy, learning about the details and trails manipulation may leave behind helps you understand the world better, in my opinion.

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Before there was Photoshop | film photography | Photoshop 25th anniversary

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His work really peaked my interest, he has many illustrations with sillhouettes and i like this kind of approach, as i did a few works in Pre-Foundation using sillhouettes only. What really got me interested was his use of negative space, and colors, for example in the linked image below, you have a wolf head in the negative of his back. I also feel some sort of movement, like a loop. The details that form the head are essential, even thought they are details, it's like two images but one is done only with fur details.
I would like to experiment this sort of detail in sillhouettes.

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His videos are amazing, it's very beautiful, the way the shots, the colors, and the time lapses creates a fantasy-like atmosphere.
Definately one of my favorites references so far.

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Reflections from Uyuni is a Time-lapse short film that shows the intrinsic beauty of the sea salt of Uyuni and the province of Potosí in Bolivia.
The reflections produced by the water flooding in the rainy season, are the main protagonist Enrique Pacheco´s camera, who invites us to dream with impossible images from another world, where the sky meets the earth forming an infinite mirage.

Its area of over 10.000 km 2 makes the salt flat of Uyuni the largest one in the world. It is located in the remote province of Potosí in Bolivia, near the Andes, at an altitude of 3.656 m.

In this remote corner of the Earth, a peculiar natural phenomenon occurs - a thin layer of water gathered on a plain of salt turns it into an other-worldly looking glass mirroring the skies above in perfect symmetry. The eerie calmness of the place makes it all the more supernatural, and takes the observer far beyond the familiar.

- If you want to license this footage, it's available in super sharp 4k at my .

// or you can contact the media department: [email protected]

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Reflections from Uyuni is a Time-lapse short film that shows the intrinsic beauty of the sea salt of Uyuni and the province of Potosí in Bolivia. The reflections produced by the water flooding in the rainy season, are the main protagonist Enrique Pacheco´s camera, who invites us to dream with impossible images from another world, where the sky meets the earth forming an infinite mirage.

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I think the way to describe this is very unique, and it pleases me, it's one of those videos that you think whe you're bored and start to play with things in your head, the way he did it is very simple, the animation does not have any kind of amazing effects or anything, but still it had very high quality and serves the purpose perfectly.

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Also from Enrique Pacheco, this is even more fantasy-like than the other ones, beause it's a compilation. The night sky and starts on time lapse are amazing and i want to try it in some work, you can really see Earth's rotation with it, and the music is also incredible, adds up to this "unreal" world style.

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"Made on Earth" is the result of many photography expeditions over the past two years. Spain, Iceland, Estonia and USA were the main destinations. My goal has always been to get the best results, both technical and dramatical, emphasizing composition, light and feeling in each and every shot.

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I always think of VFX only on films or TV, but now i took the time to research about its uses on other types of media, like animation.
In this case, it's not really visual effects, it's more about creating or drawing the individual frames so the effects are created along with the animation itself.

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What is the difference between VFX and animation for a film?

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Answer (1 of 5): Visual effects has more to do with images or a series of images that are manipulated in a way that unnatural occurrences look realistic. Animation on the other hand is involved with the creation of an object in 3 dimensional space that may later on be incorporated as a series of ...

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This is from where i got the idea of using one eye per frame in my video, before that i would use just one or two. Everytime when i edit a video i like fast cuts personally, so i always try to include that. You can also see it's present on Kevin's project video on the Induction weeks.

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From Love to Bingo    Getty Images   AlmapBBDO

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I did not know him, Ana talked about his films and i got interested, what i learned was new concepts of shooting angles, for example he always shoots his scenes in a certain height, and always framing the scene in some way, using forniture or something like that. There is also a message in all of them, something to reflect upon, like life meaning, this sort of thing.

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Support this Channel on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Channel_Criswell Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lewis_criswell Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/lewiscriswell/ Business enquiries: lewismichaelbond@gmail.com Feel free to contact me personally: PO Box 833 STOCKPORT SK3 3BJ

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Sound references for the video's audio

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NASA Recordings - The Sound of the Universe

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This is a list of everything that i've watched (missing a few ones that i don't remember) that relate to the project and i've either used in the project or helped influence me.

Through the Wormhole (2010-2017) TV Series
The Search for Life in Space (2016) Doc
A Brief History of Time (1991) Doc
Journey to the Edge of the Universe (2008) Doc
Wonders of the Universe (2011) TV Series
Cosmos (1980) TV Series
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014) TV Series
Particle Fever (2014) Doc
Voyage of Time: Life's Journey (2016) Doc
Wonders of the Solar System (2010) TV Series
Wonders of Life (2013) TV Series
Galaxy Evolution Animation: James Webb Space Telescope Science (2010)
Journey to the Edge of the Universe (2008) Doc
BBC Horizon Swallowed by a Black Hole (2013) Doc
Earth: Making of a Planet (2011) Doc
Origins: The Journey of Humankind (2017- ) TV Series
The Beginning and End of the Universe (2016- ) TV Series
Passage de Venus (1874) Film
From Earth to the Universe (2015) Doc
Hubble: 15 years of Discovery (2005) Doc
The Universe: Cosmology Quest (2004) Doc
Of Stars and Men (1961) Anim
A Sidewalk Astronomer (2005) Doc
Hollands Licht (2003) Doc
Interstellar (2014) Film
Gravity (2013) Film
Martian (2015) Film
Life (2017) Film
Hidden Universe (2013) Doc
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Film

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Power of Ten is really related, and i had no idea of this video. The "micro x macro" correlation is very similar, the concept of inside and outside, and that we are part of the universe.

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A poem that i also did not know, but talks about the same idea, relation between space, universe, what we can reach, and what not.

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To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage

A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons

Shudders Hell thr' all its regions

A dog starvd at his Masters Gate

Predicts the ruin of the State

A Horse misusd upon the Road

Calls to Heaven for Human blood

Each outcry of the hunted Hare

A fibre from the Brain does tear

A Skylark wounded in the wing

A Cherubim does cease to sing

The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight

Does the Rising Sun affright

Raises from Hell a Human Soul

The wild deer, wandring here & there

Keeps the Human Soul from Care

The Lamb misusd breeds Public Strife

And yet forgives the Butchers knife

The Bat that flits at close of Eve

Has left the Brain that wont Believe

The Owl that calls upon the Night

Speaks the Unbelievers fright

He who shall hurt the little Wren

Shall never be belovd by Men

He who the Ox to wrath has movd

Shall never be by Woman lovd

The wanton Boy that kills the Fly

Shall feel the Spiders enmity

He who torments the Chafers Sprite

Weaves a Bower in endless Night

The Catterpiller on the Leaf

Repeats to thee thy Mothers grief

Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly

For the Last Judgment draweth nigh

He who shall train the Horse to War

Shall never pass the Polar Bar

The Beggars Dog & Widows Cat

Feed them & thou wilt grow fat

The Gnat that sings his Summers Song

Poison gets from Slanders tongue

The poison of the Snake & Newt

Is the sweat of Envys Foot

The poison of the Honey Bee

The Princes Robes & Beggars Rags

Are Toadstools on the Misers Bags

A Truth thats told with bad intent

Beats all the Lies you can invent

It is right it should be so

Man was made for Joy & Woe

And when this we rightly know

Thro the World we safely go

A Clothing for the soul divine

Runs a joy with silken twine

The Babe is more than swadling Bands

Throughout all these Human Lands

Tools were made & Born were hands

Every Tear from Every Eye

Becomes a Babe in Eternity

This is caught by Females bright

And returnd to its own delight

The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar

Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore

The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath

Writes Revenge in realms of Death

The Beggars Rags fluttering in Air

Does to Rags the Heavens tear

The Soldier armd with Sword & Gun

Palsied strikes the Summers Sun

The poor Mans Farthing is worth more

Than all the Gold on Africs Shore

One Mite wrung from the Labrers hands

Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands

Or if protected from on high

Does that whole Nation sell & buy

He who mocks the Infants Faith

Shall be mockd in Age & Death

He who shall teach the Child to Doubt

The rotting Grave shall neer get out

He who respects the Infants faith

Triumphs over Hell & Death

The Childs Toys & the Old Mans Reasons

Are the Fruits of the Two seasons

The Questioner who sits so sly

Shall never know how to Reply

He who replies to words of Doubt

Doth put the Light of Knowledge out

The Strongest Poison ever known

Came from Caesars Laurel Crown

Nought can Deform the Human Race

Like to the Armours iron brace

When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow

To peaceful Arts shall Envy Bow

A Riddle or the Crickets Cry

The Emmets Inch & Eagles Mile

Make Lame Philosophy to smile

He who Doubts from what he sees

Will neer Believe do what you Please

If the Sun & Moon should Doubt

To be in a Passion you Good may Do

But no Good if a Passion is in you

The Whore & Gambler by the State

Licencd build that Nations Fate

The Harlots cry from Street to Street

Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet

The Winners Shout the Losers Curse

Dance before dead Englands Hearse

Every Morn and every Night

Some are Born to sweet delight

Some are Born to sweet delight

Some are Born to Endless Night

We are led to Believe a Lie

When we see not Thro the Eye

Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night

When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light

God Appears & God is Light

To those poor Souls who dwell in Night

But does a Human Form Display

To those who Dwell in Realms of day

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Auguries of Innocence by William Blake | Poetry Foundation

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To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand A Robin Red breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons Shudders Hell thr' all its

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We went to Tomie Ohtake to see Joana Lira's exposition, but after that me and a friend went upstairs to see Julio's work. I enjoyed it a lot more, because it was related to my collection, and specially a dark room with several mirror-related works. I took pictures to add to my collection because it had light.

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I read on EBAC hallway a chart about the VFX career, so you have all the pipeline and jobs there, i took the picture above which is what i want to follow, basically doing the effects, like particles for fire or explosions.

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The FXTD creates things that are too complex to animate manually, and need to be run as computer simulations instead, including fire, destruction, dust, water, cloth, smoke and magic.

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Also researching things outside Film and TV, VFX for games is pretty similar but with a few more restrictions, a game has to be "playable" so you can not make very hardware demanding scenes and effects. But that creates a new type of visual language.
That also comes across of another interest, i've played games all my life, so mixing both would be pretty cool.
Once you're in the industry of VFX you can work with whatever VFX area you want.

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VFX master Francisco García-Obledo Ordóñez talked about the way he blows stuff up, created lighting and other cool stuff in UE4. Some very nice breakdowns for UE4 users inside.

Introduction

Hi, my name is Francisco García-Obledo Ordóñez and I'm a Senior VFX Artist working at King Barcelona, city where I was born 34 years ago. I started working in the industry in 2005 as a 3D artist in a small company here in Barcelona. At that time videogames productions weren't that big so being an artist meant having to deal with a lot of different tasks: modeling, uv mapping, rigging, texturing, lighting, etc.

My transition to VFX Artist started in my second company, the Barcelona studio of Grin, swedish company creators of Bionic Commando and, the one I worked on was Wanted: Weapons of Fate. This was my first time moving away from intensive art tasks and I took care of more technical tasks being responsible of helping the environment/props team to export assets and dealing with programmers to implement new features (shaders, gameplay, tools, etc). When I joined Mercury Steam in 2011 I officially became a VFX Artist. I worked on Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 and I was responsible of almost all the VFX work: power ups, magic, character effects, gameplay effects, etc. I learned tons from this experience as this allowed me to start getting deep into the VFX community, knowing terminology, plugins, software and, most importantly, people in the industry who also were working as VFX Artists.

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. I was hired at Splash Damage (London) in 2014 where we developed Gears of War Ultimate Edition. 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 took over tasks such as Unreal Script, shaders creation, etc. 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 was part of a team of 10-12 people including FX Artists and graphic/gameplay programmers. It was very challenging/rewarding going back to work on proprietary engine and being able to implement new features, shaders, etc.

For 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'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.

Main Tasks of VFX Artists

When talking exclusively about VFXs, I would talk about 2 major types of tasks: gameplay effects and environmental effects. It depends a lot on the project we are working on how these are divided. 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. 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, let's put a flamethrower as an example. Gameplay designers define a damage area for the attack and then you have to create the effect on top of the debug cylinder. As the fire lingers while it's dissipating, it will not follow the damage area completely and designers will come to complain about it. 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.

Similar game genres where the gameplay effects are more "important" would be fighting games or rpgs, amongst others.

There are other game genres, like for example shooters (specially realistic ones), where the environment effects are equally important to the gameplay ones. Here, the VFX Artist in charge of environmental effects becomes almost an environment artist and most of the collaboration will be with this team. Examples of environmental effects are waterfalls, mist, rain, etc. 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.

Realistic Effects

The more powerful the technology becomes the less limitations we have to achieve realistic visuals. Especially in cutscenes we are reaching similar quality to movies VFXs.

This is partly thanks to the amount of software we've had access during the last years to create amazing textures. These are just a list of examples of the tools In order to create:

And for all above: Houdini. The guys at SideFX are making an awesome work, especially in their latest release getting closer their amazing software to game development. 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. 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.

But all this software is mainly focused on precooked asset creation (textures, meshes, animations) that we'll use later in our game. You get high quality realistic results but no variation whatsoever. A precooked explosion texture will show always the same look and motion. And here is where the real challenge comes, we have to achieve that quality in real time. And we are getting there, companies are improving the real time techniques and we are already seeing from real time physics and fluid simulations to complex shaders, such as the motion vectors frame interpolation by Guerrilla ( Anatomy of a Nuke) or the real time raymarching implemented for the fire/smoke in Uncharted 4 ( Siggraph 2015 volume shader).

Particle Effects

A good way of understanding how particle effects work in real time is to analyze how a popcorn machine works:

1. First you have to decide how much popcorn you want. This would be our spawnrate

2. The corn kernels represent the points where our particles will be located

3. The pop would be the render of our actual particle. It's up to us to decide if we want it to be a mesh (3D) or a sprite (traditionally a 2 triangles plane)

4. After the pop, we get a popcorn flying and eventually falling. This represents the initial speed plus gravity (dynamics).

The difference between the popcorn machine and real time particle effects is that, while you cannot get enough popcorn in real life and you can even choose between butter flavoured, sweet, salty, etc. in a realtime engine you have to make a compromise. The more sophisticated the shader the less number of particles you can have on screen so you don't harm framerate.

Production

I like to see us, VFX Artists, as some kind of magicians and I cannot help but seeing all the tricks I used to create that effect.

This effect was made as a result of an art test. The requirements of the test were:

The purpose of this test is to show your ability to create "AAA" effects.

Create a multilayer, magical based, attack that destroys a cube.

The effect must consist of: anticipation, attack and impact, followed by the deconstruction of the cube.

All textures must be of your own making.

Make use of single frame textures, and/or at most, 1 animated flipbook.

Whit those guidelines, the first thing I do is create a library of references (vídeos, still images, pinterest, etc). Some people, who are better at drawing than me, prefer to proceed with story boards, drawings or paintovers but for me it's much quicker to gather references and assemble everything in my mind.

When I decide the overall look of the effect I identify the main element. That is, the rays. I decided I would go for the same technique I used to create the Teleport Smoke effect on Castlevania LoS2.

Directional rays

First, we create one spiral-like mesh that will define the trajectory from the attacker to the victim. As the effect can be seen from different angles and I prefer not to use trails or beams, the mesh will consist of three planes rotated 60 degrees each.

Without the texture/shader it seems odd but the end result will look as a three dimensional ray.

The next step is to create a spline that will define the trajectory of the ray. We'll use this spline to apply a path deform modifier to the mesh.

Now we have the static ray. The way to make it appear and disappear is as simple as scrolling vertically the uvs of the texture via shader. The trick here is to set the texture in Unreal as Clamped. This way, when the UVs are outside the 0-1 space the mesh will be transparent. Otherwise we would see the ray repeating.

You can check the differences here between the texture set to tile:

And the texture set to clamp:

Arc rays

Ok, now we have the main element of the effect. Let's dress this a bit more. We need some kind of anticipation from the attacker. We need to make the player aware that something is going to happen. For this purpose I decided I would use the same rays but with different trajectory. This time we'll create a 200 degree arc and we'll apply a path deform to the cross-section mesh.

Fracture

The next element of the sequence is the explosion of the cube. There are some ways we can approach this in 3dsmax but I made it with Rayfire plugin. I exported it as an animation to be used later in Unreal.

UNREAL

Now is the time to put it all together. I started by adding the anticipation effect. To do that I created a particle effect using the arcs we created. Making those meshes spawn randomly rotated 360 degrees and moving their UVs creates a surrounding effect on the sphere which resembles a shield. To break the stiffness of the meshes I decided to add GPU particles with a Vector Field. At first, with these two elements I didn't see very clearly when to trigger the directional rays.

I realised I was missing something very important and and that turned out to be a status change. In order to trigger an attack I always like to give more punch to the anticipation for a short amount of time. Then I decided I would change the color of both the meshes and the GPU particles to something more harmful. I chose orange-ish because it reminded me to fire and red hues always help to express something is dangerous. Also, to give more power to the effect I added a orange light which helped to transmit the feeling of energy accumulated.

With the anticipation effect done it was time to emit that energy forward, to the enemy. I wanted the effect to be powerful so I I created a particle effect consisting of three emitters, each one of them with a copy of the directional ray rotated 60 degrees from the previous emitter. I adjusted the emitter delays and the scrolling of the UVs so not all three spawned at the same time and with the same speed but they impacted in the same frame. This subtlety is something a VFX Artist has to pursue and spend time on. Most of the viewers/players won't notice the tiny adjustments but if you show this effect with and without any variations on delays/scrolling/sizes... they will notice the differences.

The last part is the impact. The first step in Unreal is to trigger the animation in the exact time in Blueprints. Then I created a particle effect for the destruction. The particle effect consisted of different elements: light, sparks (gpu particles and not all colliding for performance reasons), lightnings, aftermath smoke, screen distortion (which shrinks the cube for 0.1 seconds and adds extra power to the explosion). The special element in this effect was the lightnings. I created a single sprite texture with UV Distortion to animate it via shader:

Also, I added Erosion, which is a very handy shader to make the particles disappear not just with a simple fade out:

This way we have the whole sequence done. Of course after putting everything together there are some tweaks to make both in the art side or timing.

Tools

To visualize the effects the most obvious choice here would be getting started with Unreal 4. Not because I think it's the best but because it has the biggest community and you will find tons of tutorials, examples, marketplace, etc. To get started. And from that you can search in youtube for tons of tutorials.

Then we have Unity which I haven't had the chance to use much because most of my career has been with proprietary engine and the only time I worked with a commercial engine was either Unreal 3 or 4.

Talking about asset creation, there are some pieces of software which are very useful for us the VFX Artists. Fume FX, for example, is very good to get animated fire/explosion/smoke textures and I have to thank the developers because it was one of the first plugins I found when I started in this field and it's pretty impressive how they managed to build a tool with which you can get very nice results in a very short amount of time.

Lately I've been using Blender a lot. I started just because it is free and I didn't have to mess with licenses and stuff but now I really like it. You can get the same as Fume FX plus fluids, rigid body simulations, fracture tools, etc. I managed to get done in this software some ocean meshes for some multiplayer maps in Gears 4, blood textures for Red Dead Redemption 2, oil splashes, etc.

Blood splatter simulated and rendered in Blender

My most used software is 3d studio max mostly to create low poly meshes, UV Mapping, rigging, etc. Then we have also Adobe Photoshop to tweak some rendered images or create some textures from scratch to apply to the particles.

Animation

Most of my experience being a VFX Artist so far has been working on the gameplay side of the effects. That said, most of the time I was given an animation I had to stick to and add the extra layer of effects (blood, magic, impacts, explosions, etc). The animation I'm referring to could be an in-game animation or a bespoke one for a cutscene.

When working with animations, usually VFXs are attached to bones, helpers, objects, etc that are in the scene. This is a back and forth workflow between the animation and the VFX teams where the latter can ask for changes or additions to the sequence such as adding extra keyframes to make a sword trail smoother, rotate a helper to use this rotation as the direction for a blood splatter or change a camera cut to avoid compromising point of views for a mesh particle, for example.

Also, there are some features from the game engine that can help for the animation or the dynamics of the effects. For example, when I was working at Mercury Steam, as we were using proprietary engine and I was very close to the core technology team, I was lucky enough to be allowed to request new engine features. I benefited a lot from it as I could ask for new ways to link effects to a bone: I was able to link an effect to a bone using its position but not the rotation or taking the bone position and rotation but using always the Z (height) of the ground (very handy for fire linear attacks on Castlevania).

I remember it was especially satisfying when one of my requests was implemented without the programmer being very convinced to if what I was asking for was going to work. I asked a way of setting the initial velocity of the particles over the lifetime of the emitter. This way, using this method with a trail, I was able to get a blood spurt that never disconnected from the point of impact. This extra layer of meticulousness added the viscosity feel I was demanding and I was very proud of it. In fact, in all the projects I've worked on (I kind of got obsessed with blood after working on Castlevania) I always demanded that feature very useful for other things as water, oil, etc.

I remember one programmer approached me one day and asked me: "How the hell did you do that blood effect that comes from the hand of the enemy in this cutscene?" I had to remind him he was involved in the implementation of the feature and it finally paid off.

Framerate

One of the big tasks of a VFX Artist when it comes to implementation of the assets in game is the optimisation. The word we say and listen to the most is overdraw. Usually game engines render the final image in passes (albedo, roughness, metalness...) and every time there is a particle on the screen, depending on the rendering type of it, it impacts the rendering pipeline. For example, if we have 2 translucent particles on screen which are overlapping, the rendering cost of the pixels which are overlapped will be double. This is especially bad for performance when we have full screen particles, as the engine would have to render x amount of times 1920×1080 pixels (if Full HD). Here is a good thread to know more about overdraw.

Most of the time our elements are not the most complex ones: mesh particles have low triangle count, shaders are not very complex (usually), particles are lit in a much cheaper way than the characters or environments, some times particles are not lit at all, etc. Even with that in mind, particles can get very expensive at runtime due to the way they are rendered. Roughly there are 3 major ways of rendering the particles (in Unreal called Blend Modes):

Opaque: this is the cheapest, but it's barely used unless we are talking about mesh particles. This is the cheapest method because particles overlaying others occlude them so the engine discards pixels more easily.

Alpha masked: this is also called alpha test where we have 0 or 1 transparency values. So we either have visible or invisible pixels, no semi transparency at all. This is the cheapest way of achieving transparency, at least in console games. The opaque pixels on the sprite occlude the pixels underneath just like the opaque method explained above.

Translucency: this is also called alpha blend. In this case we don't have any occlusion whatsoever. This is the most expensive method to render a particle. On top of the performance issues it's hard for the engines to sort the rendering of semi transparent pixels because usually they don't store the Z Depth (opaque and alpha masked do). So this is why most likely you've seen popping on some games (fog, dust, windows, etc)

We also have two lighting methods:

Unlit: particles are not lit at all. All the lighting has to be baked in the texture or do it via shader (not totally accurate).

Lit: particles get similar lighting to the environment and props. This method is trivial on opaque/alpha masked particles because they store Z depth information. However, by default translucent particles don't store that info, therefore the engine doesn't know where these particles belong in the world. Enabling lit shading method on translucent particles adds an extra layer of complexity to the render of every particle.

Adding lit shading method to translucent particles allows semitransparent particles to store Z depth info. This is expensive per se, but nowadays graphic cards can handle it if used carefully.

Best practices:

Use the texture space wisely. When possible, avoid too much transparent pixels in the texture trying to get the opaque pixels as close as possible to the borders.

Use alpha masked when possible.

If the engine supports it, use clipping or hexagonal shapes when possible.

Use spawnrate with caution and make a compromise.

VFX Optimization guide

Example:

When we were working on Gears of War 4 multiplayer maps we had to be specially careful with the performance impact of our work. Our goal was to get 1080p at 60 fps so we had to be clever to achieve the quality it was expected but always getting smooth gameplay.

There was a level with a grass field and after the profiling phase, the technical art team pointed the grass to be the most expensive element on the map. So after some discussions between environment art, technical art and vfx art departments we decided to try one technique. I was in charge of, somehow, make the grass sprites so that the further they were from the camera the less transparent pixels they had. I created a diffuse texture covered with grass blades but the opacity was done in a way I had groups of blades with different grey values. This way, the shader increases the value of that grey the further the camera was so that the blades where visible. As the shader was set to alpha masked those blades only were visible when the alpha reached 1. This way we saved tons of overdraw in the long distance.

Another example of optimisation and tricking the player is deleting the particles when they get close to the camera. Actually particles don't get deleted but they shrink so that they are invisible. We did this on Gears 4 too with smoke particles, lightshafts, etc. In the shader we did that the particles became gradually transparent when they were at X distance from the camera (set in the shader) and when they were totally transparent we shrank the vertices. This last step was done because Unreal wasn't clever enough to not render a particle which was totally transparent so we were getting overdraw issues.

Advice

I don't know any VFX Artist who doesn't know about imbueFX. Don't worry about the content being too "old" it's still invaluable what these guys helped us all with these videos.

There are also some breakdowns around there than can be easily followed by anyone interested in the field and has a basic knowledge about some 3D Packages. Also, the official Unreal Engine 4 website is a good spot to learn:
Unreal 4 Particles Systems
Some years ago I was invited to a Facebook group called Real Time VFX. I never imagined I would get so many knowledge from this platform. Recently some guys decided to create an own domain for it and, although we still share our knowledge in Facebook, we have a more structured content now.
Real TIme VFX
In there you'll find the best VFXs artists in the industry, people from Naughty Dog, Epic, Infinity Ward, etc. all of them showing their tips and tricks and always open to help.

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VFX master Francisco García-Obledo Ordóñez talked about the way he blows stuff up, created lighting and other cool stuff in UE4. Some very nice breakdowns for UE4 users inside. Hi, my name is Francisco García-Obledo Ordóñez and I'm a Senior VFX Artist working at King Barcelona, city where I was born 34 years ago.

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I also have a lot of interest in compositing, here is a video i saw last year on EBAC's facebook, it shows both compositing and VFX techniques.

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A short project that I have created that explains what is VFX and especially Digital Compositing. This project was made to showcase my skills alongside my creativity, I was responsible for all of the 2D aspect of it and supervising the team that was working on their own special skills such as 3D, Matchmove, Grading, Sound design and much more…..! Software that have been used are Nuke, Adobe After Effects & Photoshop, 3DS Max, 3DEqualizer and more...

Credits of who ever worked or donated his work are being showed in the end of the video so please feel free to stay and watch until the end.

Special thanks & Links - 

Starring - Aaron Vodovoz

CG was created and donated by Dmitriev Vasiliy:
www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/mech-robot-obj/803794

SFX was donated by Bluezone Corporation:
www.bluezone-corporation.com/types/sample-pack-bundle/bc-bundle-02-robot-sound-effects-download

Thanks for watching!

www.RoyPeker.com

--10/02/17--

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Here is a good explanation about it, more focused, it's basically mixing all the tracks from different sources, like a 3D CGI object with a real background for example.

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Disclosure: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. Please help support wolfcrow and buy from B&H and Amazon. It won't cost you anything extra.

Compositing is the foundation of the visual effects industry. In many ways, if visual effects is a game, then compositing is the last level where you fight the biggest baddy. If you win, you get to watch the spectacular cut-scene.

Interested?

What is Compositing?

If I had to pin down a definition for compositing, I would say it is the art of marrying pixels.

You can combine two pixels in infinite ways. What separates compositing from other visual effects and computer generated imagery is the fact that you always need two pixels to composit.

If you only change the values of one pixel, it isn't compositing.

Examples of Compositing

What are some of the simple ways in which you can marry pixels?

You can add them:

If you put a green pixel on top of a blue pixel, you only see the green pixel.

You can subtract them:

You can multiply them:

The key to all this 'magic' is mathematics. In its essence, every pixel holds nothing but numbers. All said and done, a good compositor can play music with pixels.

The most famous compositing task is keying, more popularly known as chroma keying. Keying is simply the act of selecting data based on certain criteria (like all green pixels for green screen):

If you 'key' an image, i.e., if you can selectively isolate a part of the image that you want to work on, you can do many things with it. In the above example, we just replaced the background. You can also selectively color grade only the 'keyed' part, or you can even paint over it, relight it, erase parts of it - whatever you want.

Keying doesn't have to be chroma based. You can even key off luma values, or anything else.

The person who composits is called a Compositor.

So, what does a compositor do? A compositor is like a chef, who takes ingredients from many places or people, and mixes them all together to produce the end result. Sometimes, the carrots aren't fresh - maybe it's a poor season. Still, a good chef will have the knowledge, experience and skills to make the dish taste great.

In a visual effects studio, artists will produce computer generated imagery (CGI). The DP will have shot an actor against a green or blue background. They might also have shot the same actor in different clothes - the evil twin, in his lair.

You take the green away from the good guy and add him to the shot with the evil twin. Then you place the CGI dinosaur produced by the visual effects team. Then you look at the picture with the eye of an artist, and do whatever it takes to make it look real.

Then you do it over and over and over and over.

What does it take to be a Compositor?

The challenge in compositing is to make the marriage work. In other words, when you combine images from different sources, the end result must look real. But that's not all.

Artists who use Photoshop do exactly this. The added challenge that compositors face is they also have to match the shots to either the ones preceding it or succeeding it. In addition, they also have to ensure the result works even when the elements are in motion. Oh... there's one more challenge.

A Photoshop artist might get a whole day to work on one image, to perfect it. A compositor must display the same level of skill, but can't afford to spend a whole day on a frame. A movie running at 24 frames a second will have 1,440 frames per minute. Not only must a compositor be good, she must also be fast.

It takes a whole lot of skill to be a good compositor. Here are some general requirements:

An eye for art, photography and cinematography

Knowledge of lighting

Knowledge of color grading

Keen eye for storytelling and timing

Anybody can be taught to composit in a few days. The general principles of compositing (or comping) are simple, just like learning to use a camera or an NLE. To master it, so that you have the magic touch to make a scene come alive - that's the hallmark of a true artist.

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Disclosure: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. Please help support wolfcrow and buy from B&H and Amazon. It won't cost you anything extra. Compositing is the foundation of the visual effects industry.

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(best project so far by the way)
Feedback
- backpack's audio is a little bit annoying
- she gets the idea of what's going on too fast, maybe add one more drawing until she realizes

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This is "Late" by Gabriel Lyra on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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I wrote down all of the mentions he made during his lecture, but i did not take any particullar interest in any of them. But here theu are in case i want to do further research about any of them.

Fortunato Depero
H.N Werkman
Wolfgang weingart
Internacional swiss style
Craig welsh
Bill moran
Alan kitchking
David wolske
Vida sacic
Lucio passerinis
Myrna keliher
Ian gabb
Maximo soalheiro
F. Vignoli
Paul klee
T. Hellmeister