Special Effects with Depth in Unity is a really interesting presentation that covers:
Soft particles • Animated shields • Intersection highlights • GPU simulated particles • Refractive force field effect • Object outlines • Vertical, fluffy fog • Point light shafts
Although it takes place in unity, the tricks would work in any engine.
Rock Show VFX was my GDC talk from 2010 - deals with random stuff like particle lighting, simulation, rendering and some framebuffer trickery
Rapid Prototyping Techniques for Kinect Game Development is mostly about kinect and unfortunately all the videos are missing so I’m not sure how much sense it will make. Deals with rapid prototyping VFX and gameplay using “Processing” so I wanted to include it since that came up in the roundtable.
I’ve heard about the killzone viewport renderer like 2 years ago, hadn’t seen anything until now. Very cool stuff and something I actually had in mind to develop for fun, now I almost have the motivation but not the time
Thanks for posting these, I had forgotten to bookmark that valve PDF so it’s nice to look at again. I recreated their camera-facing-UVs math in the UDK material editor and it works like a champ, cool trick that I’ll be looking for reasons to use.
Yeah it’s a classic - we use the greyscale + LUT a fair bit. Sometimes 2D LUTs with the V coord keyed off some other property.
Chris Tchou’s Halo Reach Effects presentation from GDC 2011 is also cool: HALO: REACH Effects Tech
Hefty download due to the embedded videos, but worth it.
Screen space particle collisions is a hefty system to implement, but the depth faded effects are more easily achievable (as long as you can get a hold of the depth buffer in your PS) and give great results!
Just saw that 3dBuzz is going to do a 6 week webinar about UDK. Could be good for the guys who want to get into it. There is one week of material stuff and one week of particles. Should be good! 3d Buzz
I think i’m going to do this too. Always good to get a more rounded view of a tool I use all the time. I’ve been doing the Houdini webinars too, so I’m curious as to the differences in teaching style. I’ve done some of the buzz videos before, so they’re usually pretty solid albeit a little chatty. haha
Fxphd just got a intro to Houdini class and theres a re-run of their fluids class. Also there’s 2 3ds Max destruction courses. I’ve taken their courses before and it was really enjoyable and thinking I’m going to enroll again for the 3ds max courses and the fluids one. (its about 395 US dollars) Also once you register you have 2 weeks to decide your final three choices.
