Meant to drop in on one of these, really sorry that I missed both of them:
Anotherexampleoftheabovepointisnotingthatsounds/lights/camerashake/postfx/etc…area*
hugepartofwhatmakesupan*“effect”,butmanymiddlewaresolutionswillonlyaddressthe*
particlesthemselves.**Andamiddlewarethatdoesaddtheplethoraoffeatureslistedabovetouches
almosteverypartoftheengine,makingitdifficulttointegrateandmaintain.
Yeah, this is what happened on Rocksmith 2 – we ditched Gamebryo’s (lol) internal VFX solution for Fork. It was ‘better’, but isolated in a lot of ways – particles end up feeling like a thing that lives off in a bucket all by itself.
When we were doing evals a while back, the solution that we really liked was HellHeaven (which is now called…PopcornFX? popcornfx.com) – it was pretty fully-featured, offered scripting support, and all kinds of other stuff. We were worried about performance (and a lack of shipped titles at the time), so we went with Fork.
Demothefeatureinanotherrealtimepackagegetpeopleexcitedaboutitandusethedemoto*
isolatespecificfeaturesshowingexactlyhowtheywork,andwhattheycanadd.
This, exactly. This is what we do here - we’ll actually use something like that (a tool running in Unreal/Unity/etc) during pre-pro/lookdev and use that as leverage towards helping us get what we want.
Whataretheindustryexpectationswhenitcomestoyourfreelance*reel?
I’m less concerned with FPS and more interested in what you’re using to get the effect that you’re showing me. Did you make this in Maya? Unreal? etc. I’m interested in seeing that you know how to build things out in interesting and novel ways – some big crazy effect in Unreal using particles, animated textures, custom shaders, etc etc etc is what I’m looking for. Impress me first – I see a lot of artists (this isn’t limited to VFX) who are so inside their own head about optimization that they end up cutting themselves off at the knees, and all it does it limit their development. We’ll optimize later. Make it look good first.
Other notes off the top of my head:
PBR – really excited about this, and even more so for stylized visuals. Look at Monsters University, for example.
fluid sim – I’ve been looking for an excuse to do the ‘sim in houdine, bake to mesh, bring into maya/engine’ workflow since I saw Eben @ Naughty Dog’s talk on it last year. This will be huge moving forward.
I’ll add more thoughts/musings later.
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