All content is rendered in 4k using the Unity High Definition Render Pipeline. Clips are from cinematic trailers and marketing material.
Featured games:
- Lightseekers
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar Champions
Category: Showreel
While at Jagex, I worked the game Transformers Universe. This game has a lot of history.
I joined late 2012 when Jagex still were developing their own engine for the game, this of course came with its own particle tool that I helped develop.
Jagex’ own engine later got scrapped and we moved onto Unity. I had no previous experience with Unity but it ended up becoming one of my favourite game engines to date!
Transformers Universe was an online PVP tactical MOBA-style web-browser game where the visual VFX language was key for readability of player abilities. It was very important you can tell what ability the other player are using, to either stay away or time your attack!
It was really fun to develop this type of VFX language for abilities and it was super challenging to try to make the VFX stand out and be unique. Each Transformer had a handfull of abilities that had to be unique, adhere to one of three different damage types, faction and their personality, not to forget their vehicle-form abilities as well!
Each ability in the video has a short description of what it does and we almost free hands when it came to creating the VFX. Usually bigger and more impactful the better – but it still had to be readable!
I love Unity’s ease of use while still powerful and real flexible. If I find there’s something I can’t do out of the box in Unity I can usually easily write some C# and fix whatever I wanted to do. As a VFX Artist in Unity, knowing how to do programming is key in my opinion. I wouldn’t be able to do much without it!
I find it limiting to either rely on someone else to do the programming for you or forever stay bound by the off-the-shelf-tools.
A combined Showreel displaying some of the best projects I’ve recently worked on. Both VR and standard PC games!
Featured projects:
- Sky Harbor (VR)
- Robinson: The Journey (VR)
- Transformers Universe
- Multiplayer Snakes
While working at Crytek I got the opportunity to create Realtime VFX for a few bigger VR titles. VR is Cool.
Working with VR as a VFX artist is really challenging as there are way less resources available. I usually had 1-2 milliseconds of total render time budget at my disposal. This depended on scene complexity of course and also if we were CPU or GPU bound. There are a lot of things to consider while working with VR you’d normally can ignore.
Hitting a 60fps target on a Playstation 4 is harder said than done! We spent a lot of time optimizing performance on these VR experiences.
For the first project in this video, labeled Sky Harbor, 0:00s-0:16s, is basically a long cutscene developed to benchmark graphics cards. We used a new particle system that I had been involved in developing. There was a lot of new cool features we had available and it was amazing how fast it was. This new system also introduced GPU particles which work really well in VR!
One particular sequence I’m particularly proud off, which also required a lot of hard work and effort, is where the big ship comes crashing down, and gets shot by the big cannon.
This sequence would have been impossible for me to finish without an Alembic cache. Alembic caches are super fast to process, downside is that it costs a little bit of memory but that’s easier to get when working in VR in such an empty scene. In the end the whole Alembic sequence allocated 350mb RAM which is not that much considering the complexity and length of it – 1700 frames and roughly 100k vertices.
This sequence was animated in Maya, some parts were simulated while others hand keyed.
The second project in the video is Robinson: The Journey where your play a little boy stranded alone on a planet full of dinosaurs. I really like the whole world of Robinson and it had amazing environments.
I mostly worked on scripted events, triggers and environmental VFX as there wasn’t much gameplay-wise. The player had access to a scanner tool but that was about it.
I think VFX in VR is all about adding to the immersion, whether its small tiny dust particles that are present around you or a big explosion. A VFX artist can add real small things do that let’s you feel a lot more physically present.
I try to keep myself updated with Unreal Engine and this video shows a collection of small projects I made during my spare time for fun.
Projects:
Categories
Showreel 2015
While at my second job in the industry working at Jagex as Realtime VFX Artist, I got to work on Transformers! Really cool.
This video also include higher resolution recordings of previous work I did at Eurocom compared to my 2012 showreel.
Games featured in this video:
- Transformers Universe
- Goldeneye 007
- Goldeneye 007: Reloaded
- Disney Universe
- Mortal Online
Categories
Showreel 2012
The work I produced while working my first Realtime VFX job at Eurocom Developments Ltd. I used their own proprietary engines EuroLand 2 and Euroland 4.
During this time I got the chance to work on the following games:
- Goldeneye 007
- I worked on environment destruction, scripted events and cutscenes. This game was released on the Wii and was my first Video game credit!
- Disney Universe
- Defined the cartoony look of the core effects in the game such as fire, explosions and smoke. I also worked on destruction, scripted events and cutscenes. There were a lot of destructible objects in this game which I manually shattered and then baked the destruction simulation to use in the game.
- Rio: The Game
- As a party game, I worked on a wide variety of gameplay effects such as interactive objects and pickups to name a few. I also did a lot of work on victory fanfare screens.
- Goldeneye 007: Reloaded
- This is the Xbox360 and PS3 version of the Wii release which got itself a face lift by swapping engine. We didn’t have a good VFX converter of the Wii effects so we ended up re-making all the effects.