Introduction

80Lv: Mederic, could you introduce yourself to us? Where do you come from, what do you do, what projects have you worked on? How did you get into the development of 3D effects for games in the first place? How did you get into this market?

Mederic: Well, I got into 3D arts after finding out that banking was not my thing, plus in fact, I was drawing doodles and cartoons during basically all of my classes in school. Now I kind of wish I spent less time drawing and more time listening in Calculus though… Oops!

I’m from Montreal Canada, quite a hub when it comes to video games development, so I got to get into the “modern” gaming industry quite early on (back in the PS2 days, circa 2004). First game I ever worked on was Happy Feet PS2, the penguin thing. I was a 3D level artist doing modeling, texturing, lighting, – basically, taking an empty Maya scene and making a full level because we had no engine really. We’d do everything in Maya then save the scene and send it to a build machine to hope it looks the same on PS2. Back then, on PS2 we didn’t have access to custom shaders, and I wanted to push my maps a bit further, so I turned to the VFX pioneers we had at that time to explain to me how the particles worked. I wanted to add some fake reflection on the ice and some dripping water droplets from the icicles. So I learned from them that UVs are not always meant to be pixel perfect and that particles were a thing. After having way too much fun with these things (and exploding the performance budget on several occasions), it wasn’t long till I made the switch to VFX full time. Today, I am VFX Technical Director on Skull&Bones at Ubisoft.

Real-Time VFX Advances

80Lv: In terms of technology, what do you think were the biggest advances in real-time graphics you’ve witnessed so far? It looks absolutely astonishing what you can do with modern tech, but it would be awesome if you could talk a bit more as to what you consider to be the biggest advances?

Mederic: I think the biggest advances in Real-Time VFX are still a bit under the radar, they are the unsung heroes in our beloved games. To me, the single most impactful tech advancement we’ve seen in this field in the past few years is shaders, specifically vertex shaders. In order to get why it made such a huge impact, we have to go back a few generations.

While the technology, in general, has really advanced, VFX and animation are still lagging behind quite a lot, they’re the prime place where you’ll notice the uncanny valley. Also, since the PS2-OG Xbox era, we’ve lost a bit of ground. I know, it doesn’t sound plausible since VFX looks better now than they ever did then, but let me explain it!

Back in the PS2 days, we didn’t have anything like PBR rendering. Everything was a huge approximation. Shading was basically Lambert and Phong and that was pretty much it. Particles didn’t have lighting at all in most games, it was all baked in textures or made with tricks using additive blend modes. But it looked ok because everything on screen was of similar tech and similar quality. The PS2 was especially (in proportion) very good at handling overdraw. So we could throw in a lot of particle sprites in lieu of complex materials. We could use transparent planes to fake shadows. I remember doing a windmill where the shadow was a rotating particle in black semitransparent since we didn’t have real-time shadows for anything that wasn’t the main character.

Then Xbox 360 / PS3 came out. Shaders became a thing, PBR / HDR was starting out, and browner graphics were to be had (thanks to Need for Speed: Most Wanted). There was a significant Lighting Improvement, but the VFX side saw almost none of it. For the most part, we added emissive and the ability to do some UV manipulations but we lost most of our ability to do things with overdraw or stacking particles. That’s when there was a huge boom in the usage of animated textures because memory went up and overdraw went down. So what used to be done with cycling 20 particles using 1 or 2 images and relying on flips and rotation to create a campfire was now made with 2-3 particles living longer and cycling a 16 frames texture animation.