Hi I’m Matt Schwartz I’m from Toronto, Canada and I am a VFX Artist in the videogame industry at Ubisoft Toronto.

During my 5 years at Ubisoft I have worked on several titles – Far Cry Primal, Watch Dogs 2, For Honor, Far Cry 5 and currently Starlink: Battle for Atlas. Prior to Ubisoft, I worked as a freelance artist and intern at SideFX Software.

As a child I was always enthralled by animation and drawing. Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, has always been one of my favourite artists because of the way he combines wit and storytelling through drawing while having a unique and defined style. Of course, from a young age I was also passionate about videogames, and found I was always interested in texturing and later the FX that were used in the medium. Although I was unsure how they were created I always found them to be the most exciting aspect of my gaming experience. Casting a new spell or blowing something up could entertain me endlessly just to see the effect used. Later in life this passion for games inspired me to attend George Brown College for Animation, specializing in Game Development. While there I found my interest still gravitating toward real-time VFX even though I was studying the more traditional route of character animation. At the time no school was offering a specialized course in just game FX, so I had to experiment and find information online about how FX in games were created.

After graduating I had the opportunity of being selected as a student intern at SideFX software, where the 3d software package Houdini is developed. There I created film fx, which were used in their promotional material for Siggraph that year. Although we were focusing on VFX in film, I was still curious to find ways Houdini could be used in VFX for games, be it through texture creation, procedural mesh modeling etc. Briefly working in the film related world of computationally intensive simulations and extremely long render times, I was still drawn toward the immediate feedback that can be realized with real-time fx that are used in video games.