Intro

Hi, I’m Gregory, a VFX Artist from Brazil. I am 26. I was born in Manaus, a city in the middle of the forest, literally. I have 3 years of experience with game development.

Since I was a child I had a great interest in video games, not only I liked playing games, but also creating some stuff. I used to do some experimentations with RPG Maker and Lunar Magic. At the same time, I was always the artist from my classroom. I enjoyed drawing a lot.

As time went by, I started college studying Computer Science. Graduated and even did a Master degree in Information Retrieval and Machine Learning. At that point, I was working as a System Analyst, developing Android stuff. That was when the company I was working for decided to try making games, and I was the guy who could program and do the art at the same time.

With a very low budget and a small team, we made some very simple mobile games, and I started making my portfolio. That gave me the opportunity to start working on a big studio, with over 40 other game developers. I started as a game programmer, but I was introduced to a bunch of new things, like 3D, game design, animation, and VFX.

I started learning from my new friends. First, I tried to learn 3D, it looked so awesome, to be able to model my own character an all. But I didn’t want to throw away all I got from my developer experience. That was when I found out what VFX was all about. It was the perfect combination of art and tech, where I could learn a bunch of new things.

When the main VFX artist from the studio announced he was leaving the company, I got the opportunity to start working with that officially. It has been 1 year since that. And doing so, I could see that VFX is really my vocation.

The VFX in The Legend of Zelda

The Zelda game never looked so great as now. The firsts gameplays from E3 came right when I was starting learning VFX. I remember that the explosions were so eye-catching, and those were the first things I tried to study. At that time, I had no idea how to do that.

When I got enough experience with particles and shaders, I took a second look at those explosions, and the way they looked cartoonish and stylized was something that I wanted to incorporate into my work. I also got myself thinking about the overall timing and the way it stretches out of a core point, but suddenly starts behaving like facing-camera billboards. I ended up trying to replicate those things as a challenge to myself.

Using Shader Forge

Writing shaders from sketch takes some time, and when you need to write a bunch of them alone, having a visual editor tool that compiles and tests the shader on the fly is really helpful.

Shader Forge was already the tool used in the studio I work for, so I started learning that. But what makes it such a good tool is the readability of the shader code after compiled.

Sometimes we got to get our hands dirty to do some fancy stuff. Often, we need to really write CG code to achieve some effects, and having a clean code from the graphs editor is key for that.

Beam

After watching some gameplay footage many times, I analyzed the shapes used in the textures of the original effect and tried to replicate that on Photoshop. They are basically circular shapes and star/cross shapes. Here is a comparison between the original effect and my particles: