Introduction

80lv: 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 VFX in general and end up in Bungie?

My name is Mike Stavrides, and I am a Senior VFX artist at Bungie. I have been with Bungie for almost 6 years now, and have worked on every Destiny release.

I have wanted to work in games since I was about 13 years old, and it took me a long time to reach that goal. My desire to create games mainly stems from my love of these games: Meridian 59, Ever Quest, Final Fantasy Tactics, Command and Conquer Red Alert and Doom series.

My career actually started over on the East Coast, and I found my way into contract work for quite a few years. I worked on cell phone content, commercials, educational cartoons for children, and medical animations. For most of these jobs, I was a modeler or a generalist.

I would try to learn as much as I could to keep myself relevant and employed for as long as possible. These jobs were all contract work, and I wanted each one to last as long as it could. I would start on modeling for a project, then usually help with rigging, lighting, and rendering. This let me stay for the entire project length and also taught me many skill sets. It was when I was working on cartoons for children remotely for a company in Japan that my wife and I moved to the West Coast. We had the safety net of knowing some friends out near Seattle already, and I was able to take my job with me since I was working remotely from home. I was also eager to move out to Seattle because it is a video game hub. If I was going to be able to find my way into games, I had to be close to where the jobs are. I eventually found my way to a Microsoft contract, and this is where I started to get my first real time experience. I was hired to model, texture, and rig a character that would be used with Kinect for some demos that they brought to colleges. They kept me on for about a year. We made various projects, some real time, some pre-rendered, but this was my start in real time work.

Luckily for me, a friend I had met in college was working at Bungie already. This was now 2012. Bungie figured out what they wanted to make for Destiny, and they were starting to hire more people for it. My friend kept talking me up, and I was able to get an interview for a new team being created. The team was internally called Spec Ops, and the idea was this would be a small multi-disciplinary team that would handle the spectacle moments in the game. We needed to be as self-sufficient as possible so that we could take an idea from start to finish. I first started out doing technical set up, rigging and creating doors. Tasks quickly grew more and more complex, and, before I knew it, we were creating large story moments for the game. As time went on, I kept noticing that the bottleneck was always FX. Everything in Destiny has little glow bits on it or space magic of some kind, and there were just never enough people to create the amount of VFX content that was wanted. Seeing this, I started asking questions about shader VFX to anyone that would listen and help me learn. I would also look through files that VFX artists were creating and try to deconstruct it. I used that knowledge to start making very simple glow cards that I would use on my tasks. From there, I kept asking more and more questions and then taking those learnings to my next task and tried to push what I was able to a little more each time. Before I knew it, I was working on the original ghost shader VFX, and creating the crystal shader for The Vault of Glass. The great thing about VFX is that it is a conglomerate of many skill sets to make an effect sing. All of my learning from those previous jobs started clicking together. I was able to model and UV my shells for shader VFX, to add lights to support the FX, to rig and animate patterns, and I knew the engine inside and out to do what I wanted it to do. I think I officially became an FX artist somewhere during Rise of Iron, but by then the line was so blurry because of all of the FX work I was already doing. I always liked working in CG, but it wasn’t until I started making VFX that I realized that this was truly where my passion lied.

One of the things that I love about VFX is that hardly anyone goes to school for it. It is like an old style apprenticeship where you find someone, and for some reason, they decided to hand down all of the learnings they have to you. Then you become a combination of that teacher and your own unique style. It’s beautiful.