Introduction

Initially, I did not want to make VFX at all. I always wanted to become a film director. When I was 15 or so I started doing some silly short movies. My idea was that I should make a lot of them to get some experience and increase my chances of passing exams for a film school. I started with comedy genre and I was slowly drifting into action genre with each movie I made. Then I discovered four things roughly at the same time: Freddie Wong and Corridor Digital channels on Youtube, “Escape from City 17” fan movie and Andrew Kramer’s videocopilot.net . I was shocked by what these people were capable of. Corridor guys and Freddie Wong were doing exactly what I wanted – short actions movies packed with low budget but high quality VFX. Andrew Kramer made me realize that great effects can be made by a single person and I can learn that for free. And then Escape from City 17 – it was ten times better than anything Freddie or Corridor could do and it was still made by just two people. And they spent zero dollars on it. I was blown away. I thought that if I want to impress people, if I want to make it into a film school, I need great VFX in my movies. Few years later I finished my first music video. It looks very corny and cringe these days but I put all knowledge I had to make it. I tried to make as much VFX as I possibly could. This was very eye opening and I remember I was enjoying creating special effects more than anything else. After finishing high school I tried my strengths at film directory department in one of the Polish film schools. I failed so next year I tried at animation and VFX department in different school and I failed again. This made me think that maybe this is too hard at this point in my life and I should try something else. I found a job offer in Warsaw in a new company called CreativeForge Games. They were looking for VFX Artist with any amount of experience. I thought that maybe if I can do effect for movies so maybe I could do the same for games. I sent an application, they liked what I had in my portfolio and so my gamedev journey began.

Creating Effects

I think the general idea of creating effects is the same. Both in films and in games what matters at the end of the day is a great looking effect which is both artistically and technologically groundbreaking. And what can be done in both medias is limited to technology available and time constrains. But there are a lot of differences too. Effects in games are not restricted to budget so much. A lot of effects in movies are practical and each practical effect is a major expense which needs to be considered. If you don’t own you render farm you need to rent it which costs money. You need to buy very high-spec machines to do simulations for you. This is all a lot of money, Whereas in games there is almost nothing stopping us from creating the effect you want except the time itself. Tools are so cheap these days I don’t think this is any concern anymore. You rarely have to simulate anything and most of these things can be done on a single, high-end home computer.

But the biggest difference in my opinion lies in workflow and the role of effects. In film an effect does not have to be functional. You don’t have to make it match specific gameplay requirements. It does not have to reflect any design ideas or does not have to be prepared with some code inputs in mind. In most cases it needs to match artistic needs, not functional ones. In games this is what VFX artist very often have to do. They not only make effects look good.They also have to incorporate certain design elements in them. There can be a gun with different gameplay states such as: charging up, ready to fire, overheated, out of ammo etc. All these things, they need to be communicated to a player and very often this is VFX artist’s responsibility. Think of aura effects in games such as MOBA or hack & slash. They need to tell you visually if they are offensive, defensive, passive, active, are they healing you, damaging you etc. Amount of health points your spaceship have left can be communicated by the intensity of damage effects playing. If it’s a flying fireball you know you are about to die. In movies you just do an effect which looks great and feels right in this particular scene. It still needs to communicate emotions or some ideas but this does not have to by systemic. But then again, all animation principles which can be applied to film VFX can be also applied to realtime VFX. Anticipation, readable shapes and motion, squish&squash, all these things still work in games.