Introduction

Hello, my name is Yanni Tripolitis and I’m from Athens, Greece. I’ve been an FX artist for the past five years and I’m currently working on the Avengers project at Crystal Dynamics. Previous work experience includes Rocksteady (Batman: Arkham Knight) and Epic Games (Paragon).

I’m not one of those people who knew what they wanted to do from an early age or even had an art background. Up until 10 years ago, I thought I wanted to be a Naval Architect, and it had never crossed my mind that I could make games, and specifically FX, for a living. I’ve always been a gamer but I never thought about making them. Then during my university studies, I had a module where I had to create a 3D turbo engine in AutoCAD – that was the first time I did anything in virtual 3D space. From there I started experimenting with After Effects and then 3ds Max in my free time, then I changed career path and joined a different university to learn 3D animation and VFX for films. In my final year, I started learning particles in UDK through tutorials and I realized that I enjoyed real-time FX the most out of everything I had done so far. It took me a while to find it out.

VFX: stylized and realistic

Even though we may not have the technologies yet to easily and efficiently create film-like FX that can run in a game, that doesn’t mean that all real-time VFX are stylized. A realistic effect is one that intentionally replicates reality without any stylistic input, both in the way it simulates and looks. On the other hand, a stylized effect is one that has an intentional artistic style that’s reflected in its motion and/or its aesthetics.

Stylization to an extent can be considered subjective, but in any case, it’s not a failed attempt to reach the quality of the FX that we see in pre-rendered films. It’s an art style on its own with its own principles. You can just have a good or bad stylization.

When we talk about stylization in FX, it often comes from the colors and textures you use, the animation, timing and of course the elements of the FX. By elements, I mean what shapes and components you will use in your effects that can help drive away your work from realism. To achieve stylization through the use of color, it’s a matter of value and saturation. For textures you often need bold and dominant shapes, sort of “less is more” approach.

In FX animation, similarly to traditional animation, exaggeration in motion and timing is key in achieving stylization. Whereas in realism, you usually want more detail in those textures and colors that resemble the real world.

I knew I wanted to make realistic FX as soon as I read the first word in the VFX guidelines, especially as I kept reading and saw that there was room for combining stylization. That sort of artistic freedom to choose what direction to lean towards and how to approach it is what I love as an FX artist, as much as I greatly appreciate either far ends of the spectrum. So the fact that my effects are not full on realistic or full on stylised, is very intentional.

Creating VFX in Unreal Engine 4

One of the things I love about Cascade is that it can dynamically communicate with the Material Editor. You can use up to four parameters, or even up to eight and edit them dynamically. I used a lot of meshes in my work and most of them change over time on a vertex level driven by Cascade. Considering this was a real-time cinematic effect I wanted to tailor every single detail and have full control in my effects.

Another thing that Cascade offers is Random Seed, and I was using it all the time. Random Seed is basically the safest way to have randomization. In VFX we love randomization, it’s how we make the same effect look slightly different every time. In combat FX, especially those that the player sees a lot, you want to have a great amount of randomization, so FX look less repetitive. Naturally, a lot of randomization (randomizing many different values and elements in your FX) can create results that you don’t want. Since this was cinematic that had a static pre-decided camera, I tried to limit unwanted random results as much as possible. UE4 allows you to do that by showing you an infinite number of random results, and you can choose the ones you want. You can do that for pretty much everything in Cascade: color, velocity, size, parameters, location, everything. That way you do get a random result, but you get the same random result every time, which technically makes it systematic. I used that a lot to avoid unwanted surprises. It’s a small feature but it helped tremendously.

VFX stages

Typically there are three primary stages in combat FX animation: Anticipation, Climax, and Dissipation (similarly to the Twelve Principles of Animation by Disney).

Editor Note

Jason Keyser from Riot has made these videos explaining in detail the principles of VFX.