VFX Factory

With only 3 months before release day, I was assigned to author and integrate VFX for a character’s combat kit—a process which was normally allotted 9 months. The biggest production bottleneck by far was integration, especially managing spawned VFX outside of their dedicated events, which would need to be repeated for every event, including various state checks.

The solution was a VFX Factory component that simplified the management process. I whipped it up in an afternoon, and it handled the vast majority of the detailed integration work for me in a predictable, repeatable manner.

As a result, the tasks were delivered 3x quicker than normal, with no compromises made to quality. The lessons learned from this feature went on to completely overhaul the team’s FX integration workflow in the next project.

Level VFX Lighting System

Late into production, it became clear that unlit VFX materials were going to be insufficient to cover the various levels and the game’s Time-Of-Day system.

I worked with engineers and artists to create a performant, per-level lighting system that could be modularly slotted into new or existing materials.

This made an enormous improvement in the visual quality of VFX throughout the game, enabling VFX to properly match the lighting they were in, especially with water and dust visuals.

Niagara Crowd Simulation

I created powerful tools for artists and designers to easily populate levels with dynamic, animated, performant characters, directly in the editor. I also created the data framework to modularize the art assets and animations created by the VFX team with the Maya-Houdini-Unreal pipeline.

This was used to great effect in one of the post-release trailers, which features 200+ unique, animated characters, all running off one Niagara emitter.

Later, in an unannounced project, this technology was used to create swarms of birds and bats that could seamlessly perch, fly away, and return to designated locations on uneven surfaces.

VFX Master Materials

I created master materials that accommodated 90% of the VFX that I authored. Because of this, I was able to add material features as new engine capabilities came online, such as DepthFade, and features I used for some tasks were easily able to be re-used for later tasks, such as spacial masking. This also improved game performance by enabling the team to utilize the Material Analyzer to optimize our material inheritance hierarchy.