The uncanny valley is starting to fade away - wow. These are behind-the-scenes frames from Goodbye Kansas Studio's work on the cinematic trailer for CD Projekt Red's game Cyberpunk 2077, Phantom Liberty. It features a very, very realistic CG Idris Elba, in fact, perhaps the most convincing CG character I've even seen. It has to be seen to be believed.
You can watch the trailer here
For our VFX tests for Omelette, which is currently in preproduction, I originally wanted to do all of the VFX shots practically (meaning a special effect produced physically, without computer-generated imagery) but getting the movement of the egg to not feel like it was swinging off of fishing line proved to be too difficult, so we settled on creating the egg via CGI (which also wasn’t easy - but I’m pretty happy with the results)
Omelette is a Horror/Comedy about a young boy who just wants to practice his telepathy, but his mother has other plans.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is an American fantasy television series developed by J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay for the streaming service Amazon Prime Video. Based on the novel The Lord of the Rings and its appendices by J. R. R. Tolkien, the series is set thousands of years before Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and depicts the major events of Middle-earth’s Second…
Here's another post explaining the process of my last VFX. This teleport effect is abstract enough to be used in various cases, like the blue effect one looks like a waterdrop effect, kind of. So you can be quite creative with it.
I won't detail the whole process of the VFX, because I simply followed a Youtube tutorial by Grabriel Aguiar Prod. :"Unity 5 - Game Effects VFX - Teleport & Spawn"
You can check that if you're interested, and check his other videos on VFX. He uses the Particule System to do this, while I opted for the VFX graph. I chose this option because I like to set properties with the VFX graph and edit their values via script. Which is what I'm going to detail today.
I made this effect for the teleporter to exit a dungeon in my game. The effect will display differently depending on the situation:
- Nothing on the teleporter (Inactive)
- Player on the teleporter (Active)
- Player using the teleporter (Using)
These 3 states led me to define a state machine to play different animations.
The script switch states when Player enters/exits the trigger and when players press the button to use the teleporter.
An ExitState class only contains data that will be changed in the VFX and the Light2D object attached to the teleporter. I guess I could have used a struct here since I only have data but anyway 🤔
The only issue is that if I update directly the VFX with my states data, the animation won't be smooth. So I made some scripting to change some values gradually.
This was also the opportunity to use local functions. It's pretty handy here since I want some organization within my function, without polluting the whole class with functions that only serves the UpdateState.
I still put 2 functions outside of it to manage which values will change without/with transitions. If I want to change that in the future, I don't want to open the massive UpdateState function haha
It’s depressing that none of this is really surprising. And what grinds my gears is how fucking cowardly Disney, Marvel Studios in particular, is in letting the actors go out and express support for VFX artists instead of having the real people responsible for all this abuse in the first place (executives, committees, Kevin Feige himself) answer for it.
Because the actors are not relevant in this conversation, it’s the production houses who make these absurd demands and go along with this broken system in the film industry to create broken artists. I mean, my god, the amount of stress and pressure on artists that are so undervalued by virtually everyone because VFX are so misunderstand or taken for granted is horrific.
And look, like anything else in film, VFX are a tool and are used pretty ubiquitously across the film industry. Any tool can be mishandled but can also be used to create truly stunning works of art. But when one tool is favored because the others are unionized and (for the most part) protect their artists, then we have a problem.
Anyway, this whole article is worth a read because it gets into just how much needs to change and pretty much confirms what I either already knew or saw coming thanks to following the crunch abuse scandals in the video game industry.