RTVFX Bluesky, Houdini for VFX, Effects from other games

Hey lovely person! ⭐

Hope you're having a fine day! This time, my newsletter does NOT contain anything from myself. Just some cool stuff from others :)

Bluesky goes brrrrrrrr

Game Dev on Bluesky goes crazy right now and more and more people enjoying the platform. Cool feature: They have "Starter Packs", which are basically lists of people you can follow with one click. I made one for Realtime VFX artists. Feel free to tell me, if you want to be on the list as well!

Visit Starter Pack
Houdini for VFX?

On my Discord, Marina asked how useful Houdini is for game dev. I copy/paste my answer in here because the links might be useful for some of you as well:

In regard to VFX, it's often used for:

  1. Procedurally "cutting" geometry into pieces and then simulating/baking their destruction. Great talk: https://youtu.be/d6FMHWaDkYQ?si=HJMNv3yd1n4RgqGY

  2. Making Pyro/Liquid Simulations and baking the result into flipbooks or exporting it as geometry (e.g. via Alembic or Vertex Animation Textures). Simple but efficient example tutorial: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/splashmesh-houdini-for-games/

  3. Creating procedural geometry which would be complicated to model by hand. Here some wonderful examples from God of War: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Za5DeR

  4. You can even execute your procedural networks (which you build in Houdini) while being in Unreal/Unity with Houdini-Engine. Very useful! And here are some fantastic examples how to use it (scroll down, there are several short videos with example for Building-Generator, Cloth-Sim, etc): https://www.sidefx.com/titan/
Join my Discord
Learn VFX from Mod Tools

In my latest talk "Being a Tech Art Detective" I shared, that mod tools can give great insight into VFX because it's possible to open and study the effects of a specific game.

By accident, I stumbled across this Doom Eternal Studio with integrated VFX Editor!

And don't forget, Divinity Original Sins 2 also offers mod tools which allow you to browse their VFX as well!

Single Sample Seamless Tri-Planar Mapping

Nemi mentioned on my Discord a super cool technique to have tri-planar-mapping but only using ONE texture sampler! How cool is that?

Watch Youtube Video
Bling-Bling

It's always astonishing to me how important black frames are. Look at this frame-by-frame! The stars start small and glowing, then suddenly turn black, then turn glowing again. Works so well!

Watch Youtube Video

Thanks for reading! Have a lovely day/night! 💘
Simon