GAMES
WHO ARE THE ROCK STARS OF VIDEO GAME VFX? By DAVID “DJ” JOHNSON CEO/Creative Director, Undertone FX
TOP : David “DJ” Johnson BOTTOM LEFT: Robert Gaines BOTTOM RIGHT: Sascha Herfort
In the film industry, when it comes to Visual Effects, there are names that we all know. We know exactly what they worked on and where they made their names. They are legends: Dennis Muren VES, ASC; Ray Harryhausen; Richard Edlund VES, ASC; Stan Winston; Paul Debevec; Ed Catmull VES – the list goes on. While your list might differ a bit, this is part of mine. So who are those people in the games industry? In video games, we are more than anonymous. We are the few in the trenches working on our passions. We don’t often show up in behind-thescenes videos. We are rarely named in any of the gaming awards. But there are incredible talents out there that are doing what I and others consider to be some of the most cutting-edge visual effects in the game industry. I would like to call out some of these people. They are the legends that I look up to and aspire to emulate. A few of them I’ve worked with, and a few I’ve competed against at the VES Awards. But for every one of them, when I hear their name, an image is conjured of a moment in gaming where something astounding was created – something better than I had ever seen before. These are some of my legends of gaming VFX, and what stood out in my head as making them each rock stars. Robert Gaines, Call of Duty 2 I remember everyone in the office I worked at huddled around a TV showing off this game and all of us admiring Robert’s work. It was a WWII level set in Russia, and in it you planted explosives, then from afar detonated a building and saw it come down. We were in awe. It was beautiful. The smoke plume left behind was gorgeous. It eventually led to me applying at Infinity Ward and working under Robert for a few years. I’ve learned more from Robert than from any other person I’ve worked for or with in games. His critique was always on point and he came up with ways to work that I’d never seen before – time looping iteration, first-person in-context FX placement via the console. I’ll always consider Robert a mentor for what he taught me about creating video game effects. Sascha Herfort, RYSE: Son of Rome There were a number of ways in which RYSE shined above anything I’d seen before. The siren character caked in dried mud with warpaint cracking off was stunning. The facial animation pipeline they developed was amazing, sharing the same setup across gameplay and cinematics. But the sequence where the warship crashed into the shore with sails tearing, ropes flying everywhere – it was destruction on an eye-popping scale. They implemented an Alembic GeomCaching pipeline. When this was shown at the Game Developers Conference the following year, I scrambled along with several other studios to play catch up. A new bar had been set. Sascha has now moved over to the film industry where he works as a Creature TD at ILM. Marijn Giesbertz, Killzone Shadow Fall Killzone Shadow Fall also had a number of advancements that truly amazed me, such as its approach to forces I hadn’t seen
88 • VFXVOICE.COM FALL 2018
PG 88-90 GAMES.indd 88-89
“For everyone [on my list], when I hear their name, an image is conjured of a moment in gaming where something astounding was created – something better than I had ever seen before.” —David “DJ” Johnson
in a real-time engine before. Some of the cityscape fly-ins were absolutely gorgeous. The producers at Guerrilla Games were early adopters of PBR lighting. They were using motion vectors (functionally optical flow) to get higher-resolution effects textures early on. But the scene that really floored me came late in the game where gravity was going bonkers. All of these building bits were flying around the sky. It was the answer to “What if there were a massive destruction sequence, but instead of falling, everything just swirled around and you could fly through and run around inside of it?” I was truly astounded. Alessandro Nardini, Call of Duty: Ghosts Alessandro comes from the film industry and is back in it now, but we were graced with his talents for Call of Duty: Ghosts. After seeing the work [leading technical animator and director] Chris Evans did in RYSE, we had our sights set on seeing how far we could push destruction in a game engine, and Alessandro was just the man to pull it off. The opening level shows you running through the streets and houses of a town outside San Diego, where a ‘Rod of God’ has just struck nearby (a non-nuclear kinetic rod dropped from space that does as much damage as a nuke). As the streets are cracking and dropping out beneath your feet, you run through houses that are being torn in half and witness buildings collapsing into the chasm. Alessandro won a VES Award for his work on this sequence, and it will always stand out as a high point in my career to have worked with him on it.
TOP LEFT: Marijn Giesbertz TOP RIGHT: Alessandro Nardini (Photo: Andrea Arghinenti) BOTTOM: Matt Vainio
Matt Vainio, Infamous: Second Son Second Son is what you get when phenomenal artistry intersects with powerful tools. It says something when, of all the games in this list, Infamous is the only one whose showcase of outstanding work revolves around core systems effects (the abilities of the player) rather than one-off set-piece moments. The player smoke, neon dash, and other gameplay effects are all brilliantly executed. Particles are emitted off of the entire player body with proper coloring, and transition to beautiful ribbons and ash with an insane amount of density and curl noise. When the team at Sucker Punch Productions showed off their tools at GDC and a VES event in Seattle, the audience was awestruck.
FALL 2018 VFXVOICE.COM • 89
8/23/18 1:11 PM