Thank you for extracting all of this useful info!
As skilled as you are in finding things out. Could you do a breakdown of how this is done?
(Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End™ flame torch fx study): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBGVTfSR2Co
Looks like at least 2 camera facing sprite animations recorded from real fire, lined up on top of each other, one at the lower end with some wrap distortion possibly. Then the direction of the top flame is controlled by the characters movement and a distortion texture ramped way up here to give the impression of motion with some particle fx triggered above a certain speed?
Ramblings of a mad tech artist. :P Hope it gives some insight.
VFX artist here, pretty much on point there, though it’s not a sprite animation for the flames enveloping the top of the torch, it’s a model with some distortion and fresnel shader trickery. The top flame is a 2D sprite NOT recorded from real fire, but rather a fluid sim, which seems to have a fast and slow variant. When it’s not moving the flame looks a lot calmer and when he’s moving a little it looks a bit more violent. And when the torch is moving fast enough it starts spawning little animated flame particles.
I’m curious if they do anything to prevent seeing the flatness of the particle if you’re looking at the torch from above. In Tomb Raider, which uses a similar 2D sprite for the flame, but if you look at it from above they transition to spawning particles to hide the effect.
Ahh cool, interesting insight there. Cheers. Curious why they’d go for having two variants though, rather than a distortion texture and some shader magic.
Concerning Deus Ex: it often seems to use both a grand defining texture and a detail texture map, and it just looks especially funky on the screens. It’s one of the few games that I’ve noticed utilising them, but that may be me. I suppose the game doesn’t quite have the texture resolution to keep the effect from being a bit jarring, but it’s still cool that you’ve got sharp texels even when standing right in front of something.
i dont know if this is something you can test, but I’ve always been perplexed by whatever method they use to create their “motion blur” effect in jet set radio future, considering it only affects the player model and seems to affect geometry rather than being a post-processing effect or a particle effect
Thank you for extracting all of this useful info!
As skilled as you are in finding things out. Could you do a breakdown of how this is done?
(Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End™ flame torch fx study):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBGVTfSR2Co
Wow…this looks really stunning! I wished UC4 would be on PC so we could investigate how it’s done.
Looks like at least 2 camera facing sprite animations recorded from real fire, lined up on top of each other, one at the lower end with some wrap distortion possibly. Then the direction of the top flame is controlled by the characters movement and a distortion texture ramped way up here to give the impression of motion with some particle fx triggered above a certain speed?
Ramblings of a mad tech artist. :P Hope it gives some insight.
VFX artist here, pretty much on point there, though it’s not a sprite animation for the flames enveloping the top of the torch, it’s a model with some distortion and fresnel shader trickery. The top flame is a 2D sprite NOT recorded from real fire, but rather a fluid sim, which seems to have a fast and slow variant. When it’s not moving the flame looks a lot calmer and when he’s moving a little it looks a bit more violent. And when the torch is moving fast enough it starts spawning little animated flame particles.
I’m curious if they do anything to prevent seeing the flatness of the particle if you’re looking at the torch from above. In Tomb Raider, which uses a similar 2D sprite for the flame, but if you look at it from above they transition to spawning particles to hide the effect.
Ahh cool, interesting insight there. Cheers. Curious why they’d go for having two variants though, rather than a distortion texture and some shader magic.
Great job on finding all those tricks! Thanks for it.
Do you think you could look into how Prototype does it’s “hand to tentacle-ish weapon” morphing?
Thank you! :) Hm .. I thought Prototype is bound to consoles, isn’t it? Really hard to look into console stuff … especially since I don’t own any :,(
Concerning Deus Ex: it often seems to use both a grand defining texture and a detail texture map, and it just looks especially funky on the screens. It’s one of the few games that I’ve noticed utilising them, but that may be me. I suppose the game doesn’t quite have the texture resolution to keep the effect from being a bit jarring, but it’s still cool that you’ve got sharp texels even when standing right in front of something.
i dont know if this is something you can test, but I’ve always been perplexed by whatever method they use to create their “motion blur” effect in jet set radio future, considering it only affects the player model and seems to affect geometry rather than being a post-processing effect or a particle effect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgtHdRGRqfk
youll see it a lot during higher-speed segments especially when grinding on rails or jumping off them, here’s a few screensots of the effect i grabbed
https://puu.sh/xnoKi/e2cbf171e4.png
https://puu.sh/xnoVU/37e6e3ca1b.png
https://puu.sh/xnp3r/efff160222.png
http://puu.sh/xnpbh/e6d319a194.png
I’d love to see an explanation on how they accomplished this
Wow, that’s very cool! i love it! i put it on my list with notes … this definitelly deservers more investigation! :)
there is a cool rounded edge shader in lumion 8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAmf2GujGTA&feature=youtu.be&t=21m7s
and a paper on this topic
http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2012/presentations/S0611-Edge-Aware-Shaders-for-RT-Computer-Graphics.pdf
i would love to here your thoughts on this and maybe how to approach this in unity
Wow, this is awesome! Just shared it on Twitter, thank you for the hint!
I just watched your RIME talk! You’re fantastic, thank you so much for contributing to the community!
Thank you :)