How to (Not) Create Textures for VFX

[Music] i would like to thank you to come here to my little talk about how not to create textures for vfx i'm simon tripler he him and up there you can see some games i had a privilege working on and here is one of my very first effects i made for a game at some point long time ago and here are some effects i did recently um yeah and now i would like to invite you to a little vacation on an island which i designed like the vfx paradise okay so this is how i imagine the paradise for vfx artists um explosions all the time splashes all the time that's what we like and i created this project just for this gdc to have a base for a talk to talk about some textures and textures which i think are the most commonly types you will find in vfx like some splashes some explosions some water some foam and so on and so on but before we come to that i would like to give some expectation management when you search for resources how to create textures for effects then you will find not much but if you find something it will be stylized and this is why i will not focus so much on this today because you can see there are some names there if you google them you will find amazing resources and i will focus a little more on semi-realistic effects and um yeah that's what i will do and i will also not focus on version zero version zero is usually um a version where you maybe not even use the texture at all you just communicate gameplay usually and this is what i will not focus on today i will also not focus on the final polished version where you had a lot of time to spend into your textures right i will focus on a version which i call ge stands for good enough and the idea is that you get to this version as fast as possible but it should look nice not amazing but nice so that you um for example also see the scale of the explosion because it has some detail uh or the effect in general um and it should be a base for the discussion with for example art direction that you can say hey uh sure we iterate more about the style of the effect or can we go into the polishing phase so this is what i would like to focus on today and as as far to my knowledge this is maybe the first or one of the first talks focusing very specific on how to create textures for vfx let's start at the basics okay so the most common texture types for vfx artists are sprites and this is just a texture on a little particle so nothing special here but we have also spreadsheets which is just a collection of sprites on one texture and the particle system will choose one randomly just for some variation um and then we have flip books which is basically just a little movie running on on the particle and then we have volumetric textures which is basically slices of simulations or objects stored into a volumetric texture and then you can do some magic with that but to be honest i never used one so i will not focus more on this topic but i wanted to have the list complete okay and the most common use cases for textures are okay color surprise we have a color texture and put it on our particle we also have masks and these masks come usually at least one mask as an alpha in your color texture to mask out these shapes but a mask can also be a grayscale image just separated separately stored and you can use your shader to i don't know mask out your other textures if you want to and another grayscale mask we have is can or can be used for erosion and you can see that my little particles fade out in a bit more interesting way than just the opacity low and down right and then we have look up textures which are basically just little color gradients and they are used to colorize a grayscale map and here you see how i colorize my little erosion map from before with different colors and it's just a very nice way of um [Music] with not many resources colorize something very nicely and of course vector maps which are usually used to distort your uv so you get a little bit of extra motion into your particle so and now let's go about how to create these textures because this is what we are talking about today um there are four ways of creating textures for vfx at least to my knowledge and the first one is handmade you can paint it you can use photos you can use procedural tools like substance or simple tools which are specifically made to create one type of texture or you can simulate something like an explosion for example and then bake this into a texture usually done with houdini or blender and nowadays ambergen which is the software which can almost simulate in real time and now on the next slide i will have colorized these words depending on how quick it is to do so here you see and i also have little emojis so as you can see photo bashing and simple tools are the fastest way then we have something in the middle ground with painting and substance designer depending of course what you want if you just use substance to store out some noises that's a bit quicker than doing a realistic fire from scratch and learning simulation takes forever i i took weeks to follow this one course for learning how to do pyro doing the simulation itself also takes forever because it's so complicated and then the rendering also takes forever so this will be not any more part of this talk because it just takes long and we want to achieve a good enough version kavik but embergen sneaks a little bit in between because it's real-time simulation and i did not use ambergen before but for this talk i did a little test i downloaded it and then i saw what i could could get out of it as quick as possible and here are the results so after 50 minutes of ambergen i rendered out these little flip books and that's not because i'm a genius it's because amber 10 comes with presets and i think it's 60 or 70 or something like that and you can just load them in and render them out and it's very nice and i think when you take a day of work you can get a very nice base uh for your vfx texture library out of that but it's important to mention you are not allowed to do that when you only have the demo version you should buy a license then it's okay but there's one way which is even faster than all of them and this is by the way also the reason or one of the reasons why my talk is how to not create textures because you use existing textures so of course it's very faster if you use something existing like texture packs or brushes then when you do everything by yourself um all of these things like these different texture types these use cases and also these different ways of creating things can sometimes be a bit overwhelming and it was important for me to share that i feel and felt like that often and in preparation of this talk i spoke with many other professionals and they told me all the same nobody was like oh yeah that's super easy for me they all were like oh yeah sometimes i feel like especially when there is no texture at all um already in the project so i wanted to share this if you feel sometimes like that it's okay and you are not alone and i hope with this talk maybe i can give you some inspirations to overcome this hurdle or give you some creative ways of creating textures again normally we would be very happy to see that now but unfortunately i need to be in this a little bit more melancholic uh mood um for this slide because i would like to speak about and this is the second reason why this talk is called how not to create textures for vx because they have some things in my mind blocking me from creating good textures and maybe if if you want you can give me a kiwi can sign if this was happens there on the screen there will be a quote or a little sentence if you had this thought in your past or maybe you even think nowadays like that using photos is cheating so i raised my hand because i fought like that and okay nobody here okay i want to okay maybe 50 or maybe maybe 40. okay that's good to hear that i'm not alone because um i don't know where this was coming from but for some reason i had this thought in my head and i also know that in concept art areas you can hear that often that people especially i don't know maybe beginners or maybe people who don't do concept art so long they are like oh man you don't paint every pixel by yourself it's cheating and here is my little journey of not using textures this is two textures of my one of my earliest textures i did for vfx for a game at some point this is a long time ago i didn't know what i was doing and of course i didn't use textures but later for a project um i yeah continued doing textures and you could maybe say okay these are maybe nice for for a stylized game unfortunately this was a semi-realistic game but i was under this impression oh no i can't use textures and i have to paint everything by myself and then finally later at some point at the project i finally started using some photos and i hope we can agree that these textures on the right look a little bit better a little bit more detail just a little bit more realistic and it took me a long time to overcome this hurdle but important do not just use any texture from the internet don't go to google and and take everything you need to check out the faq or the license and just as an example textures.com very good yes you can use it for commercial projects and most important at the bottom you do not need to mention our website this is important because you find many free resources in the internet but most of them will require you to attribute to author which is totally fine of course especially when you have maybe a little indie game or something but it is unpractical if you go to your producer at the end of call of duty and say hey i have this list of 50 people could you please add them to the credits because i use some brushes and textures for them this is they will not be delighted about it at the producer i mean i mean the people would and here's an um example for being careful the art station standard license allows only one commercial project and up to 2000 sales which is not that much if we think about the scale of a call of duty or something so um usually on art station you have to buy the extended license but sometimes this is not offered by the creator so be careful about this and there's another reason i got blocked by i had in my mind another weird thing using third-party assets is cheating okay what i had in my med what i had in my me in my head sorry is that an artist a real artist creates everything from scratch and using i don't know texture packs from someone else is cheating and um maybe this is something artists have in general i don't know but i think it's important to mention that we are not artists which need a kiss from the muse and then we start creating something we are production artists so we should use every tool we can get to make things as fast as possible and yeah as mentioned sometimes i have this now today even so this is not something from the past and if you also struggle with that if you also have this artist's brain sometimes saying no no i want to quit everything from scratch here come my top six solutions to calm your artist's brain down so first it is fast it is very fast to use textures from from someone else if you are allowed to but don't worry there's enough work to be done here for example is a free flipbook from unity which you can use for your project but we see yeah i mean it looks nice but it's a bit stuttery and here is what i made out of it for this this project i i showed you before and to improve it a little bit i had to adjust the color curve the size curve enable frame blending in the particle system so that it's not as stuttery as before and i most important i animate the frame rate of the flip book so that it moves fast at the beginning and slow at the end like when the smoke calms down because of air friction this is what i'm achieving with that and this is just one particle you have now to set up the whole explosion with many particles and then add other elements like sprites sprites and sparkles and debris and stuff like that so there's a lot of enough work for you to do don't worry just using a third party as it does not make you without work sometimes i head to this in my mind oh yeah i would like to use this flipbook but there's some data missing for example this flipbook is just lit from one side but i want to have a dynamic lighting but here i need to calm myself down and say hey we want to have a good enough version must not be super polished so it's okay to have just static lighting or something maybe you have no uh you have this flipbook which stutters a little bit and you would like to have these perfect motion vectors to blend perfectly between the frames but you don't have them and you don't know about slate and it can create them for you pretty easily then maybe it is enough to just enable frame blending in the particle system uh it's not perfect but it's good enough and maybe some people are like yeah i i i could imagine using third-party libraries but i'm working in stylized effects and these are all realistic but here's a small example of what you can do i mean it's not perfect it was just quickly done drawn by me but i use the realistic or semi-realistic reference and draw on top to make something stylized so this is also maybe a little inspiration for you and also important when you go into a company usually you have a team with other fellow artists and they maybe created already some textures before you and of course you will reuse them if possible why should you do a 20th explosion if they are 19 perfectly usable in the project so you will use third-party assets anyway and nothing speaks against taking some out of the internet if you are allowed to of course and then it really helps to find your art direction on the left you see my little explosion which i used this is the unity flipbook and on the right i just used a different flipbook from the same pack and i like the left one more because you have a nice silhouette right the right one is a bit rounder and now that i know this if i should go and do my own explosion now or simulation i know what to look for and this is very valuable finding out what you want and what you like takes usually a lot of amount of time and these assets can help you to find out what do you like quicker and i already spoiled it a little bit this is the most important thing if your artist's brain is like oh no i don't want uh to use assets from someone else then you can tell it hey we just use it now and maybe if there's time we can make our own simulation or effect or explosion later and now finally let's talk about practical stuff okay all this theory so here's this project again you can see some some effects going on there and these are the most important textures i created for this project and i will go with you on a little journey and explain how those are created first a little general guide if you were unsure what would be a good way to create the texture first ask yourself do you need a texture if you know then enjoy life and if yes then ask yourself is there a third party asset you can use and if so use it in my case the explosion if there's no third-party asset then you can ask yourself hey is there a simple tool which generates this texture for me and if so use it in my case this will be the little cloud which we're on top of my island if no then ask yourself if it's tileable is it's a tileable texture and if so you can use substance designer of course you can also use photoshop but in substance it's just a little bit faster more convenient and if the texture is more unique then i usually prefer photoshop or creator and that's my little guide here and now let's talk about the explosion um yeah spoiler i just used explosion from unity flipbooks but i want to mention that yeah these are cc0 so you can use them for whatever you want and they offer way more than just some explosion they also have some nice flames and some smoke and you find whenever i mention something here by the way you will find a source down there in the corner ambergen also offers some free vdb's and also keep in mind that unity and unreal offer both usually big asset packs which you can use if you use the respective engine and just the paragon assets alone contain a huge load of amazing vfx assets oss in general okay that's already for the explosion um now i would like to talk about this background thing which is not necessarily a vfx texture but i want to cover some basics in there so i included it here in this talk first we look at reference of course i noted i noticed that [Music] these galaxies are basically very soft gradients and then a lot of high frequency noise on top and then and this is important i wish someone would have told this to me like i don't know 10 years ago create your source files always in a big format meaning big format and then set it in your engine to is to the size you actually need um [Music] this is future proof if production comes and says hey we make a high-res version of our our game or we make a 4k version or a 4k page then the only thing you have to do is increase these numbers and you are done you do not want to repaint all your textures because you created them in two small source files like i did a while ago and this does not mean that i i ask you to paint all these little details which at the end nobody will see okay but if you oh no no what should i do my laptop is something happened i am not sure what happened uh did i press something no it's good it's good okay so this does not mean that you paint all these details but the workflow and the time um the time investment is the same if you use a big brush for example or photos on a big canvas or if you use a smaller version of the same brush and a small canvas so it's exactly the same work for you as an artist but the one version on the left is future proof and the other is not and i have a very nice example for that in baldur's gate 3 there are these ash particles flying in the air they can come really close to the camera which i really like and i tell you if i would have painted this a while ago because of in my head an ash particle is something very small so i would have created a 32 by 32 texture and call it a day but this would then be just a blurry blob in front of the camera okay so um yeah this is something i i learned pretty late in my career actually brushes okay it's no surprise to use brushes that's a wow simon that's crazy but actually i found it really hard to find good brushes for vfx which you allowed to use there are some websites that are out there with a lot of brush packs but mostly they are attribution and as i explained before this is a little bit of a practical issue um this is not free but adobe bought the brushes from coyote webster some time ago and offers them for free if you have a subscription to photoshop and i guess most of us have so i wanted to include it here that i like this better brush pack a lot which you also see in the background with some nice clouds and sparkle shapes and yeah this is what i like and also important i always store everything like the photos the brush bags everything into my cloud vfx library with that i have it on access on all the pcs and even if my my pc crashes at some point i still have it and my workflow is not disturbed by losing these assets so this was very important to me saving we save our textures do we saving is something very dear to my heart because i like to have it efficient and this is the [Music] workflow in photoshop and this is not very efficient you have to press file and save and then select the type every time and if you save as tga there's this little dialogue coming up oh do you want to save in 24 bit 132 and this is so annoying and we it can't be annoying because we want to iterate often and fast and this is i'm getting angry looking at this gif and this is already twice the speed so here are my suggestions for making it better if you use krita there is a batch exporter coming with krita one click you export your textures to a desired location in photoshop there's the good old q save very nice script i used it a long time but nowadays i prefer the espresso plugin from francesco which is even capable of saying saving some folder layer folders into the different color channels of texture but i use it mainly for saving and is so good okay and the rest of this texture is actually not super exciting but you see i i iterate quickly i paint some some soft brushes then i use this plugin which i just mentioned to save it and then switch to unreal look at it and then i use this better brush pack to finish off the texture by just adding some nice clouds shapes and so on and yeah this is the for the for this texture but i want to mention something maybe you're thinking now oh simon you're saying that um we all need big brush packs and big brush libraries i mean you can but i don't underestimate the power of the standard brushes and before this talk i talked with a lot of professionals and many of them said i just use the thunder brushes most of the time so i wanted to give out some little techniques which make you get a lot out of simple brushes first if you have a boring stroke you can make it more interesting by erasing some negative shapes with the eraser or lasso tool for example so this is a very common technique also smudge is of course your friend simple stroke smudge it around and not a simple stroke smudge it around and you get some nice wispy shapes out of that and i'm i want to mention down there you see tiled painting happening which means when your brush and is on the one side of your canvas it wraps around the other side of the canvas basically so that you can paint perfectly tile tiles textures there and maybe you will now say well krita had this forever but what you see there is photoshop and this was just added in 2021 and i wanted to send it out here because i didn't know that i stumbled across it on twitter by random and i just want to make sure everyone knows view pattern preview this is titled painting in photoshop it's amazing and shannon has very nice tutorials about how to use uh blur a motion blur to get a lot out of simple brushes and she also has very nice um yup tutorials in general about the standard brushes so you can use these things um i will spoil it now you don't need to take textures of the slice there will be something later but i will talk about this later but don't worry you will not lose these resources and this is the most mind-blowing to me because i didn't use the min filter so much i didn't even know that it existed and the idea of the min filter is to increase shapes as you can see i increased the filter strength and then these shapes get bigger and bigger but i saw something very nice on the youtube channel of cg howe and he um just painted different sizes of strokes on top of each other smudged them a little bit a little softer brush on top so pretty simple stuff actually and when you use the mint filter on that it generates a very nice shape look at this it doesn't this is super cool i would i don't know how long it would take me to paint this by hand so this is a very cool technique to make something nice and here another example from ben who show us how to use the mindful of bigger values and you get very nice interesting stylized shapes out of that right just some squiggly lines and you get something very nice out of it okay so that's uh about brushes and now let's talk about the lightweight texture these lightweights were generated in photoshop and it all starts with this little shape there and then you can apply the wave filter in photoshop to distort it a little bit and then we use the good old radial blur with the zoom mode and you will see here every time you use it every time several times and every time i do this it gets better and better and look at these chains how to develop doesn't this look awesome and it just takes two minutes to do it um and just for a little comparison here on the left is one of my very early textures where i tried the same in photoshop by hand and i can tell you it took me longer than these two minutes using the photoshop printer and i guess you can agree that the white one looks a bit better and [Music] we have a problem if you use substance because substance does not offer a zoom blur node so we as a vfx community lack this node but unfortunately fortunately we have a bruno in our community and he told me how to make this happen in substance you can see it by using the polar to quotation note and then a directional blur and then cartesian two polar again and this is how it looks so this is our zoom blur and substance just in case you want to have it and we also have fortunately a robin in our community and he used the slope blur for that and it looks like this so very nice techniques in substance and this is my result so i generated two more textures with these techniques lightning [Music] if you look at the lightning you will see this what you will see when you look on different scales in the world on different things you will notice that the structures are often the same or similar you see that the river the blood vessel and this little root at the right looks very similar to um lightning so maybe if you can't find the perfect resource or reference or texture maybe you can get a little bit creative with your footage and so i did so i used the ribbon and i increased contrast and inverted it and then cut away everything what did not look like a lightning and then i also copied some parts from other parts of the river and rearranged them to look like my lightning and this is how i did my lightning but i wanted to have it fade out no fade in from top to bottom and fade out in a global erosiony way okay and but this was easy just in photoshop but on top i made a little gradient i hope you can see there's a little gradient from top to bottom and for the fade out mask i just used the photoshop inner glow filter and yeah maybe it's not perfect but it's good enough and the water splash is maybe now that we saw how to use these photos not super special but i just take this photo increase the contrast and then i cut out all the pieces i like and assemble them to a nice little water splash and what i want to emphasize here is reusability of textures of vfx textures because you should if possible reuse them as much as you can and here's an example on my little explosion on the left you see these sandy spikes like the scent going off right and this is exactly the same texture like my water splash so why should i create another water another splash texture if this is good enough right so lucky for me it saved some time yeah and also the moon in the background uses the blue channel of one of the textures from lewis texture pack as a base for my little look loot so that i could colorize it again so i just reused whatever i could could get in my hands and the water is something i saw in a youtube video this is why oh on the next slide it will say source unknown because i saw it in a very nice video but i forgot what the video was so if you see this talk please people tell me that it was you and i will add you as this source and i generated these difference clouds in substance but you can also do it in photoshop by applying the um the difference cloud filter twice on your canvas and then i use substance to generate the normal map so not too special but what i like about substance is the preview because it's very nice to emphasize how roughly it will look in your game right and i would also like to underline that these shapes on the left there they look awfully a lot like lightning and it is actually a technique to generate these clouds increase the contrast and then use these shapes for your lightning textures but i did not because i wanted to show you the creative approach using photos and it sources unknown like i said and now let's talk about the waterfall so the waterfall starts of course with a reference i really liked and there's something we will use substance for that and when i think about substance i always think about making things from scratch i guess it comes from the fact that the substance tutorials out there for stone and sand and all these cool things always start from scratch and they generate photovoice resource results and this is just amazing but i tried and to be honest um i think this explosion texture which i tried doing from scratch could be improved a little bit and also this fire is not without the potential to get better but at some point i realized why should i do everything from scratch why not take a flame from a photo like here use a tile sampler node and just uh splattered on on on the canvas and substance and then get a perfectly nice fiery tileable texture out of this within some minutes and this is what i did for the waterfall so i took this amazing texture from from textures.com and made the border a little bit softer and then used this tile sampler note to just splat it around and this is the result you can see here is get it up and down to see how where the actual textures are and i think it blends very very well and then i put it on my waterfall under the edge and now i'm contradicting myself a little bit i said we are talking about good enough but i was not super satisfied even though it should be good enough right but i wanted to try something else because i found it did not resemble too much the structures in my reference folder right folder texture picture so then i did something crazy i used the reference picture as texture so i got into a substance with the svg node which lets you paint a vertex vector shapes yeah so i painted some vector shapes i blurred them a little bit and with that i cut away all these pieces which i did not need and then i did the same like before i just split it around a lot and have now a texture which looks like this which resembles more the structure i was looking for but then while looking at all these photos i saw this and i really like this layer structure in this waterfall right but i couldn't find a nice texture to to to resemble that but what i found was when you look at the forest and you flip the forest and you increase the contrast a little bit it looks kind of like these layer structures right so i just took this in my substance and overlaid this layer with the other layer i created before and now i got here where i have some nice structures but also sometimes you see these these wavy layer things falling down right so uh yeah this is what i ended up with and here are some more creative ways this one is from pete clark how to use the interesting photo choices for you for your textures so he generates a massive flash out of a little rubber duck and here is the good old chicken thingy which gets converted into a texture yeah so unfortunately these are not for me but they are still awesome okay and now let's talk about this little cloud for this little cloud i used a tool which is just there for creating clouds it's called kumo works it's open source and you can paint a very simple shape and it will create a very nice cloud there are a lot of sliders but you can use these templates to get different cloud structures out of that which is super super nice and also you can change the light source direction which means that if your shader can do it you can generate different light maps from all direction and then you have a six-sided light map shader in your game if you want to have this and here is the texture i generated out of this and for this cloud i generated three different masks the diffuse mask of course but then i wanted when the lightning goes off i have a little mask from below that the little cloud is a little bit too lit and for that i just used the light source comes from below now i just used another version of my little cloud and increased the contrast and then took my original texture inverted it and then increased the contrast a bit and masked it a bit out and combined both and this is my little mask for the the lighting no the lightning for the lighting cloud and was this correct i don't okay but you get what i'm saying uh and the last thing is i wanted to have this cloud appear not just um fade in and out i wanted to appear at least at the beginning and that it grows right now that it erodes into the scene and this is i just painted with soft standard brushes on top of the alpha channel and this is basically just what i did there and these three different masks i put now into one texture into the rgb channels and this is something we know as gray packing or channel packing it's very common known technique but i wanted to add two things about that first i don't know if you know but in photoshop in the layer style in your folder layer folders or the layers themselves you can enable these checkboxes to send this photo or layer directly to the color channel which is amazing and super easy so you can do that here in in my gif you see how i just check these boxes and everything is set up or you just use the the plugin by francesco it is also capable of doing that but yeah wanted to share this knowledge here and second the big advantage of channel packing is that you have to sample your texture only once in the shader yeah here i sample it only once and then i can use these three masks which are put into the rgb channels for whatever i want but often my shaders sample each layer separately anyway because for example i want to move them in different ways or maybe i want to sample them at different resolutions or something with different uv tilings and so for my workflow 90 of the time i noticed that this channel packing i love this technique but i prefer to store these masks as grayscale images just the separate ones and then i can reuse them very easily in other shaders which also read in this mask but it is a very cool technique for these special cases like my little cloud and there is actually a talk from um nikola about spellbounds which i heavily recommend it's super cool they use this technique for almost all the vfx textures and they have one master shader reading in everything and it's super interesting so if you like the technique then yeah you can have a look on this talk shader magic it doesn't fit in here so well because i would like to talk about textures right but um i think there are three simple techniques which can boost your textures a lot and it was important to me to share them because even if you are a bit hesitant with going into material or shadow creation i think these can help you a lot and so i wanted to share this your redistorsion look up textures and erosion are three techniques which are simple but cool and uv distortion we sorted at the beginning already it adds some motion like my little cloud starts wobbling if you um generate it with this example here and here is the cloud again you see that yeah my static texture not super exciting but up there with this simple shader trick a lot of motion suddenly which i really like and look up textures are like be spoken before just there to colorize your grayscale image or mask with a little lookup gradient very resourceful technique and it also changes how you create your textures because instead if you have if you have or if you want to have different versions for your flipbook you do not need to store them separately into different color versions you can now use a grayscale flipbook and colorize it with this little lookup gradients which is better for performance and memory and also gives you as a vfx artist more flexibility and it is also used and this is for the stylized people you can use it for stylization as well so on the on the left is the explosion like seen before and on the right i use the little look up texture which only has some colors and you can see that it looks very more comicky i would say so it's a very useful tool to have into your belt and erosion is like be spoken before they are for making the fade out a bit more interesting and here you can see another little shared example i just put them in for someone want to implement it later and it basically fakes complexity so that here you see on the left side there's the little texture and you see these shapes falling down and while they're falling down they dissolve right and on the right you see how it would look like if you would just use soft alpha and it's not just exciting and here the same example on the left we see these water splashes and while they are falling down they rolled away so it looks way more exciting i think than on the right side where nothing happens basically yeah um yeah and here's the alpha original software and this is also a technique which can be used for stylization again left side is the explosion this time with the stylized look up texture assigned and on the right side you see um how the alpha erodes away and i think it looks way more like a stylized i don't know manga animation or explosion than the left side right so um there are not too many resources to [Music] about this topic about the texture generation itself but there are quite some tools out there like for example this little cloud tool i just showed and did you know for example that krita has a particle brush engine which allows you to paint very nice wispy smoke or that photoshop has a flame filter which generates very nice flamy shapes for you and we did not even talk about the effects texture maker which is a tool running in your browser and it can generate many kind of different textures for you [Music] and save it into a flipbook super practical and then there is a flamepainter is a very commonly known tool but it is i i didn't know that there is an online version which you can also use for creating very interesting things and you can see the links down there of course and i think it would be nice if if we could um collect all these this knowledge at some point maybe a decentralized website or something to so that everyone can access that because it's it's really it took a lot of research for me to find all these things and i think it would be nice if this person can then maybe would prepare a talk about this and while talking then mentioned it he actually did so i created this resource database for my preparation where i collected all these things and i separated in eight different categories the first four are like to find textures and texture patches and packs and brushes and also some photo and video footage which you can use as a base for your textures and the other four are focused on tutorials so i collected any tutorial i could find i mean there are not too many but what i could find i put in there for for the different methods of generating the textures and if you feel fancy you're of course free to search the database directly by yourself with keywords by authors or maybe some some like fire or lightning or something like that uh i need to mention i will extend the keyboards further in the future uh so if there's maybe something in there uh which you can't find yet hopefully in the future it will be better i didn't have too much time to perfectionize the all the tagging yet but i will do in the future and now you may ask yeah that's great but how do i access that and to that i would answer you can use this qr code or this url or this very small url down there if you like it a little bit shorter and this will lead you to a website um just some some notes on websites with some links and it will not only contain the link to the resource database it also contains links to these slides so if you want to revisit something or you saw a source that's what uh why i mentioned before you don't need to take photos because you have it already right now it is online right now and you can just look at the slides and i also um added what i basically saying right now should be readable in these slides as a little speaker's commentary so i hope this helps people who maybe didn't visit the talk yet and it will also contain the unreal project files and the substance files and later if this talks goes online the video recording and there is some stuff which did not make it into this talk because of time purposes so when you scroll down there's a little secret section called content plus plus and you can look at these slides with for even more little tricks and i added a commentary in the speakers notes just for these reasons and you can help to make this whole situation better if you want because i think there are like i said not too many resources right so if you uh because in my perfect dream world this talk is just the beginning of this whole discussion and maybe it can inspire other people to generate some more resources now specifically for this topic i would very much like it to feel less overwhelmed in the future and if you do you can use this hashtag because it was only used once on twitter by cg how actually and i think we can just take it and share our knowledge there if you have more resources which are not already in the database then feel free to tell me and i can add the resource um and if you share something already like maybe you're sharing a texture pack or something then please share it as cc0 so that anyone can use it without attribution or judge money this is totally fine i i'm happy to pay for good content but it would be nice to avoid the attribution issue and if you can paint maybe you consider making a little uh tutorial about this because sometimes i see concept artists amazing pieces um like like uh i don't know a castle or dragon or something and then they paint over some effects and i'm like oh i would like to know how you did paint these effects right so there's a little example kianen had usually he paints figures and stuff like that but he has one video about video game particles and i really enjoyed that much it was a really cool little lecture and yeah maybe other people fancy this too and if you're a vfx artist maybe you consider to not only share your vfx in your ad station profile but maybe also the textures because it's uh even though you don't see the process it's still a very good learning opportunity to see what an effect was made of and if you want maybe you want to even show your process maybe even a speed painting a very nice example is sara comedy and she shares a lot of processes this is just simple gifts she also has speed paintings on her station page and it's not necessarily a vfx texture now but i think it's still a good example how much you can take out of even this simple gif it's so cool to see right uh yeah so these are the things that you can do if you want to improve the whole situation and while cheap studio this is the company i'm working at is also hiring so if you feel like you would like to work in the south of france in a very nice team and like you can see a very nice little office then feel free to check out these this little url and i would also like to take the time to thank some people because celine is our ceo at waichi and without her it wouldn't have been possible for me to fly here and to stay here so thank you so much for that and leah organized the whole trip and she took away a lot of stress from me i can tell you and of course beer was also my um contact person to gdc and without him i wouldn't even have dared to apply for this for this talk here so thank you so much and other people there i highly recommend uh checking their profiles out there all great artists and these are the people who gave me so much feedback for this talk and shaped it together with me so if you liked it feel free to visit their profiles and give them some love if you did not like it then that's me and if there are more questions then of course you can send me a twitter or an email of course we can also talk after this because i love to speak to fellow with x guys and so that's this for that yeah i didn't forget anything yeah and this is the end so um my name is simon and please don't forget using photos is not cheating thank you [Applause] and please fill out the vote forms i shall say these little things to you know you know it right the devo vote the feedback forms okay great um so that's for me yeah we have 10 minutes left which is very pleasant in my tests sometimes i run a bit over the time but i guess i was a bit nervous and spoke faster so if you want you can ask something but like i said we can also talk afterwards if you want oh a question oh no two questions oh that's great um you have a fantastic hierarchy for organizing like which route you take have you ever had to sell that workflow to a company that had more set in stone um pipelines of their own uh no good question like like this pipeline if it would be implemented in a company and you mean that maybe i uh i hit against the wall maybe by implementing it yeah again no like what they were used to yeah the my problem is that i was always the own sole vfx artist in this company so and i never worked in a huge company so i positively formulated i never hit at all so that's good but this also means that i never have a real fixed guideline to follow i just was doing it on the go and hoped it will result in something positive thank you so much hey before the question by the way if if everyone doesn't know there's a vfx meetup at the saint regis lobby bar thursday night at 6 30. so come hang out um optical flow motion vectors and slate i've i've done a lot of that it's an awesome tool but the numbers never seem to translate into unreal correctly i don't know the motion vector intensity number that it gives you yeah seems to be just completely wrong yeah and i usually just half and i just kind of eyeball it i know have you have you found a better way than that to to take that and get it looking correct this is a question coming from one who knows the pain i did actually two tutorials about this and i basically eyeball it as well because they give you some numbers which are supposed to be correct but yeah not really right and i have this youtube channel it's called unreal simon and there i made two videos just about slate and how to get these things out of that but um there are some other numbers which supposedly have nothing to do with that but for me they worked so i just took them and yeah so and then of course if i was not satisfied i i also eyeballed it but yeah it's the usability could be improved a little bit in that regard yeah okay and that's not the motion of extra intensity that's some other numbers that are is that in the tutorial that you mentioned where to find those numbers um yeah uh um i think the numbers change the numbers change depending on what you how your simulation looks like i think it is like that yeah and i mean is the youtube here maybe can you look at this together youtube let me see youtube andrea simon uh probably there's also assignments why do i don't find my my video because then we can have a look at it as we go but in general it's a tutorial in general about um about this the whole slate workflow but it covers the so i can't find it right now i don't know what why why the google search doesn't show it to me but this part is a small part of it so i think you will hopefully be happy when you see it thank you thank you so much okay um if there is no more questions then i can just show you just for a short moment the content plus plus section which looks like this content plus plus and then here there's some some more things for example a summary of all the knowledge nuggets i wanted to drop on you uh just a little summary and then there are some some more little examples down there and like you see there's comments down there so this hopefully makes you happy and by the way just because i forgot to talk this texture is so wide because it was put on this long rim of water so i wanted to avoid tiling issues you know if i would have used um a square texture you would have seen the tiling too much so yeah that's why it was so wide okay so um yeah if there's no more questions then we can i don't know have water now so thank you for being here it was really really nice to give me your time and listen to me thank you so much [Music] you

Channel: GDC

Views: 52,752

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: KaNDezgsg4M

Length: 54min 34sec (3274 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2022