Hello everyone,
I’m a junior VFX artist in an indie game dev studio ( I also do anything animation related ). Being the only artist with no previous experience I’m struggling to better our current character setup, animation, VFX workflows. My biggest issue is the VFX triggering. Currently I place animation events in the animation clips to trigger the effect, but Im not sure if that is the right way to do this? If you guys could share your workflows and/or any tips, if there is an industry standard way to do this, anything would be super helpful
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Hi and welcome to the forums!
Unfortunately this is one of those situations where the answer is “it depands”.
If you’re looking at some character vfx that are supposed to trigger at a specific point in the animation, then triggering them in the timeline is a pretty good way to go about it.
Depening on the engine, you might need to include some extra information with the trigger. For example: if you want to make the effect go in a specific direction, then it needs to know the direction it’s supposed to go or the target’s world position.
At some point this complexity could mean that it’s easier to decuple the animations from vfx triggering. In that situation you’d have the vfx triggered in code/blueprint, getting attached to the character or just recieving a transform of one of the bones.
Have a chat with the programmers on your project and see if there is any capacity to have them handle triggering vfx. That will give you more time to focus on the artistic side of vfx and animation, at the cost of you having to communicate with them very closely on how you’d want to have the vfx implemented.
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Hi, thank you so much for the response. Currently the way we trigger the vfx through the animation events (and code) works fine, I just didn’t know if there’s a industry standard way to do this, that’s different from what I’m doing know. I will try your suggestion to trigger the effects through the timeline, thanks again 