Combat VFX Showreel - Hellblade II (2024) | Tobias Noller

Personal Work
1

Hello fellow VFX people!

With Ninja Theory’s closure now on the horizon, I finally found the time to collect some of my work from Hellblade II: Senua’s Saga.
I’m still quite proud of what we have achieved with a relatively small VFX team (around 4-6).
I genuinely loved working at Ninja Theory, and from a VFX standpoint it was a chance to work on projects that felt truly special.

If anybody has questions about anything Hellblade related (even if not VFX specific), don’t hesitate and post them below :slight_smile:

Hugs and thanks to everyone I got to build this with!

2

Lovely stuff! How did you do the volumetric fog? Hand placed volumes and other things or…?

3

Different solutions:

  • We have a large ‘global’ fog volume (just a cube with volumetric material on it), which constantly moves with the player. That’s used for general atmosphere, thick ‘sight-blocker-fog’ and when we need to cover large areas. It’is also integrated into our atmos-system, so it’s part of the larger lighting/atmos.
    Example:
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    We also utilise screen space fog scattering for specific situations. We can fade that in/out at runtime and it makes the whole look super soft, almost dream-like.
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  • And then we have localised fog volumes, which we just scatter all around to get thicker pockets of fog where needed. These volumes have a lot more individual parameters to tweak the look, they get culled properly, can be animated in sequencer and so on. Very similar to what the Ultra-Volumetrics plugin from FAB does actually.
    Example:
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    One thing I really liked doing is putting volumetric fog volumes right on top of fire. Just makes the fire feel a lot more smokey and thick.
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  • Lastly, for wide-vista fog, we use fog cards. Volumetric draw distance is limited, so we need fog-cards for these situations. They are also more detailed, which works well in the background.
    Example:
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4

That’s really cool, thanks for the explainer. They all work really well together to give it a great atmosphere

(Side note, the compression ate the text in your images)