Realtime VFX Reel 2017 - Justin Cherry

Hey everyone! I finally put finished my reel for this year, and I’m excited to share it!

The entirety of this reel is from The Well. It is a mobile VR title (GearVR) so it was an incredible challenge to hit target performance (120fps!!). It was also an enormous joy to work on and I hope it shows! All of the footage was captured in-engine, with the majority of the post-processing being color correction. There are some shots that I added other minor post-processes (radial blur, channel splitting) - only because with mobile VR there is absolutely no post-processing and I can’t help myself, haaaa!

Links to Artstation posts:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/weRGV

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gQRlQ

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Mesmerizing!
Love the style :slight_smile:

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Great looking!
What are you main optimizations was to make it works on VR?

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Amazing work!!
I love the style.

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Thank you! The two big considerations were overdraw and draw calls. To counteract overdraw I created meshes for everything. :sweat_smile: Since most of the effects were combat related I was able to spend some extra polys in order to do so, since combat took place in custom “rooms”. Creating meshes also helped because sprite billboards in VR look really bad (especially without a depth buffer to add any edge softening).
I tried to limit most effects to 2-4 draw calls (which turns into 4-8 for rendering both eyes) with only a couple being above that - the materials I created used a lot of separate UV channels to get different effects without having to split up the meshes into their own draw calls. Aside from that most of the other stuff was standard fare - low-complexity materials, lowest resolution textures possible, and actually limiting the particle count in emitters. There was a cpu hit even for systems that spawned <100 particles, so basically all of the systems became “burst” meshes.

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Thank you, I had the privilege of art directing this project too, so I had a bit of fun working with the team to bring the artwork to life!

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Man, are you still there?Is everything ok? I really like your vfx work .But I can’t find your ArtStation page now.

links seems dead :,( image

Hi everyone, I’m still here and everything is fine! I just got rid of my Artstation page as I didn’t feel like keeping track of one more thing.
The reels are still on my Vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/nephelomancer
And on my website:

You can find me on twitter a lot:
@nephelomancer
Cheers!

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Good to konw !Cheers!

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Love your stuff, Cherry. The B4B stuff is looking great.

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