I was looking through the demo reel for Beyond-FX, and this breakdown from Uncharted 4 caught my eye:
I always get a special kick studying another artist’s break-down. I feel like I’m absorbing their superpowers! Anyone else want to share some of their favorite VFX breakdowns?
Also, Beyond-FX is our latest featured job poster. They’re looking for a Senior VFX Artist to oversee a diverse range of projects for their clients. Here’s the link:
@Travis. I created that breakdown for Uncharted and I can tell you it took a very long time. That breakdown is a very short part of a larger showreel of breakdowns from Uncharted 4. We made the breakdowns for the VES Awards, which we won
So what we did was, using a capture card, we played the game several times and captured the footage. We Captured it with Zero FX, then we captured it with foreground FX, then some Background FX, then some Ambient FX, then in Wireframe and many more passes. Now to make sure that the footage matched, we wrote a script that would play the game the same way each time. This, however, doesn’t guarantee that certain realtime elements like smoke, fire etc will match. So you have to play it many many times to get it as close as possible.
Then we took all that footage into a compositing package and comped it together with wipes etc.
That’s what I figured. It felt like it took forever just to put my last demo reel together. That rotate + zoom around Nathan with the sparks still in the air is crazy impressive outstanding breakdown. I appreciate all the extra work that went into it