What should a professional VFX gym have?

General Discussion
1

I’ve been working as an indie VFX artist for three years now and learned everything myself online. I’ve unfortunately never had the chance to work with another VFX artist yet and I know I have some gaps in my knowledge, despite doing my best to fill them in.

Recently at work, we’ve been thinking of ways to help me set up my gym for better workflow. As it is, to playtest I need to either set up looping VFX I drop in my gym and iterate on, manually changing their status using Events and booleans, or I drop them into game scenes to do the same thing with the proper visuals surrounding the VFX.

I can also swap out a given enemy’s VFX with the one I’m working on and be able to iterate it’s behaviour as the enemy uses it. For projectiles, one of our programers has given me a basic script I can put on my vfx object that launches it and will call the proper events upon touching a collision surface.

Mostly, I work on things fairly piecemeal and then adjust them all once the code comes in and lets them function. These days, there are rarely any problems, since I’ve streamlined a lot of things.

However, we all agree that this is a clunky way of working and are willing to put the energy into making a proper gym that would allow me to iterate far more fluidly and be able to present the proper behaviour of all my VFX as needed, without needing to wrestle with the game to try and get things to work.

As an asside, I don’t have any issues with the environmental VFX I create. The gym works just fine for them, since they don’t have particularly complex behaviours and can be showcased easily. What I need help with is with VFX that are interactible, ex: pickups, projectiles, beams, traps, etc.

I’ve tried looking things up online, but I can’t find anyone actually talking about their gym setups. It just brings up actual physical exercises or things relating to movie/tv VFX artists, which I am not. I want to know what people have access to! Does everyone need to interface awkwardly with their games, or are there entire gyms set up to be miniature microcosms of gameplay where iteration can be rapid? What do you have access to, if you do have some of these features? And is there anything else you consider should be part of a gym, even really basic knowledge? What can be expected of AAA gym setups versus smaller studios, or even setups individual artists have created on their own, for their own purposes?

I would love answers to my questions, but I know wider answers will absolutely benefit others if they can find this page.

So, what kind of features do you think a good VFX gym should have?

2

Good afternoon,

In terms of VFX Gyms I would’ve given you a detailed breakdown on what you could expect in a VFX Gym if it were for your own personal use but when it comes to industry work it’s a little more complicated than that.

For example assuming you have a sort of “check in/check out” workflow the gym I believe it would require space if it were ever submitted which could cause longer build times etc So in this case it’s best that the gym is kept to local and never submitted for your own sack (others departments not touching it) but also for space reasons. (I understand this means that not submitting it means you’re the only one that has access to it, but being the only effects artist at your company, that should be fine.)

In terms of what should be in a gym to make your life easier, honestly it’s just usually BP triggers, so you can depict size and colour of the effect. For example if it was an AoE attack you’d probably start making it then put the Character SK in the middle of the gym and then the effect around it to see if the size is too small/big. There really isn’t any way of making an efficient gym for VFX since you can’t really transfer it to new projects because you won’t need it all.

Personally in the projects I have worked on, there was a gym for summoning the enemies which then attacked you (while you set yourself to Godmode) that way you could see if the effect looked right, size, colour etc

In regards to any sort’ve stuff to help with quick Implementation as a whole, is defo make a texture library, VFX mesh folder, and some material functions to take between projects, since the VFX stuff should be in it’s own folder away from everyone else assets.