Learn about what makes a real-time visual effect in today's modern context, how it differs from other forms of effects, and some beginning steps for first time artists.
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Hello. I'm Michelle Gagne. And you are listening to the real time visual effects podcast where wizards reside.
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You have a gift. You have a passion for creation. There's something inside you that wants to express itself and that something has led you to explore the world of visual effects. A place where magic happens on the only limitation is your imagination. All the greatest artists in the world started somewhere learning and growing into the people they are today. You being here is the first step to building your legacy as an artist. Third, for the best and brightest in the real time visual effects community sharpened your skills and be your best self.
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Today's episode introduces the topic of real time visual effects. I'll talk about how it differs from other forms of effects. What makes up a real time visual effect in today's modern context and beginning steps for first time or aspiring artists looking to get their feet. But with that said, Let's get started.
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Here is your host, Travis McCallum.
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Hey, everybody, welcome to the first episode of our real time visual effects podcast, really excited to be talking to you today about what real time visual effects is all about. So if you've ever played a video game, you've seen some form of visual effect where there'd be a big explosion after a rocket launcher blows up on that shiny Porsche. Or maybe of torch fire illuminating a forest riddled with mysterious clues of a murder scene effects are happening in places in your mind. My now even notice them, like the user interface that we see when your health wires depleting on the loading screen and between levels. Visual effects are everywhere. But what our visual effects and specifically for real time visual effects. There is a lot of ambiguity on how we define real time visual effects. Ask any artists and you'll get a different answer for each. The field of real time visual effects is still relatively new, and there's not much training or education with this ever changing profession. So I want to share my personal definition to go off of today. Real time visual effects are computer graphics that air rendered live or in real time to enhance the environment or characters that live in it. So there's two components to that definition is the real time or live or present in the moment. But there's also the visual effect portion, which is geared toward computer graphics and computer graphics are created with a variety of different tools. To really understand what real time visual effects is, it's a good opportunity to go back in time and see its origin story on how real time visual effects came to be. Activate my handy dandy time travel watch, and we're gonna take a trip to the past. All right, so the years 18 57 and we're seeing special effects come into play for the first time. Special effects are a live action, but there's no computer graphics involved because there were no computers back in 18 hundreds. But a fellow by the name of Oscar Raylan, Dear created our world's first special effects image by combining all these different sections on 32 negatives into a single image, making a montage combination print Fast Board into 18 95 and now Alfred Clark has created what is commonly accepted as the first ever motion picture special effect. He basically filmed a reenactment of the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. Now Clark had instructed an actor to step up to a block in Mary's costume and as the executioner brought the acts upon his head clock stopped the camera, had all the actors freeze and have the person playing Mary step off the set. And he replaced Mary's dummy in the Actor's place and restarted the filming. And that allowed the executioner to bring that acts down, severing the dummy's head. And all these types of techniques would be dominating the production of special effects for an entire century, all in real time. Basically, after the film editing techniques were discovered very rarely what any future works, not have some sort of special effects of them. Now let's fast forward and talk on the other side of the spectrum. Visual effects. So unlike special effects, which are live or president, the moment visual effects are not their pre rendered or pre created before they're actually implemented into whatever kind of media source that we use. So this gives it the ability to kind of implement into computer graphics and, if we look all the way back to 1982 with the release of the movie Tron that introduced the first computer generated graphic for visual effects, and you may remember the scene where the bikers air racing and they leave this cool trail behind them. Or maybe when the characters clothing was glowing. All of that was visual effects that was pre rendered and added to the movie post processing after it has already been filmed. Most people think that Star Wars was the first, but Starr was actually used special effects that were really good, that controlling the cameras, those explosions that you saw in the Star Wars movie. Those were actually done in the real life saying things with Indiana Jones, those air special effects. And as we know now, visual effects are used everywhere and movies. So the springs back to the question. What is real time visual effects? We understand that it incorporates the best of both worlds, from special effects and visual effects, riel time and with computer graphics. So we think on the history and forgive me, the guys. This is gonna go a little technical, but it's just a set of foundation toe understand, really were computer graphics and how computer graphics came into games to make them real time. And we can think all the way back to 1948 with the invention of the bit the bit is what We Call Information and an engineer at A T and T. Claude Shannon invented this technology, as historian James like said, an invention even more profound and war professional and more fundamental than the transistor came in a monograph spread across 79 pages of the Bell System Technical journal in July and October. No one bothered with the press release. It carried a title both Simple and Grant a mathematical theory of communication, and the message was hard to summarize. But it was a fulcrum upon which, with world began to turn like a transistor. This development also involved and Neil is Judaism. Neo log is, um, I'm sorry. That's words. A little are down the tongue, but the word bit chosen in this case not by the committee but by the loan author, which in this case is Claude Shannon, a 32 year old. The bit now joined the inch, the pound, the court and the minute as a determinant quantity of fundamental unit of measure. But measuring what a unit for measuring information. And Shannon wrote as though there were such a thing measurable and quantifiable as information. And this was a quote from how the bit was born. Claude Shannon and the invention of information on brain pickings. The bit really kind of sets the tone on how information is quantified and really when it becomes digitized in what we know is the modern computer with that said, we take a single bit and we plug it into what we call a bit Matt, which is a type of memory organization in an image file format to use to store digital images. And that term for bit map comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits. We're going to go just a little bit more. In the technical side, I'm kind of building it up, right. So we've got the bit into a bit map, which is a combination of bits which, if we think about it in computer graphics terms, we have the pixels, and a single pixel is a physical point in a raster image. Now, Travis, what may Raster image be dot matrix data structure that's representing a generally rectangle grid of pixels or points of colors? All that said, we finally get Thio. What our ste. Visual effects are made up, and those air sprites and our sprites are two dimensional bit maps that are integrated into a larger seen. Most often, we see it into two D video games. Fun fact sprites were actually developed at Texas Instruments by Daniel Hillis. Now, knowing that sprites are what are particles are made up of, I really want to drive that. That is what the fundamental anatomy of a single particle system is made up of is a single sprite. Now there is a little bit of a breakdown between what we consider Rester images versus Vector graphics, which each have their own place in the particle systems. Bunch is trying to keep it a little bit more simple. Here we start with the Sprite and from the Sprite, we create what we call a particle emitter, which is made up of the whole bunch of difference frights and from the particle emitter. Multiple emitters make up a single particle system, and the particle system is what makes up a real time visual effect. As an example, it's a little easier to put in a context we can take a campfire and in a campfire example, there is the one system, which is the campfire. But that's broken down into chunks, which are made up of particle emitters, emitters, emitters, semantic, semantics. Uh, we got the fire, the smoke, the embers and even distortion. So that's four different emitters that make up the one system. But for each of those emitters, you're looking at anywhere between 120 to 240 sprites, depending on you know, the draw account that you want. But all of these sprites make up the entire effect in the computer graphics site. So a big differentiation. In addition to being both real time and computer graphics specifically in the real time visual effects versus traditional visual effects, we have to consider that when we have our TV FX, it has to be interactive, which means players are going to be using it, interacting with these types of effects in real time. So they may be in 1/3 person or first person type of view, which means there has to have multiple camera angles to be able to see that effect. And now, as we move into the augmented reality or virtual reality side, that's going to be even Maur camera angle driven where the rendering or the visual ization of those sprites those particle systems is particle emitters is gonna have to be viewable with the visual eye from different perspectives. So all of this fascinating stuff, Travis. But why should I care? Developing skills for you is a balancing of understanding both theory and putting it into practice. So is Edmund Burke, put it. People are not gonna look forward to posterity who never looked backwards to their ancestors. What I mean by this is that all great artists from the past have to be able to apply the lessons, whatever they learn in history, to the future. And this is why this podcast really exists to help you learn and grow to achieve your dreams. Now the history of visual effects is really just about setting the foundation for context, for your own understanding. And I really like this quote that Stuart Brown shared with a brief history of graphics. And he said that graphics are absolutely important. They're essential part of any video game in their window into another world and is a prime indicator of technology that powers that however visuals is not in their realism. A game's aesthetic does far more to establish his character than its polygon count. A cohesive style is all you need, and it's often better to stick to proven technique than it is to attempt something cutting edge. We do still need pioneers to light the way, but for most there's no harm sticking to safer waters. So I bring this up because I'm gonna be honest, real time visual FX is really technical, and it's really intense, and especially for the people coming in as beginners focus on what kind of information is already out there and learn through the history of other people's successes of failures. And it's gonna help you become a better artist in the beginning. So what does it mean to be a real time visual effects artists? What are some of those skills that Dr Success in this field in this industry? Well, there's three big ones that I want to talk to you about the first. This problem solving every single real time visual effects artists has to be a problem software. You need to be able to go in and identify problems with whatever kind of idea that you or your art supervisor wants to be done. Once you identify those problems, then you have to find the solutions for him. And I say Solutions plural because there's going to be different alternatives, different ways to achieve those solutions to a single problem. You do that in, you know, in different ways, but typically you can figure it out. By researching and analyzing data with lots and lots of experimentation, you can often think of the scientific method as a framework for problem solving. A second skill that real time visual effects artists used succeeds Curiosity. You have toe like to try new things and experience novel ideas. The most curious people asked lots of questions, and they challenge everything. They explore different areas that are taking them out of their comfort zone and really pushing them beyond their boundaries. The third skill is teamwork, and teamwork is one that people seem to struggle with The most teamwork is about collaborative effort between a group to achieve a common goal. Nobody works in a silo, and communication is super important. When you're a real time visual effects artists, you'll be working with the team of different artists to achieve. You know, these affects your effect, doesn't live in a vacuum. You've gotta have it with the character and the environment and to meet with the gameplay. So there's a lot of teamwork that goes on in that we know what kind of skills that real time visual effects artists need to succeed. And we really talked on the soft skill portion. But there are some tools that we, as artists, used to succeed, starting with the particle systems themselves. That's going to be the bread and butter that really makes us unique. Particle systems exist within game engines or propriety systems from those particle systems. We have different elements that we add on top of that, and there's the materials, which are shade er's that we built, and shakers really say what the look of the effect is going to be with all these different types of math and equations that go into it. And shavers can really broken down in tow, no based or visually based, but also in code. So programming is another element of tools that we technically will form. And then there's textures. We create textures either procedurally painted or simulated, and they're literally guys tons of tools out there for us to play with our toolbox is nearly like, infinite, and every single day there's new tools that are popping up, so you just need to find what kind of tools work for you. Really. The tools kind of come down to having particle systems, materials, text a ring. And finally, there's three D modeling as well. And with three D modeling, we're looking at sculpting and and really kind of shaping and having more custom control over the directionality of movement of what our particles look like. All of these different tools and soft skills are really what contribute toward success in the field of real time visual effects. For people just getting into the field, there's a couple of steps that you can take to begin your journey. The first thing that I would recommend is learning the software jump into a game engine, whether that be unity or crying gene or un riel engine four. I believe we're on and just kind of tinker around with it. And when you're tinkering, don't just think on the particle systems, whether it be Cascade or Niagara, think about the other side's that some of your other cohorts are partners would do. Learn the U I and learn about how their material spork. How the textures looking all the other pieces. Next piece is Think about the texture painting. You just need to go in there and and practice painting your own textures and importing them into the game. Engine. Photoshopped Rita are examples off more stylized ones, but you can also go in tow, substance designer or even Houdini as examples. More procedural based texture painting. But it's just about learning the different software packages that you'll need. Thio put it all together. And, of course, three D modeling programs is something you want to learn. My, uh, three D s backs blender for the people that wanna try it for free. I always recommend that you start building you know, simple models and just kind of use that toe. Learn the tool themselves. So, for an example, with a three D model you could make is something as simple as a log for a campfire. For instance, as you learned the software, you'll have to start creating a library of effects that are related to whatever your interests are theirs. So many effects that are out there that you can make the two biggest categories being out there stylistic and realistic, and you don't have to make a decision right now what your strengths are, as we mentioned earlier. One of the skills for real time visual effects artists is curiosity, so you need to go out there and trying new things and experiment and find the things that you gravitate toward the most. But as a baseline, I really like how Travis Henderson put it together and a post that he shared on the real time visual effects forums. And, he said, for the following beginner effects to make a fire usually starting with the torch into a campfire, is a good piece to start wet, creating a magic spell of some sorts. So it really tests the abstract nous and imagination of your abilities. Creating elemental impacts with bullets hitting various materials and a realistic explosion really pushes the layered, complex city, and timing of your ability to put multiple emitters together and blood splashes is always something that people like to see as well. We know that we have some software that we want to learn, and we also have some different library effects that we want to build up or our portfolios. But the biggest thing is that this is not a solo activity you need to do on your own. There is a wonderful community of other real time visual effects artists out there that are open toe listen and collaborate and work with you to achieve whatever kind of goals that you have. This is not something that you have to do on your own, and I really wanna do a shout out to this community of real time visual effects. It's really simple. There's both the forums that we use is a platform It's hosted by, I Believe Beyond FX. Keith Herrera created this site called "www.rtvfx.com" and you can see all kinds of industry people, whether they're hobbyist, whether they're professionals out in the field, where they're they're students. The skill level is all over the place, and a lot of people have different areas they specialize in. So one person may really enjoy the stylized while another is really into explosions. So it just kind of find people that kind of line with your piece and ask them questions and really kind of get to know them. The other place that I really like to drive is on discord, which is a voice messaging program very similar to Skype or slack. If your committee wish different coms and you can find out more about that by reaching out on the forums, I know glad Gladys Particle under Andres is the owner of that particular discord. But it's really great for getting immediate feedback on any work that you have and just keeping up with the trends that are going out in the community. All right, guys. So in summary, real time visual effects is working in real time. It's a combination of both the art and the tech, and it isn't the same as visual effects for film artists employed in this area, primarily working the game industry, their natural problem solvers with a sense of curiosity and love. Working closely with others, they have a huge toolbox to work with. And there's no one single solution to a problem and finally know that real time visual effects is not just for games. It's quickly expanding into other industries like health care and telecommunications and there's an especially big growing need in the augmented reality and virtual reality space. So in summary, there's no shortage of demand for us all.
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All right, guys, thanks for listening to this episode of the real time digital effects podcast. Join us on the time Visual effects forums, Discord and the Facebook group. I'll share Link below in the show notes and go ahead and talk with other artists. Ask questions and share your work. Feel free to email me with feedback, topic ideas or any kind of random questions or thoughts you may have at travismccallum86@gmail.com. I'm sure I may have done something wrong, and I'm ready for the hate mail, but easy on me. I'm learning just alongside with you guys to be a visual effects artists, and it's a really exciting time. So our next episode is gonna be interviewing our guest, Thomas Harle, super excited to get him on and share some professional experience of what it means to work out in the field until next time. Guys, take it easy,