VFX and Particle Systems

VFX for me was all about creating a VFX pipeline that allowed our technical artists to create any effect they could think of. I made sure our material system had the flexibility needed to allow for any kind of shaders to be used on objects in the world. This allowed our artists to create interesting effects such as the player’s glowing ghost arm.

To complement the carefully crafted VFX meshes I also implemented a particle system engine. Similarily with other VFX, I wanted this system to be easy to use and flexible. I implemented a suite of features that allowed a large variety of different particle effects to be created.

The particle systems are defined in JSON files. While not as simple as a full editor, I still made sure the configuration is easy to understand. The JSON files are also hot reload-able, so the technical artists could see how each parameter effected the particle system in real-time.

The particles themselves are simple billboard sprites. They are rendered as a point list, and the geometry for each particle is created in a geometry shader. The pixel shader for particles is exposed as a parameter, so our technical artists could write their own if they wanted something more interesting than static textures.