TARAS TERESHCHENKO

In this post I want to show the benefits of my approach to smoke shading. I also want to tell you how to improve the animation of fire and explosions. And most importantly, there will be recommendations on how to maintain an impressive level of performance. These ideas were formulated in 2021. Implemented twice in two different companies where I led this process. Simple Smoke Initially, I set myself the task of not using more than one sampler. But to spend a sampler simply on alpha means not using its full potential. Please pay attention to the animation below: On the left - one channel is used for Alpha and that's it; In the center - one channel for Alpha and two more for the Normal map; On the right - Alpha, two for Normal and the last one for AO. It is obvious that the right side has the most detailed smoke, which will perfectly fit into any environment. And the best thing is that the budget for one sampler is not exceeded. Here the question may rightly arise that two channels f...

Creating VFX for video games is a specialized field of CG. This field requires a specific set of functions from DCC software. Unfortunately, there are no ready-made solutions yet, which is why VFX artists are forced to create custom solutions. In this topic, I want to describe the approach to solving problems with mip levels and filtering alpha textures. As you know, for game engine the alpha channel is nothing more than a mask for different maps. When you render transparent textures, most rendering software do not take into account the need to generate mip levels for these images or filter them. All those are essentially downsampling, which in most cases produce the appearance of visual bugs. There are such : - Unexpected outlines, at the edges of images; - Color distortion in gradient alpha areas; - Unexpected changes values in the maps of depth, normals, motion vectors... I understand how the game engine handles the texture and I sugest an effective solution for this...