Frostbite Visuals

What am I doing? Moving on into my specialism, I wanted to do a bit of a deep dive into the realms of shaders in games. Now, first things first, let's define what shaders are before we have any chance of actually creating some. This post is strictly research and will not show the development of physical work, just more of an exploratory look into the many different branches and avenues that we can go down when we make VFX. As a technical artist, learning to use shaders properly opens up the amazing power that modern graphics cards hold. This is because graphics cards contain thousands of cores instead of the 4-12 you can find in most CPUs. Though the processing capabilities of these cores are much less powerful, the sheer mass of them can hold the ability to compute many calculations in perfect synchronisation. This kind of programming is a little different to some of the more conventional types but is incredibly valuable for modern AAA titles in the games...

One Small Step into the new Niagara System. Many of us have taken on the task of creating a formative blog on developing some next-generation video game art to be rendered real-time as a project for both our own development and the development of the skills of the visual effects communities online. I wanted to start this journey into new and exciting systems by looking into the new Niagara System within UE4. This system is Epic Games next step toward artistically driven particle VFX within games. This is a statement directed towards the giants of this sector such as Houdini who have cornered the market with amazing and well-optimised systems for this kind of generation for a long while at this point and is designed to eventually take over from the old Cascade system implemented at the dawn of Unreal Engine 4. Before looking into the new system, let's take a look at some of the differences between this system and the old one. While both Cascade and Ni...