Art Directing VFX for Stylized Games

In this 2017 GDC talk, Bill Kladis, Bryanna Lindsey, Jeremy Mitchell and Shen-Ming Spurgeon discuss methods you can use to establish the artistic pillars of your game's VFX using specific examples from various games with unique art styles.
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[@SaxPanther]

"What's Fortnite? Epic's upcoming survival sim!" Oh, if only you knew...

[@Nicoyutub]

I had to stop what I was doing and look at the date... That was a hilarious moment hahaha

[@geodraws]

@@areshudson4508 What's is this poor acting you guys lol

[@evanlane1690]

Every time I see a talk from Double Fine I think to myself, holy SHIT I love that studio's work!

[@neoxblackgold]

that's a good reason to play Gigantic, a game that has shut down a year ago XD in case you're wondering, this GDC talk was in 2017, but the video was released on 2019.

[@joppemin]

headlander seems like a joy to work on, wow that art direction is awesome

[@neurojitsu]

Brilliant, thanks.

[@ant1fact]

44:38 both guys are sleeping, I'm dying

[@floatvoid]

One of those guys is me! Actually there was a monitor on the floor pointing upward. Looks like I'm dozed off, but I'm actually just looking at the slides. :D

[@benjaminramsey4695]

Good stuff. I was thrown off by Shen-Ming's joke that he was done with his talk - I thought he was serious about thinking he was done, and just joking that it's easy to make stylized characters, and that he then realized he wasn't done and continued to give the next 2/3 of his talk. I had to watch that part again to realize that part of the joke included already being done with the talk. And it's interesting to see the Fortnite art before the game was released - I wonder if he had any inkling of how big it was going to become!

[@yarbone7]

I still don't quite understand how the morphing of the smoke works. I understand how the shrinkwrapping works, but I don't know how that is used in the end. It doesn't look like they are linearly interpolating between the starting and end shape, so are they using a flipbook to do the world position offset? If someone could explain that, that would be great. :)

[@shaqm0bile]

They use textures to animate vertex location. So yeah like a flipbook except instead of a literal image, they use the texture data so taht each pixel represents a vertex, then the color represents the location... i think. Example: kzbin.info/www/bejne/e4a3dmSJpLR6qM0

[@Clay3613]

Holy shit, a Black Hole reference!

[@koalabrownie]

I really wish that Volition artist had given a shout out to Freespace.

[@steve00alt70]

will you have more oppurtunities doing vfx or film vfx?

[@HangryBunniesFromMars]

42:06 How to kill an artist soul, lol. BUT! Still awesome talk ^_^

[@Damalycus]

Am I the only one who liked previous ship explosion better? Visually.

[@Lishtenbird]

The first explosion is immersive and shows you exactly what happened; it's epic and it shows scale. The second is one of those cheap movie tricks - "let's zoom in like a lot and shake the camera to hide that we lack budget"; just a lot of flashing that makes little sense.

[@Damalycus]

@@Lishtenbird you summed it up perfectly

[@dearmas9068]

The realistic one would not have worked at all in that game. It would have looked absolutely bizarre.

[@Felik18]

50:28 Pfft, lame Other than that nice talk everyone!

[@johnleorid]

So the last dude (woman, dude is non-gender) talked about how they made a shader so blood looks "readable" in the distance and then only showed a guy getting shot at a range of 3m? Last one was also movie-animation, not ingame. They used the engine to render it but finally made a video file out of it, so technically it's not "game animation". I don't think pixar is the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear "stylized", their snow looks more real than in real life.

[@deantjewie]

Stylized is not the same as unrealistic.