00:02Hi everybody, I'm Greg Herdrutter and I'm the lead VFX artist on the Dead Space Remake.
00:06What I'm going to show you today is some of the atmospheric and environmental VFX that
00:10have been created by our team.
00:12These are VFX such as fog, smoke, and pyrotechnics that help populate the Ishimura and help
00:18tell the Dead Space narrative.
00:20Now before I show you what we're doing, let's take a look at the original Dead Space and
00:24what they did for their environmental VFX.
00:25They did an amazing job in setting a very desaturated color palette, with everything
00:30very muted and everything feels very natural.
00:33Nothing feels fantastical or takes you out of that horror mood.
00:37For the remake, we wanted to stay true to this, but look for opportunities to push things further
00:41using modern day techniques.
00:43The original was quite limited in terms of complexity of VFX, while we have a lot more
00:47room to move.
00:49The first thing I'd like to show you is how some of our VFX can react to changing environmental
00:54conditions.
00:55So here we have a debug scene, and as you can see, it's pretty much empty, with some sparks
01:00and drips.
01:01These are pretty typical VFX that we'll see in a number of locations in the Ishimura to
01:06show damaged areas.
01:08What I'd like to show you is how these effects can react to changing environmental conditions,
01:12and in this case, what happens when gravity is disabled.
01:16I'm going to disable the gravity here.
01:18And right now we can see that these VFX are behaving differently, and they're no longer
01:22falling to the floor.
01:24Now there's a lot more happening than just the gravity.
01:26I can make a number of artistic choices as to how the VFX behave.
01:31For example, with the drips, I wanted to extend their lifetime so they spread out across the
01:36room rather than disappear quickly.
01:38For the sparks, I reduced their turbulent motion, because when they had a lot of turbulence,
01:43it felt like they were still in normal conditions.
01:46There's a number of things that we can modify so that when the player interacts with these
01:49effects, they'll feel believable and well-integrated.
01:53These little details can really add up to help tell the story and make the Ishimura feel
01:58like it's alive.
02:00Next I'd like to show you a little bit about our Pyrotechnics pipeline.
02:04I'm looking at one of our explosion effects.
02:06This is something we'd see when a small prop is getting destroyed.
02:10Here we have a bunch of different elements, like a fireball, smoke, sparks, and debris.
02:15I'll hide a few of these so we can concentrate just on the fire and smoke.
02:19I'll set this to loop so we can see it continually playing.
02:22Something that is important to Dead Space is that we have a lot of dark environments that
02:27have changing lighting conditions.
02:29We were finding that elements such as fire and explosions would look way too bright when
02:33the environment was dark, and then would be barely visible when the environment was brighter.
02:38So what we had to do was to be sure that our source pyro textures were rendered in full
02:43HDR quality to ensure that the final image would contain the full range of brightness values.
02:49I'll slow this down a bit so we can see things a bit more clearly.
02:53If I zoom in, the exposure will adjust so it doesn't appear too blown out, and when I back
02:59off, it will readjust.
03:01If I change this to a darker environment, you'll see that we don't get a crazy amount of over-brightness,
03:06and we're still able to see a lot of detail in the texture.
03:09And finally, I'll go to pitch black.
03:12It still holds up and behaves naturally.
03:15So this all means that we can play a lot with the lighting in our environments, and the
03:20VFX will still integrate into the experience well, and be legible by the player.
03:28The final thing I wanted to show is our interactive atmospherics.
03:32So here I am in another test map.
03:34I have a few debug lights floating around so we can see what's happening here.
03:39I'll just back up and start one of our steam effects.
03:42So what do we have here?
03:44It's a volume-based 3D simulation.
03:46It exists inside a container, and density and velocity values are pushed around to create
03:52what we see here.
03:54Something that's cool about this simulation is that it lives in the physics world, so
03:58if the player walks through it, it will interact.
04:02Also, if I pick up an object, like this battery, it will also behave quite naturally.
04:09This will work if I spawn an enemy.
04:11I disabled its AI so it won't attack me.
04:14As you can see, the steam will collide and interact with him too.
04:19This effect also works quite well with our lighting, and renders with the rest of the fog we have
04:24throughout our game.
04:26This can be used in a number of cases.
04:28We can create a steam or smoke effect like this, or we can cover the floor with a thin
04:34layer of interactive fog.
04:35In some cases, we can even fill an entire room with a cool simulation like this to give
04:41us some interesting and terrifying gameplay situations.
04:46So thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the VFX we're working on.
04:50And we'll see you guys next time.
04:53We'll see you next time.
05:01Grazie a tutti
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