Realtime VFX Documentation

Welcome to this documentation directory : It covers many subjects of the visual effect artist and tech art field for real-time graphics and games. I hope you will find this useful. For more information click here.

Visual Effects

The VFX Artist Job - Introduction to what is our job

Authoring VFX - General concepts and thoughts about making good and clever effects.

Dynamics And Motion - Basics of how things works in real world, and how they translate in Visual Effects

Particle Systems - Basics of particle simulation

Effect Meshes - Different purposes for geometry

Mesh Animation - Different setups and methods to animate meshes

Shaders - Shortform Introduction to shaders

Procedural Generation - How to generate stuff from math or other stuff

Tools And Links - A good place to get them

Lexicon - A list of many of the terms we use daily

Textures

Textures Overview - Overview Longform about common texturing concepts in VFX.

Texture Formats - Workflow and Runtime texture formats

Flipbooks and Texture Sheets - Texture Sheets concepts and Flipbook animation processes

Sampling Textures - How to read textures in shaders.

Shaders

Shaders Longform - How things work and what do you need to know when writing shaders.

Color in Shaders - Principles of color, precision, Gamma and Linear, HDR and tonemapping

Alpha Erosion - Principles of Alpha Erosion

Math for Artists - Which operations to use for color, effects and cool stuff.

Utility Functions - A set of common utility functions to reuse in your shaders.

HLSL GLSL reference - Links and Cheat Sheets for shader authors.

Scripting

Introduction to Scripting - Generalities about scripting

Python - Introduction to Python

Python Image Library - Introduction to Python Image Library

Performance

Performance and Technical Overview - Longform about how to worry about making things fast

Profiling tools and process - Home of articles about performance analysis.

Performance FAQ - Cornercases and questions that happen when profiling.

Production Topics

Planning and Preparation - Prepare a good work environment hardware, software and work relationships

The game pre-Production - Forge your weapons for your upcoming game production

The game production - The battlefield : how to survive until your game is gold.

Articles

Overview - A page for all the articles, ....

Houdini - Introduction to Houdini (Longform)