The VFX Process Behind 'Battleborn'

[Music] hello everybody uh welcome to my very brief uh presentation on the vfx process behind battleborn where i'm just going to kind of scratch the surface of how we how we came about to create our game's very unique style of vfx so before we get started i would like to introduce myself uh my name is ashley lyons and i'm one of the senior vfx artists at gearbox software where uh in addition to battleborn i also worked on borderlands the pre-sequel and i've currently been in gearbox for a little over five years so for those of you who are unfamiliar with battleborn i'd like to show you just a quick video introduction featuring some of the vfx that uh i will be discussing today

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[Music] all right okay so uh what is battle board essentially battleborn is a fast-paced lighthearted team fps with a stylized aesthetic and it incorporates mobile-like elements all right so now that the introductions are out of the way during today's presentation the topics that i'm going to be that i'm going to be covering are why we decided to uh feature stylized effects how it concepted many of our ideas and finally how we implemented those ideas to come about with our final product so why did we decide to go with this specific stylized look

well for one it was a great way to stand out amongst other fps games and by doing so it allowed us to create some super creative and original vfx the characters themselves were already like they had this already exaggerated look to them and by adding in our specific effects style we were able to complement and enhance uh the already cartoon-like aesthetic and finally the animated vfx also really complemented our already colorful environments all right so one of the nice things about deciding on our stylized look was the ability to experiment with different techniques and styles which also led itself to the creative investigation of trying to land you know a specific look and having visual effects somewhat based in reality in my opinion tends to you know somewhat restrict an

artist to how far visually that realistic style can be pushed but with battleborn we were able to experiment with many different variations of the same type of effect so in addition sorry in certain cases we would have you know like five or six different types of explosions going off and each one would look and feel entirely different from the other so for example this is one of them and here's another and one more okay so during the concepting uh part of battleborn we were fortunate enough to gain the talents of michelle gagne if

you're not familiar with michelle's work uh he has been an fx animator on the iron giant the my little pony movie and most recently into the spiderverse now michelle is an amazing animator but when we first started working with him he was unfamiliar with game vfx in regards to what we wanted but he did have game vfx experience in the form of insanely twisted shadow planet which is a 2d platformer so getting into first person shooters was something entirely new for him uh this is an early this is an early effects concept image we where we were trying to imagine how one character's ultimate would cast uh during our game so michelle was off-site the majority of the time so explaining some of the details of our requests at first was kind of difficult but in a few months time we eventually developed a system that would maximize

our time and work begin to flow a lot more steadily so basically it was just a lot of video conferencing and instant messaging but once we once we got all the initial growing pains out of the way our feedback to michelle became a lot faster and his iterations on our vfx assets you know followed suit and this is a closer look at the concept image from earlier so i'm using this as an example of one of the methods that we use to to concept our ideas so what we have here is michelle's initial ideas uh drawn over still frames of the game animation so with this in hand we would go over it and basically figure out what works you know what won't work and you know what might need to what might need to be altered later now we have another effects artist on staff he's an effects animator named sun kim and he worked very closely with michelle

and he had the most contact with him so song would be the one that drew the in-betweens of the animation assets and he would get everything ready to be imported into our game engine and once development on the game was complete we had well over 30 000 frames of individual animation um see and here are a few more constant images uh like the ones before that were worked on both both by song and michelle so over the course of the game development our creativity grew and expanded with with our animation requests so for example if we wanted a like a type of basic ground impact so michelle would animate that for us eventually we fell into the groove of battleborns you know like we fell into the groove of battleborn's universe and a basic ground impact would turn

into something closer to this also towards the the towards the end of development so we came in uh we started to notice that many of our older assets weren't up to the standards of what we were currently you know what were currently being produced so we actually had to go back and polish many of those older assets giving them like a more precise and crisp look akin to something that was being you know being worked on at the time so this is an example of one of those reworked assets for one of our one of our characters named mikko and here we have another example so as you can see the later asset the

one on the right is has a much cleaner look with less usage of gradients so one of the advantages of having two animators on the effects team was being given the opportunity to observe and then apply some of the principles of animation to our effects namely timing anticipation exaggeration and secondary action which in turn aided us in having our effects mimic the character animations so each animation asset was drawn you know frame by frame meaning no frames were skipped if a frame like if a flip book needed 36 frames then 36 frames of animation were drawn so nothing was animated and then shortened or frames cut to fit a certain frame length so because of that we were able to break

down whatever animation asset we were using examine the frames and integrate that technique used into whatever particle effect that we were creating at the time so this is that last image that last image uh animated and this is that image of that asset in game so being able to to break down the animations you know by frame also aided us in incorporating the technique of adding a quick spark like like a spark type effect too many of our explosions so many times the spark itself would be random shapes or almost unnoticeable but it did aid us with the timing and giving

them a little something extra so this is an image of some early concept some early concept sparks and these are some explosions with that spark technique added in so in order to to maximize our texture space michelle and song came up with a frame rate guide that helped them better organize each texture sheet according to how many frames of animation were needed for each asset and at the end in addition to the 30 000 frames of hand-drawn animation we ended up with well over 3 600 individual particle effects okay so developing style guide

and with all that was going on in battleborn we needed a style guide in order to keep things consistent we had five different factions with a total of 30 different characters in each faction and each character have their own custom stylized effects so by creating the style guide we were able to cement the look of each faction while still keeping each character's effects feeling uniquely their own so for example we had the degenerate faction which is the in the the bottom left which incorporated mostly stark red you know geometric geometric shapes compared to the eldrite faction in the top right which consisted of more organic and natural tones and here is an example of an effect from the algebra faction

in this effect is actually from the llc faction which is a group that focused mostly on money and robots like robotics which we uh represented with electric butte electric blue and some golden yellow hues so once we acquired the animation assets for a character we would begin assembling and adding them into our materials and particle effects so each asset we kept at around two to three colors with little to no gradients sorry with little to no gradients in them this was in order to keep colors consistent once we began gray packing everything uh so unless we actually needed a unless we needed a specific color most of the stuff that we did was gray packed

so if you are unfamiliar with the process of gray packing it's where you just store a black and white texture into the red green or blue channels of a single texture so at the end of the project we had gray packed about 90 percent of the vfx textures so in order to have our 2d animations exist in our in our 3d environment our particle effects use many different types of meshes each with a specific uv mapping to give each animation that extra dimension it needed in this example here you can see a couple of concepts for a for a whirlwind type effect uh so in order to achieve a similar look of the hand-drawn concept we did include the uv mapping mesh strips which did wrap around like a central core and this is that final whirlwind effect

and this is another example of how an asset would go from concept to an in-game effect so here we have the initial concept for this nuke impact and as fantastic as this animation looks applying it in-game as a one-to-one asset would not work you know from all directions so with something like we just saw we would tell michelle imagine that you are looking directly down into it you know how would that look uh and this right here is that concept broken down into two of its core elements and this is the in-game effect for that nuke explosion so as you can see many of the animations are mapped onto a variety

of meshes in order to give that effect a more volume like more volume and escape that flat billboard type look so getting each effect to work with their specific character um resulted us in um as i had mentioned earlier applying the principles of animation uh so sorry uh applying the principles of animation namely squash and stretch and timing with the exaggerated look of our character animations many of the effects needed to correspond and match with their respective character as a result this conveyed a sense of ownership to every effect of its player character

so for example this is pendles he is a bipedal snake assassin whose passive ability was uh this slight invisibility like he gave off this predator type shimmer during the game so we had the idea of giving him this ninja vanish like smoke puff whenever he did activate his passive and on top of that we also decided to give him a snake theme for all of his effects and here's this smoke bomb that he does before his passive uh broken down into some of its main parts so this right here is the main part of the smoke bomb this is another part and as you can see it's a heavily implied snake theme

and here we have more snakes and this is the smoke bomb effect in game so another example of the as on another example i have is the character ernest and as you can see he's like a bird and so many of his facts were egg yolk and feather based so here's one and another one's very yolk-like and we have some feathers and this is an earnest effect in-game

okay so one of the things we fought with heavily in creating vatibourne's vfx was avoiding what we on the team called effects soup or basically color vomit which basically meant having too many effects on the screen at once so with the nature of the effects we were making and how easily it was to get carried away with it it was a challenge straddling the line of over-the-top versus over abundance so to dial much of what we put back so to dial back much of what we put into the game we held numerous critiques within the effects team itself and we also used player feedback from a lot of our play

tests in addition to that we also did a huge polish pass at the end of development where we added a fade to all of the particle systems anytime the player got got uh got close to them so that also helped cut down on too much impeding the player's view during the game okay so in conclusion with the experience of battleborn behind me here are some of the things that i would recommend when considering when considering incorporating stylized effects into your game you should ask yourself why you stylize effects in the first place and you know how will this decision affect your game so once you know the answer to that question you can ask yourself if is the universe cohesive you know does does everything belong

uh if you're going to add a specific effect style into your games like i said does it belong there and once you're now once you're ready to go into the concepting part don't be afraid to try new things and really go wild with with the type of effects that you can't create but also know when to dial it back you know you want to avoid that effect soup look and also consider this think of effects not only as screen filler or a way to cover up transitions and animations but also as a character in itself you know give them life give them attitude give them personality uh really push the limits of what you of of what you can achieve okay so with that being said uh thank you all for coming to my very brief presentation on battleborn's visual effects

i'd also like to thank michelle gagne and the gearbox effects team uh they helped me with this a lot i'd like to thank gdc and thank you audience for coming to see my presentation [Applause] and uh if you like you can follow me on twitter that's my handle let's see uh thank you again and if there are any questions feel free to step up to the mic at this time hey how are you hi uh thanks for the presentation i noticed you showed mostly the 2d assets how much emissive or different properties inside of the engine did you guys apply to the to the effects with how much emissive right like different things that you didn't showcase here um different like emissive properties or anything okay so you want to know like how much how many how much of misses we added i guess

non-2d assets non-2d assets initial-wise um maybe you didn't do any it's uh well it was we did add like a lot of it was the the basic uh 2d asses that you did see and then but we did add a lot of uh uh like like simulated smoke effects uh some fire effects and things like that so we so we did not so we didn't just stick with the 2d assets like as just like one to one but like we did add uh you know just basic uh as smoke like as you saw with the pendle's effect we we did add some gradient smokes um one of the things we were we wanted to avoid a lot of was we wanted to avoid a lot of gradients and just kind of adding things that didn't look like they belonged in the world if that makes sense sure yeah so we we did add like we did add them but it was very um on a smaller scale like we were very rich we kind of wanted to restrict

ourselves and kind of in going too far from uh the hand-drawn 2d look okay that makes sense yep thanks thanks anyone else okay uh yeah i'll be if everyone has any other questions i'll be walking around so but thank you [Applause] you