Great Sources for VFX Production

Recently Sjors de Laat did an excellent breakdown of his FX workflow showing the way he works on texturing, shaders, particle systems, meshes. Today we are publishing the list of most useful sources Sjors recommends to help you master VFX production. Let’s study it!

YouTube Channels

Jason Keyser

On his YouTube channel, you will find breakdowns of numerous League of Legends effects. Also, check out Jason’s fundamentals series. All amazingly well explained.

Sirhaian Arts

Sirhaian’s YouTube channel has great tutorials and scene breakdowns forUnity-based effects. Definitely worth checking out!

Yoeri Vleer

A tonne of resources can be found here, breakdowns, tutorials, going in depth on specific Unreal Engine related topics, and workflow guides. A true treasure trove of information!

ImbueVFX

Filled with amazing tutorials. The UE3 ones still cover a lot of concepts that you can easily apply anywhere else.

UnrealSimon

Focuses mainly on Unreal related tips.

GDC Presentations

Visual Effects of Diablo 3 by Julian Love

Some excellent concepts explained here. One of my personal favorite talks.

The Visual Effects of InFAMOUS: Second Son

The Rendering of INSIDE

Sand Rendering in Journey

Websites & Blogs

RealtimeVFX

From now on this will be your new home. Simply the best community for realtime VFX. Don’t hesitate to join (on Discord as well)!

*Video is taken from the thread Smoke Lighting and texture re-usability in Skull&Bones by Mederic Chasse.

Partikel

Andreas Glad focuses on the combination of Houdini and Unreal and these work together with making VFX.

Simon Schreibt

A really cool blog, also by Simon Schreibt (UnrealSimon), focused on breaking down how certain games achieved a certain effect. Excellently explained and really interesting. Check out Simon’s Rime VFX talk as well!

Other Sources

Kakky’s Unreal Marketplace

Helped a great deal with understanding some concepts behind how certain effects were achieved. Definitely get one of the packs, highly recommended. But I must say it might be a bit intimidating once you open up the shaders. They are quite simply put, complex to say the least. But break them down step by step and see what you want can learn from them.

Paragons Free Characters

Get them all. The amount of FX in here gigantic, so there is loads of stuff you can break down and learn from.

Miscellaneous Resources for Related Stuff

Shadertoy

A website where everyone can share their HLSL shader work. The most usable resource you can get from this is that you can tweak and break down the shaders right on the website. Simply a great reference tool.

Codeacademy

For everyone who wants to get a start in coding.

Codetrain

Great YouTube channel with tutorials focused on the software Processing and more stuff. Processing is a 2d based, but a lot of concepts it embodies could be easily carried over to other languages as well.

Abduzeedo

A website that is focused around graphic design. A great inspiration source to broaden your horizon, with some excellent tutorials as well.

Sjors de Laat, Real-time VFX Artist at Axis Animation