ILMxLAB give us an insight into the members of their stellar team with Arina A, VFX artist who worked on the superb Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge project.
Where does VFX land in the development pipeline? How do you work with the other disciplines?
We step in almost at the end of production. I would say that our work almost concludes the visual of the project. Sometimes, we don’t have too much performance left for us to use, but we try our best to fill the scenes with the best performant effects as possible. We are strongly connected with the Tech Art team, the environment team, and the performance, lighting and animation teams. We also sometimes need some help from design and engineering.
In this scene, Arina added luminescence to the electrical part on the helmet and bracelets, and added dynamic hits (dust and small debris) to the ground and the columns on the crashing bridge element.
Does VFX work in real-time rendered experiences differ from traditional, pre-rendered VFX? How so?
It depends. In some projects, we do not have enough performance to render everything in real-time, because of the high quality visuals that the project might need. For example, with 4k projects, we would tend to use pre-rendered effects. Real-time rendering is quick, and you can see the changes almost immediately, which is incredibly helpful and makes us, as artists, much more productive. It can sometimes be a struggle to make even the smallest adjustments, because it might take forever before you see the results.
With Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge – Enhanced Edition releasing, what are you the most excited for people to see that you were able to do on the project?
I hope that people who have never played any VR game or experience would be glad to experience it, and those who have played it on Meta Quest will be able to see all the work that our team put in for this version. I am especially proud of Tara’s fight when the barrels are blowing up, and the bridge destruction VFX that happened after the poor creature Ayuu was affected by an electric helmet. I am so excited to see how people will react when they see how epic each story finale is.
