What are your favorite challenges for creating VFX for this groundbreaking game?
TL;DRThe VFX artists say the biggest challenge is getting scale right, since effects must read well both up close and far away, alongside the high fidelity they aim for.
Michael has an excellent answer to this one. You talked about the scaling thing.
Yes, actually. So in this game, it's an RTS game, we were not concerned about the scale because you had a fixed camera distance, but you cannot do that in Star Citizen. So let's just say in RTS games you can have sparks which are as big as... But in Star Citizen you can get up close and far away. You need to get scale right, and that sounds simple, but actually it's making the huge difference in how you approach your VFX. You need to take care of the close and far read of the VFX, basically. That probably applies to all of us in this game.
When I'm making the impact for the laser cannons, for example, it's not enough that it looks good from the ship in the cockpit. It has to look good if you shoot me where I stand and you shoot one meter ahead of me, sort of. And that's tricky.
Very often I'm doing an explosion and it looks really good like 10 meters away, but then I'm up close and I'm destroying just a vehicle and I see nothing. Like, what happened? It's the worst explosion ever.
And besides from that, it's the fidelity that we are striving for. I mean, the quality is much higher than any game I've been working on. That's a challenge, but it's a nice challenge.