How big is the VFX team?
TL;DRThe VFX team is five or six people, with specialists in planetary effects, cinematics and simulation, junior help and weapons, plus a director, and most had never worked in a VFX team before.
There's five of us?
Five or six. There's Caleb in Germany. He's handling a lot of planetary effects. So the sandstorm demo you've seen, I guess, at Gamescom, that's his work.
What's his title?
Senior VFX artist?
No, he got promoted to... Why can't I remember this? Principal. VFX Principal. That means he is often leading the technologies. He finds out about new stuff and makes it work in our game.
So Oli, he joined recently. He is handling cinematics, so Squadron things mostly.
And he's a good simulations guy as well. And that's a really nice addition to the team. An easy example is if we need to break a wall of bricks, Oli can simulate that to look really realistic, which is needed for all the cutscenes.
And he's using Houdini, which is a great piece of software. He's doing all sorts of crazy things like procedurally generated destruction for cutscenes and things like that. We also have Aron. He's also kind of new.
Yeah, he's a junior VFX artist. He's been here for a couple of months.
He's helping me out with atmospheric effects, and I guess he was also doing some weapons before.
Yeah, he's helped me with a lot of weapons stuff as well. So he's jumping everywhere, which is good. I'm very envious of him for having that position. I wish I was in this team when I was 20 years old.
Yeah, it's a good place to start. And there's you doing weapons.
And you doing ship stuff.
We all do stuff on the side. We sometimes do things out of our box. And there's Mike, our lead.
Or even director now.
Director now. He's directing us in the right direction.
Yeah, and I think he makes it possible for us to work. He takes care of it, basically.
Is that Mike Snowdon?
Yeah, that's the one.
The funny thing I want to mention is that I never, ever met another VFX artist before I joined, and I think that applies to a lot of us. Usually a company has a single VFX artist for a whole game, and we have like six VFX artists.
Yeah, this is actually the first time I'm in a VFX team.
That's the first time I'm in a VFX team too.