BLACK VFX: SHOOTING UP THE WORLD

With the initial design stages of Black, the "5 rules of guncraft" were born:

Guns are the stars
Every bullet is your baby
Bigger and Louder
Leave a trail of destruction
Death is an opportunity

These rules helped define the game as a whole and had to be applied to all areas of the game. So when Tad Swift started in Visual Effects he knew he and his team had to answer some serious questions...

THE QUESTIONS

1. If the game is all about destruction and every bullet making its mark, can we track every bullet impact and have it react differently for different surfaces?
2. Can the player fire the gun and literally fill the screen with dust and smoke from bullet impacts and explosions?

Tad: In the initial stages we weren't sure that we could answer these questions, especially with the existing particle technology that Criterion had. All of the existing code was written specifically for Burnout where the rules are very different. In Burnout it's all about moving fast through the world, crashing into other cars and causing mayhem at speed.

But in Black the pace would be a lot slower and we needed all of the effects to stand up to close scrutiny. The player could walk right up to a wall, shoot it and watch the particle effect, so it had to be good.

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

In the beginning was the explosion

The first thing that we did was to port over the existing code to Black, which was performed by Rob Cowsill who was working on the Effects team at the time, and then we started to improve it. During this time we also worked closely with Tom Williamson, who is one of our senior programmers and the original creator of a lot of the effects systems in Burnout.

The effects system expanded quickly adding in new features that Black required, like volumetric lights and debris trails so that we could throw out tendrils from effects.

THE CREATURE WITHIN

The wonderful thing about Tiger...

As the complexity of the effects system grew it became clear that the final effects would only be as good as the artists could make them, and for that they needed to be able to see the effects in realtime and iterate them before finally putting them in the game. For this task we needed to write a particle editor. Within EA there was an existing particle system called Lion, but this wasn't suitable for our specific needs on Black. So, I created a new editor from scratch and Tiger was born.

VARIATION IS THE KEY

Tiger allowed our visual effects artist, Jon Graham, to start the task of creating the look and feel of the individual effects. We needed to have enough variety in the game that every surface type had multiple effects, otherwise you would get the same effect appearing time after time and they would lose their visual impact for the player.

Throughout the world of Black every surface had a tag, placed by the artists, that specified the surface type. So for example we could have Wood, Metal, Glass, Dirt, Mud, Sand etc. For each of these surfaces we had to create a unique looking effect so that if the player strafed across the world with a gun then the impact effects would match the surface type. This variation in effects meant that the player always had a good mix of effects when shooting and rarely saw just one type of impact effect, but this then raised another issue.

BEWARE OF THE LIGHT

Parts of the world in Black are very dark whilst others are bathed in light. If the particle effects ignored the light then they would stand out like a sore thumb and the illusion would be shattered. So care was taken to sample the lighting conditions for each of the particles and ensure that it fitted in with its environment, which greatly improved the visual look of the effects and made them seem more real.

Particle excellence

As well as the bullet impact effects our VFX artist also had to create a large number of individual effects :

Bullet ricochet effects
Grenade explosions
Exploding barrels
Exploding gas tanks
RPG trails
RPG explosions
Tracer fire

FLASH BANG WALLOP

It's worth mentioning here that many FPS games today still seem stuck in the previous generation with regard to simple effects, like Muzzleflash. They seem to think that if they just place a glowing blob on the end of a gun then that's all there is to it ... but in BLACK we decided to be different.

The Muzzleflash was altered based on the gun type that the player, or AI, was using and each had its own individual shape and form. Jon Graham devised a technique where he could use fluid dynamics in our 3D modelling package to create a realistic smoke like petal formation that could be baked into a texture and then used in game.

The shape of the formation was non-symmetric so that we could randomly scale and rotate it to create the illusion that the shape was changing. This meant that when the player pulled the trigger they would be treated to a different effect every time.

Muzzleflash #1

Muzzleflash #2

SHOW US YOUR BEST MOVE

As the game was taking shape I still felt that we were missing a "signature" effect, something that would make it stand out from other FPS's at the time. Working with another artist we devised a grenade explosion effect that would be used when it was detonated behind glass windows. This effect was timed and hooked in to the world to ensure that if you detonated a grenade behind a lot of glass then they would be timed to explode out in a ripple effect.

The audio department created a fantastic explosion sound for this effect and combined with the huge clouds of smoke and debris this effect felt very rewarding to the player and summed up all of the destructive elements of Black.

I LOVE IT WHEN A PLAN COMES TOGETHER

Now we had our signature effect and technology in place we were ready to move into the final phases of the games development and we could finally begin to answer our original questions:

Boom! Shake, shake, shake the room!

A dream in destruction

At its peak the visual effects system could handle well over 14,000 particles at once, which meant that we had more than enough to handle anything that the game designers threw at us:

You want a fire fight with 6 people with Uzi's and an RPG? No problem!

Effect reflected in water.

I started work on Black when I joined Criterion on 10th January 2005. We finalled the game and built it for the last time on 10th January 2006, exactly one year later.

Black went on to win many awards, including one for Best Explosions in a game. Even today Black is regarded as one of the best looking FPS games on PS2 and Xbox, of which I am proud to have been a part.

P.S An interesting, but little known fact...Did you know that in Black all of the effects reflected in water?? (See debug capture image on the right - The glowing "blob" reflects in the water, as do all explosion effects!)