Hi guys!
Between so many new items available in the Metal Pass, the Effects are certainly my favorites (after the Nordic models). How about yours? It is also something that brings respect to the match! Like when you score and a giant sword comes down from the heavens into the arena!
I even had to take out my mask to get the full experience of the effects!
To reach this epic result, our team of high-skilled, coffee-boosted artists have put uncountable hours of work and delivered the best for us all, who just wanna have fun. I talked to two VFX Artists: Thiago “Buzzy” Buzzi and Bruno “Pardin” Duarte. Of course, they told me a bunch of things that I had no idea of, but let’s use gifs and images to illustrate it. 😛
The job starts with the 2D artists, who pass a concept forward to these two guys to work on. Then, they check if the textures are already available in our library or if it’s necessary to create a new one from scratch. Buzzy says that it is very common to use older textures to make something new, like this sample over here:
For the season 1 of the Metal Pass, we also created a lot of things, like that amazing Ice Bomb Score Effect. Pardin told me that creating this effect was a great experience for the team, because, after all, the “icy” theme is something new in Heavy Metal Machines. Note that the following GIFs show only the particle texture of the effect because the “ball” itself is made in another software, by a professional 3D animator:
The Ice Bomb particularly can request more from the PCs over there. So here comes another challenge: make everything happen on the screen without compromising the game’s performance or a power outage in the entire country. As you can see, they achieved the first option, and all is well today. These artists use a Particle System Editor, which is a software to put textures and animations together before going to the Technical Artists (the team who implements the effects into the game).
We’re all having SO MUCH FUN in the arenas, right? It is the proof that they did a great job with the game’s performance (which still is outstanding) and communications. Yes, the Effects are communicating something that we DO understand and makes the game coherent. BUT Zarpa, I don’t have that Effect in my HMM. Go ahead, mon ami, buy the Metal Pass Premium and unlock everything from season 1. Enjoy the result of the hard work of these artists in every Effect you see 🙂
Xoxo,
Zarpa