New World: Aeternum
FX Artist · Sparx* (Virtuos) for Amazon Games · 2024
My Contribution
Created realistic cinematic effects, including fire and lightning.
Created Houdini cloth simulations for clothing and sails.
Also worked on character hair simulation, water splashes, foam, and explosions.
Technical Notes
For the cloth, I kept coming back to one question: how does the garment move around the character? I worked on the setup and checked it against the collision shapes in Unreal.
Hair was a lot of small adjustments in Niagara: curl noise strength, frequency, direction, then another look at how the strands moved. It's easier to judge in motion than in a still frame.
Selected Breakdown
Getting the cloth moving
A garment preview on the left, and a collision check on the right. Those purple shapes show the body the cloth has to move around. I handled the simulation setup here; the character models and costumes came from the team.
Tuning the hair motion
This is the Niagara groom setup I worked with. The exposed controls let me adjust the curl-noise strength, frequency, and direction without digging through the setup each time. Handy little controls 🙂
Well... that happened 😅
Left: the coat ate its owner. Right: I was working on a character and somehow got a kite instead 😂 Two bugs from production that deserved a spot here.
Role
FX Artist
Engine
Unreal Engine
Platform
PlayStation 5 / PC
Studio / Client
Sparx* (Virtuos) / Amazon Games
Production Credit: Credited under Sparx* / Amazon Games