Insights

Creating a believable world can be overwhelming without structure. Imagination is limitless, but without a plan, ideas can quickly lose focus. This article outlines the way I approach visual world building as a visual artist. It is not a strict step-by-step guide, but a breakdown of my thinking, planning, and problem-solving process when designing worlds. World building for clients and personal projects share similar foundations, but differ in mindset. Collaboration requires compromise, problem solving, and alignment within given parameters, while personal work is quite the opposite, where freedom to create your own rules can be an additional issue, and the problem solving is more internal and not dependent on others. I'll be diving into the latter and will save the client/collaborative work in a later section.

With the FPS section of the Bloomhell project, two of the VFX needed very stylized, somewhat 2D looking explosions that still worked in a three-dimensional space. I had to make sure I didn’t end up with an explosion that looked too much like a billboard, nor one that looked too much like a spherical mesh. For this brief breakdown, I will focus on the Burning Shot’s explosion.

Initially, from concept to Niagara asset, the “Bone Wave” looked very challenging. The idea was having a forward-moving pile of bones that would kill everything in its way.