Procedural vertex animation in effects

What the talk is about

Taras Tereshchenko of Vostok Games presents a set of VFX built on procedural vertex animation in the vertex shader; the principles are universal, with examples made in Unreal Engine. He covers a muzzle flash whose billboard stretches with the camera angle to fake volume without artifacts; scaling flashes and hit effects with distance so enemy shots stay readable; a pixel-based minimum size so sparks don't flicker or vanish; a water explosion that needs very little texture memory; stabilizing jittery debris billboards; and a mushroom-cloud explosion from just three particles. He closes with night moths animated by sine functions and vertex masks. He stresses that these procedures are cheap compared with spawning many particles and are easy to combine. Useful for VFX artists and technical artists.