This video presents some of my VFX Works @ DONTNOD Entertainment, mainly production works of Remember Me:

• Neo-Parisian Environments (Slums, Sewers, Mid & Luxury hallways)
• Cinematic VFX (RTC & In-Game Events)
• Various Fight Gameplay Effects (Hits, Pressens, Enemies)
• Boss Fight Stage Effects (Cinematic / Environments / Abilities / QTE)
• Post-Process Glitches (Hits, LowLife & Game Over Feedbacks)

This video presents some of my works @ DARKWORKS: Unreleased version of I AM ALIVE, and some other internal TPS/FPS prototypes. All these works have been made under UnrealEngine3.

• Massive destruction of urban environments.
• Underwater & wet effects
• Gore & gibs (infected) mahyem.
• Ballistic & weaponary effects. (1st & 3rd person sets for pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles

Here is a list of other projects, with various videos.

My main concerns are both technical and artistic: Design as the expression of technique. The most beautiful effect cannot be achieved by balancing equally the complexity of the motion, rendering and dynamics, against the technical capabilities of the console.

Designing an effect out of concern of the platform performance will probably lead to misleading and frustration. On the other hand, being driven only by the technology available on a platform will result in already-seen effects. The key resides in superseding current techniques by adding tricks learned in other effects.

By doing so, VFX become richer, not necessarily more complex, because many times the new approach will simplify an older, heavy, or not-so-accurate process.

Learning technical tricks is also the key to creativity: being able to craft your own tools and build some know-how with them, enables many times to push back the "not possible" bounds farther.

As the years pass, you become more clearsighted about how things are done and how problems come to you. Anticipating and taking response before even the first signs of issues show up are my concerns. By communicating with project leaders, I am able to keep an eye on project advances and iterate according to the schedule.

Pro-active behavior is essential in order to keep a clear overview of the production, define objectives, forecast future tasks, and evaluate a balanced load in order to keep the most quality on every VFX you make.

All these years, I have been wokring in agile-like productions, based on the SCRUM method and milestone sprints. By then, I am used to all the production tools and processes implied by this method, by proposing evaluations of the production and balancing the load to improve step by step the quality and performance of the effects in-game.

By using tools such as JIRA, confluence, and Perforce, I have acquired methods to keep track of the overall quality of the Effects, balance workload on Agile Sprints, and write documents to share with the rest of the team.

In order to keep being realistic, I perform constant and regular benchmark of my own work on console platform targets. This leads to better understanding of the capabilities of each hardware.

Since VFX are often bottlenecks on modern games - due to engine design enabling users to create complex shaders - determining what's wrong in the scene can turn a production cut into an epic win. Usage of the engine tools is the first step in undestanding the scene and keeping the control.

For the tough ones, by using specific tools such as SCE-GPAD, PIX360, RazorGPU or Intel® GPA, I am able to track bottlenecks, provide advice to the Art Team, discuss with the engine programmers about possible optimizations and improvements, and debug some GPU-Specific Issues.

Tools are the baseline of the creation: good tools increase productivity, and enables the artist to push creation to the next level. By upkeeping tools, I'm make sure to optimize my time in order to maintain a smooth pipeline. This comes by undestanding the bottlenecks in the creation process, identify laborious taks and -if the bottleneck is due to repeat- provide a shortcut solution.

These solution can take various forms: from photoshop brushes and scripts, custom tool applications, to engine pipeline features. Every time, I try to make sure the solution are the simplest possible, improvable, and share-able.

Houdini FX is one of these tools you simply can't forget once you start building your own nest in there. By building a prototyping toolchain, I have been able to push further the creation by adding reusable, powerful, and interoperable prototyping tools.

Starting working on PLAYALL engine, I've been in charge of the particle technology re-design, along with the tool which would achieve features depending on my needs. By communicating with the engine team, I have been able to gain knowledge on low-level complexities of a particle engine, alongside the UI Design for the particle Editor.

Communication with the team is an essential part of my work, as It requires me to sum up complex problems in explicit briefs.

Two-sided flows with Art and Creative Direction are major in my work: As I recieve requests, I constantly keep in touch for improvements and report ASAP technical issues, to provide solutions to production.

Communicating with the engine team is also vital to sustain good knowledge of the platforms, tools and engine features. As technical knowledge sometimes makes a new technical idea blooming.

Game designers are also one of my privileged interlocutors: I can provide them with advice about usage, propose new codes and feedbacks to sharpen their designs.

Finally, sound designers are my mirror twins in the way where Visual effects are nothing without good sound effects, and vice-versa.