How to (Not) Create Textures for VFX

Summary

Simon Trumpler’s talk focuses on making VFX textures efficiently, especially semi-realistic textures, and getting to a useful “good enough” version quickly. This version should help establish an effect’s scale and style and support discussion with an art director, without requiring either a texture-free prototype or a fully polished final asset.

Texture types and uses

• Sprites: A single texture displayed on a particle.
• Sprite sheets: Multiple sprites in one texture, with the particle system selecting frames for variation.
• Flipbooks: Animated sequences played on particles.
• 3D textures: Volumetric data, such as simulation or object slices. Trumpler notes that he has not used these himself.
• Texture functions: Color textures and alpha or grayscale masks can define shapes. Erosion masks create more interesting dissolves than simply fading transparency. Lookup textures color grayscale images, while vector maps can distort UVs to add motion.

Choosing a creation method

Trumpler describes several ways to make textures: drawing, using photos, procedural tools such as Substance Designer, purpose-built texture tools, and modeling or simulating an effect and baking it into a texture. Simulations can take a long time to learn, run, and render; real-time tools such as EmberGen can offer a quicker alternative.

His suggested decision process is:

1. Ask whether the effect needs a texture at all.
2. If it does, check whether an existing asset can be reused.
3. If not, look for a simple tool suited to the texture.
4. For tileable textures, consider Substance Designer or Photoshop.
5. For more distinctive textures, use Photoshop or Krita.

Using photos and third-party resources is not “cheating”: production artists should use appropriate tools to work efficiently. However, check each resource’s license and attribution requirements before using it commercially. Reusing existing assets can also help establish a visual direction, and there is often still plenty of work in adapting an asset and building the complete effect around it.

Techniques and examples

• Adapting a flipbook: Trumpler starts with a Unity flipbook and adjusts its color and size curves, enables frame blending, and animates playback so the motion starts fast and slows down. He stresses that an asset can be useful even if it lacks ideal features; a good-enough version need not be perfect.
• Working at a large source size: Create source textures large enough to support future needs, then scale them to the required size in the engine. A particle may approach the camera, so a tiny source texture can become visibly blurry.
• Painting with brushes: Standard brushes can be made more expressive by removing negative shapes with an eraser or lasso, using the Smudge tool, or combining strokes and applying Photoshop’s Minimum filter. For seamless tile painting, Photoshop’s Pattern Preview can show edges wrapping across the canvas.
• Creating light rays: Distort a shape with the Wave filter, then apply radial zoom blur repeatedly. For a similar effect in Substance, Trumpler describes using polar-to-Cartesian conversion, directional blur, and a return to polar coordinates. He also mentions a tilt-node approach.
• Building textures from photos: For lightning, he increases the contrast of a river photo, inverts it, selects and rearranges suitable branches, and adds gradients and an Inner Glow mask for a controlled fade and erosion. For a water splash, he cuts out and composites parts of a photo. The same splash texture is reused for flying sand.
• Making a waterfall texture: A photo texture is softened and scattered with Substance Designer’s Tile Sampler. To better match a reference, Trumpler also uses vector shapes to mask and distribute forms from the reference, and layers in a contrast-adjusted forest image to create cascading bands.
• Generating clouds: The open-source tool Kumo Works turns a simple drawn shape into a cloud and can produce lighting masks from different directions. Trumpler creates several masks—including a diffuse mask, a lightning-lighting mask, and a growth mask—and packs them into the RGB channels of one texture. He notes that separate masks can be more reusable when different shaders need to move or scale them independently.
• Improving motion and appearance in shaders: UV distortion adds movement; lookup gradients offer flexible recoloring of grayscale textures and flipbooks; and erosion makes particles break up as they disappear instead of simply fading out.

Workflow and resources

Trumpler recommends streamlining iteration and saving. He mentions Krita’s batch exporter, the Qave script, and Francesco’s Espresso plugin for exporting textures and, when needed, routing layers into color channels. He also recommends keeping photos and brushes in an organized, backed-up library.

He assembled an online resource database with categories for texture packs, brushes, photo and video references, and tutorials. He encourages artists to share process information and resources—ideally under clear, permissive licenses such as CC0—to make VFX texture creation less daunting for others.

Creators and contributors mentioned

• Simon Trumpler — Speaker and creator of the project examples and resource database; also runs the Unreal Simon YouTube channel.
• Celine, Leia, and Via — Thanked by Trumpler for support with travel, arrangements, and the GDC connection.
• Kai Webster — Brush set mentioned in the talk.
• Shannon — Creator of brush and blur tutorials.
• Ben — Cited for an example using the Minimum filter.
• Bruno and Robin — Shared Substance techniques for creating zoom-blur-like effects.
• Pete Clark — Credited for an example of turning unusual photos into textures.
• Louis — Source of a texture set used as a base for a background element.
• Niko — Credited for a recommended talk about VFX texture workflows for Spellbound.
• Kanan — Credited for a video about game particles.
• Sarah Kamdy — Cited for sharing process work.
• The talk also refers to an unidentified YouTube source for a water reference and an unidentified “CGO” YouTube channel for the Minimum-filter technique.