Technical Art: Prototyping And VFX

A tech art journey: using Unity to create reality-bending immersive experiences for XR

I spent years developing a lot of tech arts skills without knowing I was developing tech art skills. I vaguely knew what a "technical artist" was for the gaming industry, and I was much more interested in designing and building XR prototypes before I finally dug deeper and found that it is an ideal description of the work that I was doing daily. This page a brief summary of my journey as a VFX and prototyping focused tech artist using Unity for XR projects.

VFX For An Interactive VR Storytelling Experience

A studio commissioned me to create VFX for a few scenes in an immersive interactive story to be built in Unity and released for Meta Quest and comparable stand-alone headsets. The VFX elements I delivered for the project were:

Implementation of a water simulation (URP and VR compatible)
Water turbulence from a school of fish
A thin and wispy spirit character animated on a spline path
“God Rays” visual effect for the environment
Animated twinkling stars in a projection sphere for night skies

The project is still in development, so I can't offer more details than what is shown here. And these VFX elements are in-progress work without much of the surrounding context, story, and assets (environment, characters, etc.).

Also, I created these VFX for stand-alone/mobile VR headsets, which run at much lower graphics and CPU performance specs than PC and console devices (and maybe even phones).

Video demo of the VFX elements

Code and collider for controlling THe wave cresting VFX

Particle systems to create swimming fish turbulence VFX

Shader graph created for the whispy spirit VFX

Particle systems to generate god rays VFX

Shader graph for adding twinkling stars to scenes

Rapid Prototype For A Neuroaesthetics Experience

After playing Testris Effect when it was released years ago, I've been intrigued by neuroarts/neuroaesthetics/synesthesia gaming and experiences. So when Intuit held a Hackathon to explore out-of-the-box ideas for new experiences, I was excited to take a break from designing fintech apps and spend a day whipping up an experience meant for calming your mind and moving you into "the zone."

I don't have many artifacts from when I built it, but I remember this demo is much more about the VFX, SFX, and music rather than tools and 2D UI. The core components I built were:

An AI generated skybox for the underwater scene.
Particles systems for ambient VFX, user feedback after key actions, and even as the material for rendering the swimming point cloud sharks.
Quick 3D models for the coral structures.
Geometry materials for the tax objects.
Sound effects.

Turbo Tax Live VR: FX And 3D Art

One of my projects while I was leading XR design for Intuit's Technology Futures group was to design and prototype a multi-person VR experience for Turbo Tax Live. You can visit this link for more info about that project.

That project also required VFX and SFX, and I created a batch of elements to use while we were testing the concept with users.

User feedback VFX

This documentation video has the core user feedback FX: an audio whoosh and magic dust trail (particle system) for moving objects, particle system to reveal when new objects are spawned, and animated arc lines (a shader graph material) to highlight object relationships.

Completed Session Celebration

After a customer successfully completes a workflow session, I built a sequence that drops some confetti (particle system), plays happy music, and cycles through completed tax objects as a recap and small celebration to end the VR meeting.

VFX For My "Enhanced Hands" Prototype

After Meta's first release of the hand tracking system for Quest headsets, I built a prototype that enhances hand tracking interactions by enabling physics for naturally grasping and touching objects. You can visit this link for more info about that project.

I created a good amount of VFX for that project, and, since I absolutely love particle systems, I challenged myself to use Unity's new VFX graph system to implement the main elements. After watching a bunch of tutorial videos, fumbling through the tools, and working around unbuilt features of the new VFX system, I managed to put together some decent VFX. And those effects are likely more performant and less CPU intensive than Unity's standard particle system.

the VFX sequence After pressing the teleport button

Light rays emitting through the hologram UI

Portal VFX For An AR Demo

Portals was an AR app that I was using to have some fun with creating particle systems VFX in Unity. It's pretty simple: tap the plane indicator to place a portal on the ground.

This is from a long time ago but still a great example of combining a few different particle systems — smoke, radiating circles, radiation spirals, and light rays — to make one cohesive effect.