PopcornFX - Persistant Studio

I’m an employee of Persistant Studio, the company behind PopcornFX, a cross plateform and cross engine VFX middleware. I work mainly on improving PopcornFX rendering, both in our standalone editor and in-engines. I also do some technical art support for our outsourcing team.

Here is an glimpse of the topics I’m dealing with.

Engine rendering integration

I’m maintaining or integrating features inside our plugins in various engines. Recently, I worked on an early version of our plugin for the new O3DE engine, and wrote a little blog post showcasing our progress.

Vertex animation pipeline

I worked on integrating Houdini’s SideFX labs vertex animation pipeline inside PopcornFX and our plugins. Aside from the actual implmentation, it implied contributing on SideFX labs git and recording this tutorial

Volumetric and parallax texture rendering

I added some volumetric rendering of textures inside our Editor samples pack.

With parallax, we’re able to fake volume rendering for a relatively small cost, using a pre-rendered height map. A vector field map can drive additionnal dynamics particules to add complexity and interactions.

GPU Billboarding for ribbons and meshes, GPU sort

I implemented ribbons billboarding (geometry generation, from particle positions and the view matrix), mesh matrices computation, and particles sorting on the GPU. Sorting is needed for ribbons and alpha blended rendering. This allows to have GPU simulation and rendering of those types: ribbons, meshes, and alpha-blended particules.

PopcornFX editor post-processing improvements

I added FXAA and 8 bit dithering on our editor.

PopcornFX editor image based lighting

I integrated image based lighting (with our own processing of the input HDR) in PopcornFX standalone editor. Check Real Shading in Unreal Engine 4 by Brian Karis for more information on IBL.