Welcome! My name is James Hill, and I've been in the video game industry for over 13 years. During that time I have been fortunate to work on a wide range of titles and pursue my passion to create and learn along the way. My current skillset lands me somewhere between VFX Artist and Technical Artist. I have worked on Environment Modeling, Shader/Look Dev, Lighting, Post Effects, Cinematic Effects, Scripting, Level Layout and Prop Placement, even a little bit of Animation. Have a look around and check out my latest Demo Reel below.
Savengers: PC, PS5, PS4, XBox Series and Xbox One
Halo Infinite
I worked on the sandbox team on various weapon and item vfx from plasma weapons, barriers, gravlifts and exploding fusion coils
Oculus Quest: New User Experience (NUX)
I created vfx for the shooting gallery and Monty reveal as well as vfx for the controller tutorial and other various tech art materials throughout the demo
Demo Reel (2018)
James Hill's Demo Reel 2018 from James Hill on Vimeo.
Shot Breakdowns
Squids From Space:
I was in charge of creating all the VFX for the game as well as Materials, Destructible's, Lighting, Environment Optimization.
The clips are from various gameplay captures from different levels and lighting situations throughout the game. Squids from Space features fast paced multiplayer twin stick combat borrowing from its predecessor "Fat Princess (PS3)"
Fat Princess Adventures:
For this project I was the only fx artist in the studio. I was responsible for creating all the in-game VFX for combat, cinematics, and ambient environmental fx.
We created our own in-house GPU particle engine, but due to production constraints we never had a true particle editor. This meant that I had to code all of the particle fx using the Playstation Shader Language(PSSL). I worked with our graphics engineers to help streamline this process, but all of the fx were created in Notepad++
Fire, smoke, liquid, and blood textures were created in Phoenix FD for Maya, and many other textures were painted in Photoshop or After Effects
Murdered: Soul Suspect:
Shot 1: Made the smoky materials that emit for the enemy, polished the materials on ‘soul’ shader
Combat: All vfx and materials on Roman and enemy and hide objects. Including pre attack, attack, execute, and death of player and enemy. Original death vfx by Ernie Eastlund
Environment FX: All vfx and materials in shots. Fire, smoke, rolling fog, ghost objects materials and fx. Lens flares, blooms, rain materials and lighting fx
Material FX: Shot: Material fx on ghost graffiti disappear and appear cinematic, teleport fx. I also made the materials for the reveal and remove objects seen throughout the game
Ronan Dies Cine: Compositing and Gun FX by Ernie Eastlund. I worked on the impact fx on Ronan, and the material transitions on the bullet holes and the blood.