VFX for Games: Everything You Need to Know & Examples from Famous Games

One of the most unambiguous threads in the gaming industry for the coming years is the request from the gaming community for more improvements to graphics and visuals. Hardware is becoming more powerful, mobile devices can easily play heavyweight games, and the AR/VR direction continues to develop. So there are more and more challenges for developers.

VFX is an indispensable tool for meeting the expectations of the players. Whether it’s fantastic effects and breathtaking fireballs in a fantasy RPG or super-realistic smoke, water, and fire in a post-apocalyptic action game, the visuals hold the attention, provide better immersion, and allow the game to unfold in the best possible way.

So, let’s talk about the meaning of visual effects in games. With lively and exciting examples, of course.

VFX in the Gaming Industry

So, VFX for games is just as important as high-quality filming for a movie. But if a movie can do without visual effects, limiting itself to beautiful location shooting, then games don’t have that luxury. Each element of the game environment is computer-generated assets, the perception of which directly depends on their realism and quality.

For example, water in games. Have you noticed how few titles can offer more or less realistic water? Especially if the gameplay does not involve active interaction with it. In this case, the developers prefer to minimize the effort of working on the water and subsequently receive bad feedback from the players who got to the water and were horrified by its quality.

Example: Water in Metro Exodus

Water, like other visual effects in the post-apocalyptic first-person shooter video game Metro Exodus from the Ukrainian company 4A Games, looks beyond all praise. PhysX technology, along with tessellation, helped to provide amazing 3D ripples that form small waves like in reality. What’s more, even shells form splashes and ripples in the water.

Another detail that stands out is how the water actually looks and behaves on screen. The surface isn’t flat or decorative. It reacts to light, shifts with movement, and reflects the environment around it – buildings, sky, passing objects. High-resolution textures and carefully tuned lighting give it weight and depth instead of a simple shader effect.

The realism continues below the surface. In underwater sequences, players can swim, move through debris, and engage with enemies. Visibility changes, light diffuses differently, and physics feel heavier. It’s not just a visual filter placed over the camera – the water alters how the space functions.

What are Visual Effects in Games?

Visual effects in games are the process of creating special animations that are not an object or characters, but that represent the player’s interaction with the game world and bring the game world to life.

This explanation may seem complicated, but in fact, we are all very familiar with visual effects. These are not only the so-called special effects, lightning, magic, and various fantasy transformations. Not at all. Visual effects are also water, fire, smoke, dust, and more. Sometimes we don’t even pay attention to them, but they are an integral part of the gaming experience.

For example, fire. Despite the classic coziness of bonfires, embodying rest, peace, and a certain stronghold of protection in a dangerous world, much more often fire in games is something that has gone out of control and represents danger and a threat to life.

Example: Fire in The Last of Us Part II

In The Last of Us Part II by Naughty Dog, fire isn’t just an effect layered over a scene. It behaves like a force inside it. A big part of that comes from volumetric rendering. Flames and smoke occupy space. They expand, thin out, curl, and shift depending on airflow and surrounding geometry. Nothing feels static. The shape of a blaze changes from moment to moment.

There’s also density to it. Smoke doesn’t simply move upward and disappear. It collects near ceilings, seeps into corners, and softens the light in the room. Visibility drops gradually, not instantly. Once a space catches fire, it starts to feel tighter, less predictable.

The smaller elements make the scene believable. Sparks jump from damaged surfaces. Embers drift and fade. Fine ash hangs in the air even after the main flames subside. From a single burning vehicle to a larger structure collapsing under heat, the fire changes how the environment reads. It affects contrast, depth, and pacing. It feels integrated into the world rather than layered on top of it.

What Kinds of Visual Effects Are Used in Games?

Creating visual effects for games is a complex and painstaking process. The success of this activity will determine whether players feel like they are part of the game world or roll their eyes when they see clumsy fire or plastic water.

The most common types of visual effects in games are:

1. CGI (computer-generated imagery). It is a technique used to create visual effects using computer graphics. In video games, CGI is used to create characters, objects, and environments. This technique can be used to create realistic-looking graphics or more stylized graphics, depending on the desired look of the game.

• Motion capture. Motion capture is less about “realistic movement” and more about believable timing. When developers record a performer, they capture weight shifts, hesitation before impact, imbalance after a hit – the small irregularities that make motion feel human.
• In games, that data becomes the base layer. Animators still refine it, clean it, exaggerate it where needed. But the foundation comes from real-world physics and muscle memory. That’s why sports titles feel sharper, and combat systems feel grounded. The body moves like it has mass.

• Morphing. Morphing works differently. It’s not about realism – it’s about controlled transformation.
• Instead of replacing one model with another, developers gradually interpolate between shapes or states. A character’s face shifts expression. A creature mutates mid-animation. An object reshapes as part of a puzzle mechanic. The transition is visible, not hidden.
• That visibility matters. Players register the change as part of the world’s logic rather than a technical switch. Morphing turns transformation into an event instead of a cut.

This is a technological categorization. Inside the game itself, there are gameplay and environmental effects:

• Gameplay effects. This includes all effects directly related to the interaction between the player and the game world. These are the effects of a shot, marks on surfaces, splashes from under the wheels, and so on.
• Environmental effects. These are the effects that occur in the game world without the direct participation of the player and that make up the general game atmosphere: water, fire, clouds, smoke, rain, and so on.

Example: Thunderstorm in Forza Horizon 4

Continuing the tradition of examples, let’s look at the thunderstorm effect. Many games use it to manipulate the player’s emotional state, but few have risen to such heights of dynamic weather change as Forza Horizon 4, a racing video game developed by the British video game developer Playground Games.

The location called Fortune Island brings the storm to the absolute. A convincing thunderstorm in a game isn’t built from a single effect. It’s layered. Rain density, wind force, sound design, lighting shifts – everything stacks to create pressure.

Heavy rainfall reduces visibility. Wind pushes against vehicles and subtly alters handling. The soundscape changes – distant thunder rolls first, then cracks closer overhead. The result isn’t just visual noise. It changes how the player drives and reacts.

Lightning plays a major role. Strikes aren’t static textures in the sky. They’re procedurally generated, which means bolt shapes vary and flashes feel unpredictable. Each strike briefly floods the scene with harsh light, casting sharp shadows and exposing details that disappear a second later. That sudden contrast heightens tension.

Rain carries its own complexity. Droplets interact with surfaces, catch headlights, distort reflections. Small details – ripples, glare, wet-road reflections – make the storm feel physical rather than decorative.

When these systems work together, the weather stops being background scenery. It becomes an active condition the player has to manage.

What Programs Are Used to Create VFX in Games?

Special VFX software offers artists a variety of tools for working with effects. Many of them have preset animations and textures that you can modify depending on your needs. Using ready-made assets and software features, artists have different ways to create amazing visual effects of the highest quality.

Example: The Dust Storm in Forza Horizon 5

3DS Max	Unity	Unreal Engine
Houdini	Maya	After Effects

The dust storm in Forza Horizon 5, developed by Playground Games, isn’t just a visual backdrop. It actively changes how the race feels.

The core of the effect is a large-scale particle system. Millions of fine particles simulate sand moving through the air. They don’t drift randomly – they react to wind direction, turbulence, gravity, and vehicle movement. As cars cut through the storm, trails form and dissolve, creating temporary pockets of visibility.

Lighting plays an equally important role. The storm filters sunlight, muting colors and lowering contrast. Dynamic lighting interacts with airborne particles, giving the dust volume instead of a flat overlay. Headlights pierce through the haze unevenly, and distant objects fade gradually rather than disappearing abruptly.

The result is reduced visibility, shifting depth perception, and a constant sense of motion in the air. The storm feels like a system affecting the entire environment, not a texture layered over the sky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA2t9xsrdss

It is important to understand that each effect requires a different approach and sometimes a separate instrument. For example, fire, smoke, and explosion effects are conveniently created in Phoenix FD, FumeFX, and Maya fluids. Destruction effects are well modeled in MassFX and Rayfire.

Here are some examples of the most popular VFX software.

3ds Max

3ds Max is considered one of the basic VFX tools. Its convenience is that it includes a toolkit for the implementation of a complete animation pipeline, from modeling to rendering.

Look at some of the tools and features of 3ds Max that are useful for creating VFX in video games:

1. Particle flow. It is a tool that allows users to create particle systems that are often used for visual effects design: explosions, fire, and smoke.
2. MassFX handles rigid body dynamics – gravity, collisions, object interactions. It’s useful when VFX depend on believable physical reactions, such as collapsing structures or scattered debris.
3. FumeFX is widely used for fluid-based simulations like fire, smoke, and clouds. It allows detailed control over turbulence, temperature, and density, making it suitable for high-quality pre-rendered or baked effects.
4. Hair and fur. This system is primarily used for characters, but it also supports secondary motion and environmental effects where strands or fibers react dynamically.
5. MAXScript enables automation and custom tool creation. In production environments, it’s often used to streamline repetitive tasks or build internal VFX utilities.
6. UV mapping. UV tools are essential for preparing assets so textures, shaders, and baked simulations align correctly once imported into a real-time engine.

3ds Max offers depth and flexibility, but it’s not lightweight software. Mastering it requires time, especially when combining simulation tools with optimization for game-ready assets.

Unity

The most popular game engines offer affordable built-in visual effects tools. Unity provides a range of instruments for creating VFX in video games.

For example, it has such key tools and features:

1. Particle system. It allows artists to create various types of particle effects: explosions, smoke, fire, and more. You can customize particle behavior and appearance to suit your needs. The system supports dynamic and static particle effects.
2. Shuriken. An updated particle system provides more flexibility and control over particle effects. It includes a wide range of modules and parameters for creating complex particle effects with ease.
3. Timeline is used to sequence animations, camera moves, and VFX events. Instead of triggering effects through code alone, developers can choreograph explosions, environmental changes, and cinematic transitions within a structured timeline.
4. Shader Graph allows artists to build custom shaders visually. By adjusting material properties, surface responses, transparency, distortion, and lighting interaction, VFX can gain depth beyond simple particle overlays.
5. Visual Effect Graph. For large-scale or GPU-heavy simulations, Visual Effect Graph provides node-based control over advanced particle systems. It’s often used for dense smoke, large explosions, magical effects, or environmental simulations that require thousands – or millions – of particles.
6. Cinemachine manages dynamic camera behavior. While not a VFX tool directly, it shapes how effects are perceived by controlling framing, movement, and transitions during gameplay or cutscenes.

In practice, strong VFX in Unity come from combining these systems – particles for motion, shaders for surface behavior, timeline for sequencing, and camera logic for presentation.

Dive Deeper:
✔ Unity − What Makes It the Best Game Engine?

Unreal

Unreal Engine is often chosen for projects where visual impact isn’t optional. The engine is built around real-time rendering, which means effects aren’t added at the end – they’re shaped directly inside the production environment.

1. Niagara. Niagara isn’t just a particle emitter. It’s a programmable VFX system. Developers can control behavior at a granular level – from particle lifetime and collision response to event-driven reactions triggered by gameplay. Large-scale explosions, sandstorms, magical effects, environmental debris – all can be simulated with layered logic instead of simple loops.
2. Material editor defines how surfaces behave under light. Reflections, refractions, emissive glow, distortion, surface animation – these aren’t presets but node-driven constructions. Complex materials can react to camera angle, time, or environmental data, which adds subtle depth to VFX-heavy scenes.
3. Animation & Sequencing. Unreal’s animation system and sequencing tools allow effects to sync with gameplay events or cinematic moments. Particles, lighting shifts, and environmental changes can be tied directly to character movement or scripted sequences without breaking real-time performance.

On top of that, Unreal integrates dynamic lighting, volumetric fog, post-processing, and physics simulation into the same pipeline. The result is control. Not just over how an effect looks, but over how it behaves within the game world.

Dive Deeper:
✔ Unity vs Unreal Engine: Pros and Cons

Houdini

For many VFX artists, Houdini is the go-to software for advanced dynamic simulation tools. Our specialists also actively use it together with Unreal. It is a 3D animation software that is widely used in the game development industry. It offers a range of procedural tools that enable developers to create complex VFX. The tool allows you to work in an iterative way and offers a convenient node-based system to minimize the number of steps.

Viacheslav Titenko, TechArt and VFX lead at Kevuru, says that the combination of Unreal Engine with Houdini can significantly simplify game development when working with project of maximum complexity. Together with Houdini artist Pavel Filevsky, Viacheslav explained in details how they use Houdini in real cases in this article.

Houdini is widely used in VFX-heavy pipelines because it’s built around procedural logic. Instead of manually shaping every detail, artists define systems – and those systems generate the result.

1. Procedural modeling. Geometry in Houdini is driven by node networks and parameters. Change a value, and the entire structure updates. This makes it especially useful for environments, destruction setups, or assets that require variation without rebuilding from scratch.
2. Particle and fluid simulation. In Houdini, simulations aren’t decorative overlays. Fire spreads based on heat values and airflow direction. Smoke compresses, separates, and curls around geometry depending on turbulence and collision fields. Water doesn’t just splash – it carries volume, momentum, and secondary spray. The setup can be heavy on resources, but the trade-off is control. Instead of tweaking visual presets, artists define the behavior itself.
3. Dynamic rigging. Houdini allows rigs to react to forces rather than follow fixed animation curves. Gravity, impact strength, and physical constraints can influence motion in real time. That’s useful when scenes involve stress, collapse, or environmental interaction.
4. Cloth stretches under tension. Limbs adjust after contact. Objects shift under weight. Movement becomes a response, not just a timeline.
5. Compositing. Houdini also supports compositing inside the same workflow. Simulated elements – smoke layers, debris passes, atmosphere – can be adjusted, balanced, and integrated before export. Keeping this step internal reduces back-and-forth between tools and speeds up iteration when refining complex effects.
6. Digital assets. Complex setups can be turned into reusable digital assets. A destruction system, weather generator, or crowd simulation tool can be packaged and reused across projects. This approach keeps pipelines consistent and saves time when similar effects are required again.

Houdini isn’t beginner-friendly. Its node-based logic requires technical thinking and patience. But for teams working with procedural systems and heavy simulations, that structure provides flexibility that simpler tools can’t match.

Maya

Autodesk Maya remains a standard tool in many game development pipelines, especially when projects require detailed animation and simulation work before assets are moved into a real-time engine.

1. Dynamics. Maya’s dynamics systems are used to simulate physical behavior – explosions, smoke, cloth movement, debris. Artists can adjust gravity, force fields, and collision parameters to shape how objects react inside a scene.
2. Fluids. The Fluids system allows control over liquid simulations and gaseous effects. It’s commonly used for water surfaces, splashes, and volumetric elements where flow and density need to look natural rather than procedural.
3. Particles. Maya’s particle tools generate effects like dust, rain, sparks, and debris. They can also be combined with shading and lighting setups to prototype larger VFX sequences before optimization for game engines.
4. Nucleus acts as a unified simulation framework for cloth, soft bodies, and rigid bodies. It calculates how materials respond to forces and collisions, helping artists design motion that feels physically grounded.
5. Bifrost is Maya’s advanced simulation engine. It’s often used for complex effects such as large-scale fluid behavior, fire, smoke, and destruction. The node-based system provides detailed control over simulation logic.

Maya also includes MEL (Maya Embedded Language), which allows teams to automate repetitive processes and build custom pipeline tools. In production environments, this scripting capability helps maintain efficiency when working with large volumes of animated or simulated assets. We talked about MEL in detail in our Maya vs Blender comparison material.

Dive Deeper:
✔ Maya vs Blender: What Is the Best Fit for Your 3D Project in 2023

After Effects

Adobe After Effects is rarely the place where core game assets are built. Instead, it’s where many visual layers are refined before they reach the engine. Some of the key tools and features of After Effects for VFX include:

1. Compositing and Layering. After Effects is often used to combine multiple render passes – lighting, shadows, particles, atmosphere – into a balanced final sequence. Artists can isolate elements, adjust exposure, enhance contrast, or introduce subtle distortion without re-rendering the entire scene.
2. Motion Tracking. Built-in tracking tools allow designers to anchor visual effects to moving footage or pre-rendered camera motion. This is useful when blending live-action plates with CG elements or refining cinematic sequences tied to gameplay captures.
3. Rotoscoping and Masking. When effects need to interact with specific parts of a scene, masking and rotoscoping tools allow precise isolation. Smoke can pass behind a character. Light can wrap around geometry. These details are often finalized at the compositing stage.
4. Color Grading and Atmosphere. After Effects is frequently used to adjust tone and mood. Subtle grading, glow passes, depth haze, and film grain can shift how a scene feels without altering the underlying assets.

Overall, After Effects is a versatile tool that provides various features and tools for creating VFX in video games. Its ability to combine various visual elements and apply effects and animations to them makes it a popular choice among game designers and VFX outsourcing artists.

FAQ

What is VFX in games?

VFX in games is the process of creating special gameplay and environmental effects that provide a sense of interactivity and immersion in the game world.

How to make VFX for video games?

VFX for games is created using special software. You can use different tools for different kinds of effects. Most famous environments: 3Ds Max, After Effects, Houdini, etc.

What can you do with VFX?

The effects in the game can be very different, and you can do almost anything with them within the framework of the game universe and the logic of the game interactive.