Artist Guide - Legacy Documentation

Owned by Jean-François Emond
Jan 04, 2024
1 min read

Advanced Graphics in Vortex Studio is considered legacy technology. We encourage users to look at game engines, like Unity or Unreal, integration to benefit from advanced rendering capabilities.

See Integrating Vortex Studio with Unity and Integrating Vortex Studio with Unreal Engine


Graphical artists can create complex graphical assets that help in the simulation of real world object.

The Artist Guide provides a comprehensive resource for artists to design exceptional assets that can be exported into Vortex® Studio.

Graphical assets described in this document include: 3D models, materials, textures and DOF elements.

Artist Quick Start

The following list shows the typical workflow for a 3D artist working with Vortex® Studio to create, import, and work with graphical assets.

A step-by-step, hands-on tutorial is available for the Graphics Gallery.

You can also dive straight into the general Artist Guide - Legacy Documentation.

Art Best Practices

The following guidelines are meant to help you conform your models to work within the limits of Vortex® Studio.

Artist Guide Overview

This topic provides an overview of the graphics pipeline and creation guidelines, as well as the preparation and optimization of graphic assets.

Graphical Assets

This section provides guidelines for artists to create these resources in a way that will make them easy to use in Vortex® Studio.

Graphics Galleries

A Graphics Gallery document saves imported 3D models from a variety of software and file formats and converts those models to a file that is independent from the source software, using a .vxgraphicgallery file extension

Importing Graphics

Vortex® Studio imports and stores the 3D model and all its components (materials, textures, etc.) into a single native file: the Graphics Gallery. This file is then sent to the mechanical engineers to build the simulation.

Importing Models from 3ds Max

This section explains how to prepare your models for export in 3ds Max specifically, as it is the recommended DCC software for use with Vortex Studio.

Model Simplification Tools

There are a number of tools in the Graphics Gallery to manipulate imported models.

Graphics Extensions

These are the following categories of effects that you can apply in Vortex®:

  • Particle effects: Used to simulate a large number of very small objects, such as a cloud of dust.
  • Image effects: Used to affect the look of the simulation, not the physics. Note that since they involve calculations, image effects do impact performance.