Vincent JALLIFFIER-MERLON
Technical/VFX Artist
ABOUT ME
I'm a VFX & Technical Artist working primarly on video games. I was born in 1995 in France, the same year as the first Playstation was released but, paradoxically, I bought my first Sony console in 2014. I was primarly a Nintendo kid, playing a lot of Mario games on my Gameboy, my SNES and my Gamecube later, and, looking at it now, it's probably what forged my love for player experience and giving amazing feedback to the player.
As I was growing, I’ve been continuously looking for cartoons and animes, which gave me both a thirst for animation, but also a passion for storytelling. In the same time, I've been studying music, sports, chess, anything that could help me get a new perspective and new skills, and also, keep me occupied.
After a scientific Baccalauréat, I enroled at Supinfogame, for a Master's degree in Video Game Art. There, I met a lot of amazing people which, in addition to becoming my friends, made me strive to get better, doing gamejams and spending lots of time playing and creating games together. It got me used to picking up any job fast, having to create art, design, code or music on the fly depending of the needs, but also giving me room to experiment et have fun doing it.
After my fifth and final year, I started working in the outsourcing division of Persitant Studios, a tech company which was developping there own VFX solution, PopcornFX. Going there was natural to me, as I had started learning about programming langages, and wanted to dwell more into the technical aspect of games. After 2 years working there, working with many great companies such as Qualcom, AMD or Playwing, and even given a small talk on the XSens booth at SIGGRAPH2019, I started looking for something new, as I wanted to go back to developping games, and stop being outside of production teams.
That's the moment I found Wolcen Studio, a Nice based company, which was working a beautiful Hack'N Slash. I moved there in September 2020, and worked along Oskar Larson, my fellow VFX Artist, lead, and also friend, and created a lot of amazing looking VFXs for the expansions and the content patches we released over the course of the year we worked together, as well as multiple tool to make our life with CryEngine 3 easier, or to help profile the assets already in the game.
In 2021, I was contacted by Digital Extremes to join their team in Canada. I've always been curious of living abroad, and working on a game with such an aura as Warframe convinced me very quickly, and I started working for them remotly in October 2021. After nearly a full year of remote working, I finally got my working permit and embark on a new journey to the town of London, Ontario, Canada in August 2022, where I've been living and working since then.
During my studies, and even after, I always found a lot of fun in understanding how things work, and how to get the best out of the technology we were using. So with no surprise, when I started learning programmation, I quickly became fond of it, and especially of developping tools for internal use. I developped few of them for Persistant Studios and Wolcen, some that are still used to this day. At Digital Extremes, I quickly became accustomed with the scripting langage, always thriving to use my programming knowledge to provide complexe visuals. The other aspect that tech fondness brought me was optimization : learning how things works makes me feel like doing a puzzle when trying to optimize anything, having to figure out the best way to get both performances, and good looking VFX.
Finally, if you read all that and still want more precision on my career, or your want actual informations on my skills, please feel free to download my CV down below :