Martin Romero

I'm Martin Romero, a Principal VFX Artist with 18 years of experience crafting real-time and cinematic visual effects for games — and the founder of SparkFXLab.

Over the years I've shipped effects on titles including Tomb Raider, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, and VR projects like Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, working across studios like Crystal Dynamics, Sledgehammer Games, ILMxLAB, Amazon Games, and NetEase. I've been a Principal VFX Artist at AzraGames since December 2024, coming up on two years there. My work's been featured in Kotaku, and I've spoken at GDC and SIGGRAPH on real-time VFX and VFX pipelines.

What ties all of that together is the same thing that led me to start building tools: a focus on the craft underneath the effect — timing, readability, and getting a moment to actually land — and a low tolerance for workflows that get in the way of it. After years of losing time to Play-Mode iteration loops, I built SparkFXPreviewer to fix a problem I kept running into myself.

SparkFXLab is where that side of the work lives — VFX tools and pipelines for other artists and teams, built by someone still doing the work day to day.