EffectMaker: Leveraging Reasoning and Generation for Customized Visual Effect Creation

Visual effects (VFX) are essential for enhancing the expressiveness and creativity of video content, yet producing high-quality effects typically requires expert knowledge and costly production pipelines. Existing AIGC systems face significant challenges in VFX generation due to the scarcity of effect-specific data and the inherent difficulty of modeling supernatural or stylized effects. Moreover, these approaches often require per-effect fine-tuning, which severely limits their scalability and generalization to novel VFX. In this work, we present EffectMaker, a unified reasoning–generation framework that enables reference-based VFX customization. EffectMaker employs a multimodal large language model to interpret high-level effect semantics and reason about their adaptation to a target subject, while a diffusion transformer leverages in-context learning to capture fine-grained visual cues from reference videos. These two components form a semantic–visual dual-path guidance mechanism that enables accurate, controllable, and effect-consistent synthesis without per-effect fine-tuning. Furthermore, we construct EffectData, the largest and high-quality synthetic dataset containing 120K videos across 3K VFX categories, to enhance generalization and scalability. Experiments show that EffectMaker achieves superior visual quality and effect consistency over state-of-the-art baselines, offering a scalable and flexible paradigm for customized VFX generation.