This will show work that I’ve done which isn’t exactly artwork. Technical things like shaders, asset optimizations, and various experiments will be shown here.

Deep Water Shader Experiments

Here are a few shader materials that I created in Unreal 3 to simulate deep water. These are all just flat planes. Here’s the shader tree for one of them.

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Optimized Smoke Example

In Damnation we had a performance problem with lingering smoke that could fill the whole screen. In Unreal 3, particle overdraw is very expensive, so with some of our effects it was possible to fill the screen such that most pixels were well over 2000 instructions each. To fix this problem, I rebuilt a large lingering smoke effect to use only 3 sprites at any given time. All of the complex roiling is done within the shader, and there are other instructions to make it fade to gray as the camera goes inside, so you don’t see the camera-facing sprites turning around you. At it’s most expensive, with all 3 sprites overlapping, it is 138 instructions. Most times it is far less. This effect was used as the basis for reworking all of our other expensive lingering smoke. If anyone is interested in seeing the shader, knock yourself out.

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Velvet Coat Shader

This character was modeled and textured by the excellent Liquid Development, but I did a velvet shader in Unreal 3 for the coat. The velvet sheen on this was created with the same basic principles laid out in my Anisotropic Hair Tutorial, but used some slightly different math, and a speckled directional map.

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Geometry Optimization

During the production of Damnation, there came a time when unexpected technical limitations forced us to reduce the polygon count of most world assets drastically. We had built most of the world by then, and were suddenly faced with trying to maintain visual quality with about one third of the original poly count. Here is an example of one of my asset optimizations. This was one of many platforms in the tribal set, of which there were a few whole, and very many broken versions, all sharing the same textures. In the original there was a great deal of broken geometry modeled along the edge. Most of that had to go away, replaced by a tiled segment of texture showing the broken edge without geometry. I placed that additional texture in the one place I could, the center of the thatched bottom, and replaced that center on the model with tiled versions of other thatched parts. Much of Damnation had to be revised in such ways.

Here is an example of a level where platforms like this were used.