Roles: Shader Developer
Production Team Size: 12
A simple 4 layer parallax I designed for the team on HeroStar.
The goal was tio have an adaptable, simple, and computationally cheap shader that could be deployed on damaged roads as easily as the face of an apartment building, or even to enhance or exaggeratea skybox.
The solution was this 4 layer shader. Using anything form a full PBR texture set to a single emissive map, this shader would split it into 4 layers using a black and white height map.
The depth and ‘refraction’ where left exposed for the designers to play with as they adapted it to the surfaces they where making.
As a parallax shader it does come with the usual caveats: Layering without occlusion can cause visual artifacts as similar details stack up in proximity; shadows on a simple shader like this one wont be as rich and believable.
HerosStar was very high speed arcade style game, the trade of and benefits in this shader where specifically considered based on how we expected players to view with the environment, and where playtesting showed them spending their attention. A Parallax Oclussion Mapping (POM) shader was considered, but we decided the complex calculations weren’t worth to rendering cost for our implementation.
