Roles: Modeller, Developer, Level Designer, Texture Artist, Shader Artist
Team Size: 10-20
I was brought in to pickup a level from a team member who was moving off of the project. They elft a few notes and the start of a canoe/kayak and river system.
Working with our programmer I built out the level, bringing in a full river, full terrain, and custom universal shedders to optimize the visuals while increasing visual fidelity.
As a level design I created areas of intensity and rest.
- Some areas are slow, but require player problem-solving and steering.
- Some areas are fast, and the palyer can sit back and enjoy the exactment like a very controlled and minor roller-coaster (no one wants a sick player).
- In between these section are relaxing straights. I tried to give these areas a gorgeous view of mountains, a sunset, or the wide open ocean.
I designed and implemented traps like waterfalls that can sink your boat.
I also designed our level section based optimization system on for this level before brining it into the others.
To get the most out of our vissuals I made 3 ‘universal’ shaders:
- Auto terrain shader: A shader you can use on every surface. It uses world space projections and two textures to add realistic detail and definition to your environment without needing multiple materials or UV data. I implemented a sudo Hight-blend using albedo and normal data to keep the detail driven transitions for much less computation overhead and one two less textures.
- Water flow shader: A UV driven flowing water shader, Very easy for me or any other team member to author meshes for. This shader takes a mesh that has been projected using ‘Follow Active Quads’ in blender and will drive layers of water texture over the surface to create a convincing river with variable speeds.. It included a simplified refraction model, seeing the bottom of a rover is not only visually pleasing, it also lets you guide your canoe out of the shallows.
- Simplified lit shader: Based on the Unity lit shaders, this shader does the same thing, but with less textures and less adjustment inputs. I borrowed the HDRP channel packing scheme to eliminate an entire texture form the standard PBR set. This material cna be applied on any textured asset using a Substance Painter Profile I created for the project.
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