Wayfinder: Characters | Materials

Part of my tasks on Wayfinder consist of updating and improving the character materials per the requests of the character artists. Over the course of the game's development, as the art style and gameplay developed, we added (and removed) many features including:
------
- Character dyes (I primarily worked with Nathan Watson, our lead technical artist, to prototype and implement this system, with myself handling the material side and blueprint prototyping while he implemented the code-side functionality) to gradient map the character material slots based on packed IDs.
- Custom shading model (initially set up by myself, with additional support from Ben Rog-Wilhelm our graphics programmer), supporting a cheaper subsurface scattering model as well as adjustment to the lighting style of the character models. Ultimately we only ended up using the SSS and shadow parts of the shading model, as we shifted away from the more cel-shaded to half lambert lighting approaches that we initially tested, and decided to keep the character lighting model more aligned with the rest of the environment.
- Vertex shader cloth movement (iterated on extensively with Nathan Watson and Derek Taylor, senior animator) as a replacement for NVCloth on character meshes that don't require accurate collision. This shares heavily from the same movement setup that I used for our foliage, as well as ambient movement in environmental assets.
- Character rim lighting (this was primarily a joint effort with Romain Durand, he did the initial look-dev while I set up a more customized fresnel function that would let us specify how far and in what direction the rim effect would stretch). This ended up being cut, however.
-------
Character 3D and 2D art assets created through collaboration with our character and concept artists, including Brian "BoBo" Jones, Jared Kime, Gia Han Lam, Hanna Kime, Joffrey Ferrandes, Rory McHon, Dragonfly Studio, Baldi Konijn, Virginia Critchfield, Vsquad, Dimitri Devos. Additional feedback as always from Jesse Carpenter and the rest of our fantastic artists.
https://www.artstation.com/BoBo
https://www.artstation.com/neer
https://www.artstation.com/hanromi
https://www.artstation.com/quickhanna
https://www.artstation.com/jferrandes
https://www.artstation.com/derektaylor
https://www.artstation.com/jessecarpenter
https://www.artstation.com/rory_mcmahon
https://www.artstation.com/baldi-konijn
https://www.artstation.com/vsquadstudio
https://www.artstation.com/dimidevos
https://www.artstation.com/romaindurand