Wayfinder: Weather | Materials & Systems

I had the pleasure of developing our weather system along with Nathan Watson (lead technical artist) almost from the start of the project. Initially, weather was seen as a possible mutator (which developed into the current imbuement system), which meant that any weather type that we wanted in the game had to be fully dynamic so as to support enabling or disabling it on a per-expedition basis, rather than having assets dedicated to their use in just one level or another. The biggest challenge here was how to set up weather functionality that didn't overly strain our performance budget (since it would be included in all materials) while still looking good. For the functionality, Nathan and I worked together with me prototyping material and blueprint systems, and Nathan converting that functionality into code as we moved past initial prototypes, while for visuals I worked with Romain Durand to develop the look, with Romain setting up static material and mesh tests that I would then use as a target for the dynamic functions, doing my best to find efficient ways to replicate his visual fidelity on a smaller budget. We leaned heavily on virtual textures to help with the snowy levels in particular, as it meant that the majority of expensive material functions could be bundled into the landscape material alone, with the rest of the static meshes and foliage referencing from the landscape virtual texture to steal its material attributes.
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The Reaver Woods as they made it into the released game do not shift dynamically from snowed to unsnowed, as we originally envisioned, however because of the many same assets that are used throughout our different zones, it was still necessary to keep the dynamic weather behavior so that it could be enabled or disabled on a per-level basis, rather than needing to duplicate off new versions of assets with or without certain weather functionality based on what zone they are placed in.
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Additional props, worldbuilding, lighting, and vfx shown were created through a combination of all of our fantastic artists, including Jesse Carpenter, John Stamos, Vincent Gros, Ranko Prozo, Romain Durand, Jasmin Hebezai-Fekri, and Tristan Faure. Concepts were primarily done by Baldi Konijin, Virginia Critchfield, Philip Karlov, Ludo Lullabi. Additional art assets were created by Dragonfly Studio, GFactory, and Vsquad.

https://www.artstation.com/romaindurand
https://www.artstation.com/jessecarpenter
https://www.artstation.com/jstamos
https://www.artstation.com/vincentgros
https://www.artstation.com/rankoprozo
https://www.artstation.com/curlscurly
https://www.artstation.com/fauretristan
https://www.artstation.com/baldi-konijn
https://www.artstation.com/ludolullabi
https://www.artstation.com/vsquadstudio