Wayfinder: Environments | Tech Art

I get to spend a lot of time tinkering with various environment requests, usually to make things wiggle, or not crash. These are a few of the more distinct material types that I got to work on:
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Hanging materials - a variety of sinusoidal and noise based movement combinations, used as part of the foliage movements as well as static mesh assets with wave-based movements such as banners, wind chimes, fish, vines, floating rocks, etc. Like the foliage movements, this interacts with a global wind actor in each level to control direction and intensity. These assets have the option of using 1-3 sine wave movements that can be controlled by vertex color, as well as having the option to add in an additional noise texture-based movement. This lets us try to fake physics behaviors where different parts of the asset have different swing velocities/arcs based on size and positioning.
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Vertex color masked blending between a sculpted and flat mesh - more typically this would have been done starting with the flat mesh and using displacement to shift between that and the sculpted asset, however this came about backwards because we already had the sculpted wall pieces made when we realized that we wanted a better way to blend between fully sculpted and smooth, without needing to resort to using many separate "plaster" meshes to push into the wall. So starting from the base mesh's geo, I overwrite the mesh's normals to push them all back, or forward, based on a designated flatten-to point, and then flatten them aligned toward the mesh's forward vector (this keeps them working when the mesh is rotated).
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Fake lit materials - these are used often for translucent items, such as bottles, window glass, character glass, water (under certain lighting conditions). This is a good way to fake in "accurate" specular lighting for translucency, and uses baked in cubemaps instead of realtime reflection capture updates.
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Color-tinting post process gradient fog, inspired by Firewatch's gorgeous stylized fog. We ended up toning this down a lot to make it more subtle, but in early iterations I played around with letting it have a heavier hand with the color tinting.
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Texture packing tool - I started working on this within the first week of moving from DSG to Wayfinder, as during the process of optimizing for the Switch we were constantly plagued by drawcall and memory limitations. Packing textures together is not a new technique - World of Warcraft very famously does so - however I wanted the functionality to do so in-engine without needing to set up an external tool in Photoshop, as that lets the artists iterate with individual textures, and then pack them all together at the end once we know how assets are going to be used together. This technique is not used throughout the game, as too many assets are used in multiple places and in different combinations to be able to consistently get the cost savings of using large packed textures, however it was highly useful in Lower Skylight where we needed to merge some of the buildings for performance. Rather than saddle these with tens of material IDs, I packed them down and was able to use 2-3 instead for entire tops of towers.
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Additional props, worldbuilding, and lighting 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. Everything was a team effort!

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