Believer Entertainment Work
Performance, Documentation/Workflow Design
This is an example of a full multi-departmental workflow for how to create open worlds and leverage various features of World Partition in UE5.
This is an example of a “strawman” placeholder performance budget to fill accurate numbers into at later project phases.
This shows the documentation and training for our V1 Master Material library , the architecture of the system and how to use the standard templates.
R&D on World Partition to guide the entire project on whether to stick with sub-levels or adopt World Partition.
Shader Work (Look Development)
Landscape Master Material
All video content © Copyright The Believer Company
Feature Set
- 4 paintable layers using UE's Landscape Paint tool (per landscape component).
- Each layer contained:
- Standard PBR texture set
- Additional height-blended texture set for hard-blends and combining multiple texture sets ala dirt + pebbles to create unique layers and breakup tiling patterns
- Macro tri-color breakup RGB mask
- Value-packed mask to hard-height blend with other layers (different aspects of the texture masked at 20%, 50% and 100% grayscale values to hard mask but maintain full visual opacity via weight painting and use target value).
- Support for ANY of our material layer and layer blends on top such as a Landscape Macro layer to blend in a macro baked albedo and normal from external software like Gaea, World Machine, etc.
- Supports going with a splat map approach instead of paint layers if desired by artists.
Fake per-material cel shader and built-in rim light
All video content © Copyright The Believer Company
Feature Set
- Fake cel-shader built in per-material. It split the mesh in half based on the light/sun direction and then makes modifications to the profile via a texture, curve gradient or scalars to have full artist control.
- Allow as much or as little of unreal shadowing vs. custom cel as you want, this allowed us to go full PBR or stylized or hybrid per-material.
- Fake rim light always would be opposite of the light source, configurable globally to change color based on player location.
- Could be static (sampling the sun light vector) or dynamic to equate certain tagged lights to become the light source for fake cel and rim lights.
Grass & Tree Shader
All video content © Copyright The Believer Company
Feature Set
- Base PBR template for standard texture set and asset type specific background layer features.
- For foliage, this template featured mask adjustments, subsurface scattering or a fake light vector-based SSS (for style).
- Multiple layers are demonstrated to show how different features can be combined to create a shader with full artist control: adding a top-bottom gradient in both world space, local instance space and other stylized coloration features.
- RVT reading from the landscape with perfect world normal blending for seamless transitions of foliage into ground.
Pre-viz Hair Shader
All video content © Copyright The Believer Company
Feature Set
- Flow map based tangent manipulation for accurate anisotropy for hair specular.
- Root-to-end gradient featuring simple color selections or a custom curve atlas (gradient texture).
- Easily configurable and re-usable on any character with or without custom textures.
Technical Design & Procedural Tools (Pre-production)
Base Biome PCG (Data-Driven)
All video content © Copyright The Believer Company
Feature Set
- Designed to let design or world builders pre-populate open world spaces based on a simple ruleset: spawn weight, slope, height and overall density filtering.
- Data asset per biome, includes an entry for infinite amount of mesh varieties with the rules mentioned above.
- Configured to easily prune and have full control over instances through subtractive tagged splines or other PCG tools.
- Data assets and base biome PCG graph can be used in contained spline areas for re-use as a "sub-biome" pre-population within the same world.
Player "Breadcrumbs" Pathfinder (PCG)
All video content © Copyright The Believer Company
Feature Set
- Designer tool to "eye drop" any two actors and have an ideal "player-friendly" path generated to spawn in-game navigation "hints".
- Ties in with scan system to reveal the next hint by scanning it (see Scan system below).
Mini-Banter System
All video content © Copyright The Believer Company
Feature Set
- Actor component that could be added to ANY blueprint to trigger a data-driven line of dialogue with subtitle and optional matching audio from a random possible line list.
- Triggers were self-intializing so designers never had to touch a BP graph to configure, just pick the trigger mechanism: On Scan, on Interact, on Overlap, on Death, etc.
- Additional options to pick a specific speaker, specific listener, be relative to the local player or broadcast to the entire party.
- Made in about 2-3 hours.
Ship Drop System
All video content © Copyright The Believer Company
Feature Set
- Made in GAS (Gameplay Ability System)
- Animation-driven way to deploy players from point A to B regardless of distance.
- Makes use of a custom cinematic camera bone to do in-game camera cuts during gameplay to pre-canned ability. (Credit to our rigging department).
Scan Mechanic
All video content © Copyright The Believer Company
Feature Set
- Made in GAS (Gameplay Ability System)
- Re-usable component that can make any actor "scannable"
- Scan support allows designers to setup multiple player-facing paradigms: scan to unlock, scan for hints/guidance
- Full visual treatment using custom stencil/custom depth as navigation hints, color coding while in "scan" view.
- Auto-detection and management of meshes in the same Actor to auto control the stencil system for scan hint display and other custom stencil shaders used outside of scan.
Tripwire Interactive Work
Maneater Shader Work
Maneater’s Ocean Shader Features:
- Overall Notes
- Ocean shader had to work/be configurable for both above/below water.
- Had to perform/scale for three different platform groups: Nintendo Switch/Low-end PC | Xbox One/PS4 | PS5/High-end PC.
- Had to support both translucency with a seamless fade to opaque at distance for performance.
- Coloration Features
- Blood at surface when enemies are eaten.
- Fresnel, depth, height and world mask (cheaper alt to distance field) color variations. Dynamically customizable by region. (Ex. can easily go from beautiful beach water to nasty polluted water to deep ocean color patterns with just a few settings).
- Edge and height mask-based water foam.
- SSR-based water reflections.
- Tri-planar caustics built into the landscape shader.
- Wet sand built into landscape shader.
- Wave Features
- Noise map-based general wave crest for deep ocean behavior.
- World map-masked gerstner wave blend near beaches/coastlines.
- Displacement of ocean geo based on shark fin movement/splashes using render targets.
- Configurable refraction to re-use for “ocean roof”.
- Dynamically customizable wave intensity per region.
- Other
- Underwater foliage had interactive movement/near camera fade scalable by platform.
Hanako: Honor & Blade Shader Work (Indie Work)
Master Material used for the following use cases:
-Trim Sheets
- Architecture Modular Sets
- Props
- Dynamically Highlighted Objectives/Gameplay Meshes
Supports:
- Basic PBR Setup w/ Expanded Options
- Grunge Layer
- Vertex Color Painted Grunge And/Or Tessellated Displacement
- Scalar or Texture-Based Metallic & Roughness
- Separate Tiling for Grunge Layer vs. Base Map Set
Current Tech Art Docs
ILM Doc Samples
Assessment of DLSS for its impact on visuals, silhouettes and performance for a late project pivot.
101 level training for all ILM employees new to Unreal and real-time performance to introduce them to the basics.
Long research spike on Nanite after UE5 was released to inform all of ILM’s real-time endeavors in Unreal to inform stakeholders of adoption and workflow impacts.
Older Tech Art Docs
R&D Docs
Guidelines/Training Docs
Performance Reports
Goal was to compare two builds and design various scenarios to reveal why/where/how Combat performance had degraded.
Raw data/spreadsheets from the above report.
Performance Report example showing various UE3/4 Scripting and Stat profiling to call out areas of improvement in character performance.
Report comparing two maps, various statistics and suggestions.
Guidelines/Standards Documents
Guidelines document to teach artists what types of meshes to combine or not combine to improve draw call performance.
Guidelines document to teach artists how to create “Low Off” sub-levels (Meshes not shown on Min settings) and guidelines for what types of assets to put in there.
Documentation/Artist Training
Pipeline documentation of how to properly use MassiveLOD + SimplyGon to create background assets.
Tutorial to show artists how to profile their own occlusion/bounding boxes using console commands and viewports in the Editor.
Document/Tutorial to cover SpeedTree5 Asset creation.
Scripting/Tools/Automation
Performance Test Automation
Step 1: Allows Shortcut creation so testers can easily create VMMaps. This finds the game process, attaches and saves a .csv with memory data.
Step 2: I configured a network of all performance test machines (10-12 PCs) that can send data to my PC or google drive. This script copies data from all machines to a central location on G-Drive.
Step 3: Google Script that is XML configurable to have a list of machine names, map memory capture names, game and date. This allows for easy monthly reports, just update the XML and run.
Step 4: Final Data is entered by the above script. The remainder of the charts already exist from an initial template and are auto-updated when Data changes.
Simple Tools
Step 1: Allows Shortcut creation so testers can easily create VMMaps. This finds the game process, attaches and saves a .csv with memory data.