A presentation covering most of the work I did for Folded Fox during prototyping of a game under the project name of "Gang Tactics", a turn based skirmish game set in a dystopian mining colony on another planet.
In addition I also did some profiling on the Steam Deck, some simple python tools in Blender, assisted with some 3D modeling of environment assets, character accessories and documented workflows and best practices.
All content below was composed by me for the purpose of this showcase and may not be representative of the game.
Most assets are credit to the dedicated artist. I made the rock blocks. Some assets have been altered or created by me for this showcase. I also made all the materials, including the background grid.
I was tasked to develop an asset texturing pipeline that would not require any manual UV-mapping.
The end result became a set of base materials applying various effects such as dirt accumulation in crevices, edge highlighting and textured wear on exposed areas.
The effects are controlled by the properties "cavity" and "convexity" which are baked into the vertex color attribute of the asset mesh.
Since every asset were utilizing Nanite, enough vertex resolution could be provided for satisfying results.
Cavity is also combined with ambient occlusion computed from the global distance field, so that dirt can accumulate between objects.
Textured effects are achieved by modulating various pattern textures with the property values.
The textures are mapped in world space on each basis plane and blended together according to vertex normal ("tri-planar mapping").
The final textured pixel normal is generated through a bump-mapping scheme.
The property generation is performed in Blender via geometry nodes. The main workflow only involves the artist adding a certain modifier to the model and, once imported into Unreal, assigning an instance of the appropriate material.
A key part of the art direction was to have the look and feel of dioramas and tabletop miniature games, particularly in regards to effects, such as fire and smoke.
Another major feature of the game was time freezing right before attacks where resolved, which meant that effects also had to look good when "paused".
My task was to find a style and implementation that would satisfy the above criteria. During development I also implemented some custom Niagara modules.
All effects shown are made by me, including decals, red barrel and grenade. The rest is credit to the artist.
I experimented a lot with procedural generation of rock assets, using geometry nodes to generate displacement on simple base geometry, by a complex combination of various noise functions.
The end result was compelling but the generation ran too slow and so I recommended a more hybrid approach for the future. Still, it taught me the potential of noise functions.
