Unearned Bounty

Project Date: 2017
Created with: ZBrush, 3ds Max, Photoshop, & Unity
Responsibilities: Environment Art Lead, ships, environments, props, FX, & shaders

Environment Breakdowns: Terrain started out as simple rough sculpts in ZBrush to get interesting shapes and specific features.  These were then brought into 3ds Max and vertex painted to blend the terrain textures together.  Props were XRef’d into the terrain scene and placed using the Object Paint tool.  The end product was exported with the instancing intact and brought into Unity.

Prop Breakdowns: Props were simple low-poly meshes created using a texture sheet containing all of the necessary tileable textures.  Each of the textures started out as a sculpt in Zbrush, which allowed various output maps to be used to create a handpainted aesthetic.

Ship Breakdowns: There are six ships in the game total, and each ship consists of ten pieces (the base ship and three upgrade pieces each for the sails, hull, and cannons).  In order to keep the texel density and visual fidelity up, a single texture sheet was used that could also be tiled horizontally.  The shaders for the sails utilize world offset and movement speed to create wind movement, and both the shaders for the sails and the body of the ships utilize custom masking functions to depict various levels of damage.

Shader Breakdowns: I built shaders for everything seen on screen, most notably the water, ship and layered terrain shaders.  These were first built using Shader Forge, a third-party Unity plugin that allows for node-based shader development.  Shader Forge is primarily aimed at pushing visual quality, not for optimization, so afterward, the shaders were rewritten using Shaderlab.