Here is a collection of work that is a little different from my normal portfolio. It is mainly experiments or technical work that felt out of place in the other areas of my site.
VFX | Shader
The wireframe shader could be toggled to either cycle through colors or display a solid color. It was available in both forms and used in the tutorial level. Eventually, every character was intended to have this wireframe shader as an option..
The shield effect shader allowed for customizable colors and included a switch to ping-pong the effect, giving it a scanning appearance. Controls were exposed to adjust the falloff for various elements and to swap out the tiling pattern. This shader was applied to both small assets, like helmets, and larger ones—such as the shield that blocked players from progressing further in the level.
Layered Material System
While working on a project, we were handling outfits the traditional way, splitting them into top and bottom 4K texture sets. It quickly became a headache to manage, especially with all the variants we needed. The fidelity didn’t hold up either, details looked mushy.
I implemented a layered material system similar to what Paragon used. It gave us the visual quality we were after, reduced our base texture usage to a single 2K map for the entire outfit, and let us swap materials on the fly in-engine. That gave us way more variation with far less overhead.
Different Areas of the Material Ball showed different types of wear
Different materials reacted differently to different wear/dirt. Some materials were chipped others were dirty
We fully adopted the system and built out a base material library—things like leather, metal, and cloth—ready to be reused across outfits. I also created documentation to help onboard new artists and make it easy to share the workflow with outsourcing partners.