As a Senior Technical Artist on Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, I had the opportunity to work with a variety of disciplines within the team, and develop a number of features, systems, and workflows, as well as maintain rendering performance. Some key elements I played a role in were:
- VFX Shaders: Developed ‘pyro’ (smoke and fire) workflow in collaboration with the VFX team.
- Volumetric Fog: Drove implementation of a froxel based volumetric fog in cooperation with the graphics team. Followed up with training and support of the feature with the art teams.
- Water: Developed a comprehensive water rendering solution that leveraged existing engine technology in addition to new rendering techniques.
- Physically Based Lights: Drove conversion of our engine branch to physical light units (lumens, lux, nits, etc.) and energy-conserving attenuation. Followed up with training and support for the lighting team with the new systems and workflows.
- High and Low Level Rendering Optimization: Aided in optimization work throughout the project to meet performance targets. High level optimization included identifying problematic assets as well as reducing surface shader permutations and complexity. Low level optimizations consisted mainly of profiling common shaders for potential opportunities for increased performance. Some notable wins came from things such as transitioning from world-space to view-space lighting, simplification of the light loop by removing unused or seldom used features, and packing constant buffers.
