Technical Artist
designmatic GmbH
September 2024 - September 2025
Started as a Technical Artist intern working on the game's uber shader in HLSL, fullscreen effects and visual effects in Unity.
Ayna: Shattered Truth
Developed certain key features for the uber shader in HLSL
Developed various full screen effects in HLSL and C#
Developed various minor visual effects in VFX Graph
Custom Toon Shading System
Created custom noisy toon shading effects for all punctual light types and screen space shadows.
Toon Shaded Lights + Shadows Feature
- For the sake of simplicity and optimization, all functions are written in HLSL
- The toon steps are calculated by flooring the dot product of the light's direction and the objects world space normals by a parameter.
- Noise effect is sampled from a noise texture and added onto the toon effect.
Implemented stylized SSAO for the environment
Stylized Ambient Occlusion Feature
- The Screen-Spaced Ambient Occlusion is stepped to emulate ink-like shading on the crevices of environmental objects.
- Characters have an additional shading step before the darkest areas of the AO to allow more details on the character to remain visible.
Implemented custom specular highlight and metallic effect as well as toon shading for the SSAO.
Custom Metallic Feature
- The specular and metallic feature had to be written from scratch in HLSL to allow for its customization.
- Specular is calculated following the light's direction and stepped at different ranges to create the toon shading effect.
- The metallic feature takes the light's direction, the surface normals, along with the object's roughness map to simulate metal-ness.
Implemented vertex animation function for vegetation, rope and cloth.
Vertex Animation Feature
- Vertex animation was implemented as a cheaper alternative to using physic bodies on multiple objects.
- Each object types have its own calculation to best portray their movements.
- Rope and Cloth requires the object to have a vertex color map to be used as a mask.
Fullscreen Effect
Hut Fade In Effect
- Developed a fullscreen effect that masks out the building and fades the rest of the background into black
- Ported the wall dissolve effect from a node-based editor into HLSL for optimization and ease of porting between engine versions
Visual Effect
Tombstone VFX
- Created the tombstone VFX in Unity's Visual Effects Graph based on the concepted design
- The whole effect can be broken down into 3 parts:
- Constants -- Glow + Coin meshes + Minor white circling swirls
- Stage 1 -- Fire swirl
- Stage 2 -- Water splashes and white upward swirl