Ice Assets
This gallery focuses on showing part of the ice assets library I created for the game.
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The process of creating the ice formations consisted in starting from a scanned ice formation, create a highpoly and a lowpoly from it, then bake it down, for both the normal map as well as some of the albedo information.
Once this was done, when it came to the texturing, the asset would receive some additional content authored in Painter and then it would be finalized inside the engine.
There were are also some situations which required just the geometry and then the texturing would be done fully through a tileable material. In those cases, I still used meshes based on the scans that we captured.
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The icicles were generated in Houdini via an HDA.
Once the geometry was done, the texturing was done through a tri-planarly projected tileable material.
To refine the look, the refractive amount, opacity, etc, I used the shader provided, inside our engine.
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I was responsible for all aspects of creating these assets, beginning at the R&D stage, designing the pipeline for how to integrate them in our engine then helping along as other members of the team helped bring this together.
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Big thanks to George McLay who was my partner in travelling up north, beyond the polar circle to capture some of the formations you see here via photogrammetry.
Together with George, we managed to build quite an extensive library of scans to choose from for the final assets, and working with him on this was as usual a complete blast and a tremendous pleasure! <3 <3 <3
https://www.artstation.com/georgemclay
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Jorge Luna was the main programmer responsible for putting together the shader for these assets and it was a pleasure to go back and forth with Jorge trying to find the best balance between the desired look and in the same time to keep the required features/resources of the shader as low as possible.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorgeadrianoluna/?originalSubdomain=br
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Magnus Larsson helped on the icicle creation process by building an HDA that allowed me to create icicle compositions based on custom made geometry.
The tool Magnus built was key in achieving the natural compositions of icicles we were able to get in the game.
Big thanks for the help as well as for being an awesome wizard I always enjoy working with!
https://www.artstation.com/magnusl3d
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Related links:
Some areas where you can see these assets within the game levels:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GvnPd4
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/P60yG1
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/bgRJga
Example inside one of the levels of some of the icicle assets I have used.
Example inside one of the levels of some of the icicle assets I have used.
Example inside one of the levels of some of the icicle assets I have used.
Ice formation close up using a tileable material
Example inside one of the levels of some of the icicles as well as the ice formations assets I have used.
Short clip showing the ice assets isolated vs how they would look when integrated in their surrounding.
Short clip showing the ice assets isolated vs how they would look when integrated in their surrounding.
Short clip showing the ice assets isolated vs how they would look when integrated in their surrounding.
Previous composition inside the level (engine room area)