Immortal Realms - Shaders & Tech
Here are some of the shader and technical solutions that I made for Immortal Realms.
Outside my main responsibilities of leading and art directing the environment production one of my larger responsibilities were most of the shader creation, oversight of the optimization and creation of several in-engine tools to help with development of the game.
We use several kinds of shader wizardry to achieve what we have in the game some of which are not showcased here.
Buildings rely on globally shared textures, characters use an inverted fresnel to increase unit visibility and almost all 3D assets rely on a custom channel composition in order to minimize the amount of textures used.
The waving motion of any vegetation is a global noise used for vertex offset.
Here you can see a visualization of the vertex offset.
Vegetation motion in a fully dressed scene.
Another shader effect I worked on is the portal effect used on the portal building. A bunch of quite simple UV panning and movement to give the portal some life.
The world also has a global snow value that can be adjusted for each material. This snow is placed using the world normal Y in combination with some influences of the objects own normal maps.
The water shader used in the game. It uses some simple wave panning in vertex offset while blending between two colors for the water depth blending along with some distortion from the wave normal map.