Imporium (UE5, VFX, Shaders, Graphic)

Unreal Engine, Blender, Blueprint

The team I previously worked with was spun out of Improbable and established as an independent company named Imporium. The projects were Yuga Labs Otherside and internal Music project.

SUMMARY

  • Initiated creation of shared Material Functions library within the team.
  • Stepped up to be the go to VFX person in the team. Delivered, optimized and solved various technical issue with Niagara.
  • Various audio reactive shaders, visualisation and vfx R&D.
  • Cheap VAT crowd solution to enable thousands of instances in a scene, while maintaining fidelity.
  • Profiling using Unreal Insights and NVIDIA Nsight.
  • Scalability settings to optimize visual parity between different graphic settings.
  • Early gameplay prototyping.

Material Functions Library

I started an initiative for Imporium’s own shared material function library, the goal is to speed up more complex material creation as well as empowering non artist to quickly prototype visually. The library contain various vertex animation, all different kind of movement, different animation easing. Also created gym for this to showcase each of the material function.

VFX

Imporium/Improbable was a super fast-paced environment. We had a ton of VFX needs but no dedicated artist, so I stepped up to fill the gap and became the go to person for everything VFX. My role encompassed the full spectrum of the pipeline, from high-volume asset creation to deep technical problem-solving and performance profiling. I managed all VFX-related issues to ensure stability during rapid development.

Here are a couple of highlights from this:

  • Dynamic niagara dice result vfx.
    • The tech designer set a BP that output an int, I then use this int to write to a Render Target, that then passed on to a Niagara System. This is then read and then collection of particles spawned in the bright pixel. Then added some animation to make it more interesting. I also created and implemented the VFX for when the dice picked up, the position of the beam dynamically adjusted to the player position.
  • FTUE VFX work. This is one of my focus at Otherside project, I worked in creation of VFX and its implementation in FTUE part of the experience. There will need further breakdown as this work is quite big, some of the example
    • Volumetric like smoke vfx, this need to be beautiful and cheap as it’s being used all over the environment, while still in line with the art direction of the experience.
    • BP for ambient VFX that follow spline, debris, leaves etc.
    • Setup and hooking up for QTE response VFX.
    • Hands on creation of various stylised beam, explosion, glitch vfx
    • Shader creation
    • More…
  • VFX work for challenges. I’ve created and implemented various Niagara system and solution for challenge part of the experience. Here are some of the example of it

These are just a few examples of the challenges I tackled. I would be happy to discuss the full scope of my technical contribution in more detail

Audio reactive R&D

VAT Crowd

Created this as a solution to full on skeletal mesh previously implemented. Also experimented with PCG based scattering, with custom data embedded to ISM for variety and additional randomisation.

Early gameplay/tooling prototyping

Spline + PCG scattering.

The laser functionality is created by a designer, I was working on the visual aspect of this and some functionality like spawning hit effect at the right position in the dynamic spline.