These models were produced for Wonderstorm’s the Dragon Prince: Xadia over the course of 2021-2022, and were designed to mimic the look of the characters from the Netflix show. All screenshots were taken directly from Unreal 4. All designs are by the talented concept artists at Wonderstorm.
In addition to making character models, textures, and shaders for the game, I was also responsible for overseeing outsourced art content, creation and administration of various documentation and guide pages on Confluence, and developing workflows for creating show-accurate models as well as original characters that appear first in the game.
For the above character, I was tasked with creating not only the model and textures, but also shaders for the body dissolve effect and the vertex displacement effect for the cape.
To achieve an internal refraction effect for this upgradeable sword, I created a double-sided shader which used various culling and cube mapping effects to simulate the effects of seeing light refracting and reflecting under the surface. The specular highlight is the only part of the front-facing geometry visible on the areas where the refraction effect is applied.
In order to create a shader that implied internal blobs and movement for this spirit enemy, multiple blob and noise textures were overlapped and gradient mapped while scrolling in object-stable screen space. This allows the viewer to look at the creature from any direction and see the blobs, and a simple mask texture allows for changing visibility on thick or thin parts of the model.
For this material, the goal was to make a shader that gave a ghostly effect to this boss weapon for special attacks and animations. The shader uses dithered transparency, rather than using an additive blend mode, to mitigate any depth sorting issues. To keep textures and colors stable in screen space, I used object-stable screen-space UVs as the base projection for various noise and cloud textures, then added effects like a radial gradient originating at the center of the model to make the ends fade off more smoothly.