My work on Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced spanned across many job families and topics.
They include but are not limited to:

• Shader visual improvements and bug fixing

• Performance optimisations across character rigging, materials, and VFX

• Dynamic weather support - VFX experimentation and performance testing

Shader Improvements

Hair Card Shader

My addition to the hair card shader introduced more visual contrast and match it better with the hair strands that were available on higher graphic settings.

The changes add a fake sun shadow and highlight depending on time of day, which helped give an effect of translucency and some light passing through the hair. It also allows for a much more vibrant visual during golden hours.

Screenshot source

Six-point Lighting VFX Shader

This shader was created to be used for large VFX explosions and plumes of smoke. In this shader, I added distortion, blur over lifetime, frame blending options, world lighting ambient color blending with the smoke's shadows and shadow alpha intensity control.

Performance and Optimisation

Character Rigging

I worked with the character team to optimise all the character assets in the game by removing all the unnecessary blend shapes in the game. This helped reduce the loaded memory cost as it would load less mesh assets, and also saved on the actual file size.

Others

I wrote a script to process through all character materials and disabled unused options that were increasing performance costs, like Alpha Test, where it might not be needed.

In addition, I did performance analysis for the cloth simulations for character rigging, and smoke and fire for VFX. After which, I approached the artists with the results and suggestions to improve and reduce the performance costs.

Dynamic Weather Support

Occasionally, I would support the weather team in experimenting and tweaking the dynamic weather effects. This included the blending between rainy and non rainy areas while sailing, and the lightning intensity.