The Dragon's Wake - Shadowbeast

The Shadowbeast is the creature boss introduced in Skull and Bones Season 3: The Dragon's Wake. For this creature, I contributed by creating new features for the shaders, as well as profiled the event to identify places for optimisation.

The main additions that I did for this shader was to fulfill 2 needs:

• Create and visualise weakpoints that could work seamlessly with gameplay code

• Improve the movement to make it look more ethereal

Whiskers and Hair

The dragon is at this point, the largest creature in Skull and Bones at the moment, which also means that its every movement is very obvious, well pronounced, and noticeable. There was a point in development where we used physics bones to drive the movement of wind in its hair and whiskers, which was extremely costly in terms of performance in the CPU. Using physics and wind to drive this movement would fail in certain cases, such as lowered wind speeds and winds going in the direct opposite direction.

Before and After using vertex displacement in shader

The solution that I came up with was to use animated vertex displacement, adding it in the shader. This led to improvements and benefits such as:

• Using the GPU for calculations instead of CPU.

• Allowed us to remove almost all the physics bones, reducing the amount of physics bones used by about 80%.
  (Removed about 40+ physics driven bones.)

• Enabled more creative control, allowing the artist to vertex paint the influence of the vertex displacement on the mesh itself.

Weakpoints

The weakpoints of the shadowbeast is a newly introduced mechanic for this encounter. The art direction for this hoped to have the indication of it be diegetic and immersive. During this process, I worked closely with the artist (Wang Dao Cheng), art director (Andie Sulisto), and gameplay programmer (Maxime Bégin).

I created a set of artistic inputs in the shader, which I then integrated seamlessly with the existing creature boss shader. Working with the gameplay programmer, we ensured that the material that used the shader was able to change states seamlessly according to the gameplay state of the shadowbeast. I also created documentation for the artists later on how they can use the shader to setup their data, should this shader be reused for other assets and future sea monsters later on.

Shadows of the Deep - SoulShield

For the soulshield, I worked with James Ow (VFX Artist) and Charis Boh (VFX Artist) to create the shader and define the visuals. The shader that supports multiple distortion textures, vertex displacement, depth fade, and emissive.