Rigs shaders - Rio
Rio was the first level of Rigs (2016) that we started prototyping for. As such a lot of the early shader R+D was done for this map. We generally found that shaders weren't our biggest performance bottleneck and that we should be aiming to trade more expensive shader for less expensive geometry where possible. There were limits to this of course though!
We did a lot of experimentation into how we might fill out jungles in the distance. The most efficient way I found was with a heavily normal and relief mapped jungle canopy shader. This looked pretty effective as long as it was viewed from above.
An example of all the jungle canopies in the surround. We found this shader looked even better if you could afford a few polygons to undulate the surface.
One very early task was to look into what the crowd were positioned in and find an efficient way of building rooms. This is a complicated crowdbox shader with a lot of features but all of the rooms could be collapsed down to one draw call.
An example of some crowd boxes in game. Crowd and glass are hidden for this screenshot. These are vertex coloured and UVd to different areas for variety. The TV screens have an animated flipbook texture of a replay.
Originally we had a lot of metal cladding built up of building block geometry but it was costing us a lot of polygons. This is a relief mapped shader I created to replace thousands of polygons of geometry with something very lightweight.
These are some vertex and UV scrolling banner we put around the Rio stadium. We didn't have a great way of handling physics interaction on these so we had to push them outside the gameplay space.
This is another relief mapped shader that was designed to replace some expensive geometry. The ramp edges were particularly bad as they tended to curve along multiple axis causing polygon counts to skyrocket.
This is a highly gripped floor for the rio tunnels. This was a shader that required a lot of iteration to work out how much detail you could have on VR without causing moire or strobing issues.
This was an artificially reflective solar panel shader that was designed to go on the Rio stadium canopy. This is one of many shaders were I got good use out of the old trick of subtly bending the normals of every panel.
Lots of specific shaders were made for the city surround. Fun examples are UV scrolling cars on roads, blinking lights and animated billboards. Getting the city more or less material balanced took a lot of iteration.