Shaders / Tech Art - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2

Since we were a small team, we need quick ways to build the city, I created many shaders that got us a lot bang for buck when it came to achieving the Art direction. I had the responsibility to do a lot of the art side of the tech-related things, like shaders and building the city. The art director, Ben Matthews, also generated a lot of the tools and tech for the project. I want to thank Kieran Goodson for doing a lot of the art and planning for storefronts in the city.

A really fun one, got to make this material / Mural for the park in Chinatown based on a mural in Hing Hay Park, Seattle. This was a hero asset for the district, so a one-off.

Master shader for Shopfront Glass. We could create multiple effects with this single shader I created. It uses a cubemap.

The window shaders could be directly adjusted in the Blueprint, which was very useful for lighting and Env Art as they worked in the city.

I created a Shopfront Packed Level Blueprint with some logic. This reduced the amount of Material instances and quickly swapped colours and window emissives/cubemap throughout the city. It also had the option to use mesh for interiors.

Shofront window Variations.

ShopFront Base Blueprint with no dressing

Shofront window Variations.

Here is simple breakdown of the Condensation shader. The shader has a few more things going on, but here are the basics.

I reduced texture memory size by backing multiple Interior Lighting setups into a single RBG texture, rather than using multiple TExtures in the shader. This allowed us to use one Material Instance for the windows.

Shofront window Variations.

I created a window shader for buildings. This uses a single cubemap with multiple lighting channels for variation. Each building used a single Material instance.

Building window shader

There is a flicker in one of the cube map channels that has a random chance to be one. This emulates a TV screen.

The shader could swap between multiple blind and curtain textures. Each is able to open and close vertically and horizontally.

I created a separate shader for abandoned buildings and alleyways that used a bump to fake chipboard in inside the window. The shader randomly transformed the UVs to randomise the smashed glass.

I also used Designer to create some footprint masks that artists could use RVT brushes to scatter around the city.

We could split the Material instance into districts and uses such as: Alleys, hotel, Uptown generic, Downtown Generic etc. This improved eprfromcane whilst still being highly art directable on a global and local scale.

The shops also had the otpion to be beoarded up or derelict.

I made some tarp assets for scaffolding thought out the city using Marvellous Designer and Unreal engine shaders. Some had WPO and some used animated normals when we needed the performacne.