Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge – Part I & II 2019-2021 (Oculus Quest I, II)
Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge expands the world of Batuu well beyond the Disney theme parks. Unlike Vader Immortal, this would be a vastly expansive and would require new approaches to further enrich the mobile VR experience. Our techart teams & render engineers oversaw the visual performance and implementation strategy, crafted materials and look dev for our characters & environments, and constructed the numerous immersive and interactive visual effects.
To be build the rich explorative worlds of Batuu, numerous renderside strategies and engine enhancements were needed to deliver the work. It would be vital to minimize performance related transition pops and optimizations to fully immerse our players within VR. The richly detailed landscapes were made affordable in mobile VR through a custom tailored HLOD system I developed with our render engineers and pipeline TA’s. The system would consolidate assets, preserve hires materials & textures, and cull out non visible triangles reducing overdraw. The fully automated system saved our environmental teams tremendous time optimizing so we could spend more time creating our world.
The finale for Tales would incorporate numerous explosions, rigids, and a very large detailed environment. To make room for the VFX, the a high poly count version of the environment was modeled out, lit & textured and then raytraced. The result was then captured as a cubemap and then re-projected onto a lower poly version on the environment. This preserved detail avoiding a baked lighting approach. The rigids and cable sims were pre-solved and baked into animation data textures & skeletal meshes. The full screen explosion was composed of several flipbook elements were combined in sequence to maximize detail.
Vader Immortal – Episodes I,II,II 2018-2019 (Oculus Quest, Playstation VR)
Vader Immortal, a 3 part Lucasfilm VR experience, delivered on both Oculus Rift and premiered on the Quest 2018-2019. Parity between the desktop version and the Quest mobile processor was key for this experience. The effects team delivered all rigids, crowds, support effects as well as much of the techart. We devised an animation baking system to store and drive over 300 animated characters simultaneously using a modified instancing system, interpolation, and a small set of animation cycles. I personal ran all rigids from the clip as well conceived and setup the crowd system in unreal.
The Pinboard effect in Vader Immortal was a key cinematic piece in episode II. The effect was a wall of animated pins that would come to life and transform from an animated face to various shapes. I designed the prototype as well as the implementation of animation, data caching, materials, blueprints, and sequencer systems. Due to resource limitations of mobile VR, animation data was packed into textures to drive the motion, as well as store color and the shadow since the device could not support dynamic shadows. Memory limitations and texture streaming bandwidth forced a cap on the size of the textures and what could be simultaneously be played. To achieve performance and play the lengthy sequence of animation, textures were alternated via blueprint and cross faded over one another along with interpolation.