Tyler Walters - Technical Artist / Game Dev
Glassbreakers
Polyarc
Technical Art Director
PC-VR, Quest 2 & 3, Apple Vision Pro

  • Tools, workflows, automation, and asset pipelines
  • VFX, lighting, rendering, shaders, 3d modeling, and texturing
  • Trailer and marketing support
  • Multi-platform profiling and optimizations


Early on in production the team asked me about supporting a mirror in the game lobby. Given that we were planning to ship on low spec standalone VR headsets, it was clear to me that going with a common render target solution would be too costly, low resolution, and flat in appearance.

With this in mind I proceeded to conceptualize, prototype, and implement an alternative solution that relied on something more akin to a shadowbox, with meshes that extend back behind the free floating mirror, using world positioned masking to encapsulate and show only on the inner bound pixels.
The min spec standalone VR headset we were shipping on only allowed for about 250 draw calls total. I supported the team with profiling, guidance, as well as hands on content optimizations throughout the duration of the project to reach a consistent 72fps. 

One example of this effort I took on involved converting the overhead Champion UI visuals into much more efficient assets, requiring remodeling, uving, and scripting of runtime animation attributes through new shader paths. The end result took about 150 draw calls down to 30, as well as greatly reducing the shader instructions.    
The art team had a goal to create a bunch of visual customization options for players. To support this, I provided mesh specs, shaders, tools, and example assets for the art team to more easily create expressive & performant variants of their work within a fixed cost pipeline.