Blade and Sorcery - Outpost Dungeon

In 2021, I was brought onto the WarpFrog team as an environment artist (and later, lead environment artist) for the VR physics sandbox game Blade and Sorcery. My first major project was an overhaul of the visuals and environment art.

I set many new art pipeline and technical standards. I also devised a number of fairly novel techniques, such as an upgrade to the game's modular brick wall assets which turned them from flat planes into bumpy, highly optimized, fully 3D brick walls. Such a change was greatly beneficial given that the nature of VR means that players tend to see objects very up-close, which means that faking geometry with normal maps alone is often not an adequate solution.

The new approach involved creating a heightmap-displaced and decimated version of each modular wall, which was used as LOD0. A flat plane was used as LOD1, and the UVs were projected from one mesh to the other to ensure a perfect match. A highpoly version of the displaced mesh was also created, again with matching UVs. I worked with the lead dev to create tooling in Unity that swaps in the highpoly mesh during lightmap baking, similar to baking highpoly normals to a lowpoly model, except instead of baking normals, we are baking lightmaps. This highpoly-baked lightmap is assigned to LOD0 and LOD1. Combined with our high-res lightmaps, the end result is very sharp, crispy, fully baked shadows that show up on every LOD with very little discrepancy between them. The near-perfect match and nearly invisible LOD transition allowed us to use these assets with very short LOD distances, which made them highly performant even on Meta Quest 2.

Scroll to the bottom of this post for a video demonstration.

Additionally, I redid the lighting for many of the game's levels, and made many changes and suggestions for changes to improve performance, to support the graphical improvements that were made.

The tight technical and performance constraints, combined with a chill and supportive work environment, allowed me to produce some of the coolest and most clever professional work I have ever produced. I generally take pride in my work as a lighting and technical artist, but I am more proud of the work I have done on Blade and Sorcery than I have been of any other project I have worked on so far. I look forward to posting more of my work from this game in the future.

Link to relevant Blade and Sorcery Steam blog post: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/629730/view/3217266488992783546