I’ve been working on an unannounced project at yager as a Technical Artist. I’m part of the map building team so my day to day business revolves around 3D World related tasks. In the following sections I will cover some of my responsibilities and sample tasks.
World building tool development
In this section I want to cover some examples for tools I’ve developed to streamline workflows or simply make debugging easier. I’ve integrated a blueprint exposed map check in C++ so e.g. artists / designers could check for common issues. Submitted Changelists would then be flagged in UnrealGameSync. With the help of our backend engineers I’ve automated the navmesh building as part of our build pipeline. Furthermore to not only have quick but especially optimized building creation tools I’ve integrated an intelligent clustering system which based on amount of occurences of meshes and their position, would whether barch them with the help of Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes or just use Instanced Static Meshes instead. Building a UE4 Editor imposter creator is another example for my work.
Profiling and optimization
While every department is responsible for the performance of their part of the game, I was always the main person to talk to about any concerns / issues. To ensure a smoothly running game, I regularly profiled the game and send reports or started discussions about any aspect of the game. I worked out ( texture, poly etc) budgets for our project for different devices specs based on our target FPS and future features. I worked on rendering related topics, e.g. by combining several Post Process materials into one to have as little passes as possible.
Evaluating new technologies
To make sure our project is up-to-date with the latest technologies there are I tested workflows for 3rd party softwares, new algorithms or approaches to problems which might arise in the future. Currently rolling out Houdini into our project pipeline.
I hope you’re excited to hear more about this project when the time is come. Thanks for reading!