Cansu Aydin
Cutscene for transporting the player from one level to another with completely different game environment and lighting. It was achieved by baking the target level scene as a cubemap texture from camera.
The ground breaking effect is achieved with a custom shader for procedurally scaling, moving and rotating vertices. Below is a concept I created with the working shader and cubemap solution but with alternate darker lighting and contrasting rim lights.
Similarly to above, this is a game worlds transition scene. The visual of the next level, Amusement Park, is achieved with a baked cubemap projected onto a cube mesh. Additionally, there's also the lighting transition for the player and the few 3D objects such as the floor and stairs' shading to match the environment they are in.
The respawning VFX of the player happens in the first chapter of Yerba Buena. Technically it's a combination of the portal VFX graph spawning and animating, as well as the player character's (skinned mesh) materials' properties animating via my custom script. The shader consists of vertex distortion for the rectangular side offset, voxelization of vertices around the dissolving section, and a simple alpha clipping dissolve effect with a texture.
Below are some examples of early explorations of different ideas on how the respawning effect could look like.
I worked on the main portal shader which uses parallax occlusion mapping techniques, layers various textures, and has a depth intersection effect. as well as the appearing animation of the portal shader. I also worked on the post processing and lighting of this cutscene.
At the end of the boss fight, the giant boss character turns into a mysterious cube via vertex voxelization, we then see this open to reveal the human size character behind the giant boss. The VFX is created by mixing various methods; shader property animations, VFX graph, post process all controlled via timeline.
This is the cutscene where the player finds a cassette that holds the power to add an upgrade to the oscillator. The upgrades consist of 3 distinct material traits; sticky, bouncy and airy. We have these traits color-coded throught he game, sticky being represented with an orange honey-like goo, bouncy represented with red cel shading, and airy represented with smoke visuals.
Often during Yerba Buena's production, instead of having concept art for VFX, I directly started blocking out the effect by creating placeholder textures and using simple meshes with shader animations or rough visual effect graphs.
Below you can see the initial block-out of the effect, vs the final one.
I worked on the SDF outline and distortion effect on the character being hit by the beam as well as the beam's main shaders and textures. The Sutro tower cutscene also uses distance based fog for dramatic effect. I also setup the screens with Render Textures and with TV screen effect.
I worked on the shaders and animation for the 3D TV screen and the full-screen CCTV footage effect as well as the animating time of the footage.
