Ashes of Creation (PC)
Materials

Wind

Created material functions used to animate grass, trees, and other objects to portray wind.
Wetness

Derived porosity from roughness and metallic inputs to drive changes in wetness. Puddles ripple with wind speed and rain.
Triplanar with Normal

Auto world or local aligned UVs, correcting for inaccurate normals, optionally using a single texture sample.
Volume Fog

Authored volume fog materials, and enhanced them with a compute shader.
Ocean / Water

Created ocean materials, polished inland water materials. Supported wide array of dynamics.
Shoreline

Multiple effects including UV warping of ocean surface, and masking of foam. Landscape wetness also animates.
Liquid Container

For translucent containers containing some liquid. Compatible with any shape. Water surface computed algorithmically from height texture.
Lava Pour

Geometry warping material on irregularly shaped mesh, conveying viscous liquid.
Seasons

Vegetation color, vertex animation, and opacity mask respond to changes in season, as well as snow appearance.
PBR Visualizer

Debug view mode with a crosshair and chart showing PBR value at crosshair.
Volumetric Clouds

Set up foundational structure for cloud material to ensure adequate performance before handing off to lighting artists.


Niagara

Grass Trampling

Pawn position history written to render target, read in grass material.
Spawn Particles on Ocean

Particles spawn on ocean surface and optionally follow wave motion.
Particle Fog

Particles writing to volume fog. Motion flows downhill, around obstacles.
Local Wind Compute Shader

Generates local turbulence for grass, tree fronds, and props.
Store RVTs in Render Target

Copies height values from multiple runtime virtual textures and store them in a render target. Needed for volume materials, and improves performance of all materials needing height data.
Rope

Simulated rope physics. Moving attach points provided by parent actor.
Ballistic Trajectory

Ribbon geometry showing trajectory of projectile to assist with aiming.


Other Achievements

HLODs

Assembled hierarchical level of detail generation workflow. Maintained and updated as the world expanded.
Spline Mesh Placement

Tool to place static meshes along a spline. Numerous controls for position, rotation, randomness, twist, etc.
Water Swim Volume Placement

Lakes too close to hillsides needed more granular swim volume placement to avoid volumes protruding through terrain.
Flow Authoring Tool

Arrow locators placed on meshes write to the mesh vertex colors, used for material flow animation.
Distance Field From Mask

User interface minimap needed textures showing irregularly shaped areas of interest. Tool converts mask texture generated from game data into distance field to support UI styilng.