Jon Ludwig - Unreal Engine Tech Art Portfolio
A selection of projects that I have contributed to or created. I understand that the most important role of a technical artist is often to facilitate the artists in a team to do their best work given the constraints of the project, so I will outline team-facing actions related to my work in the project whenever applicable.
Performance Optimization for Mobile VR
Schell Games
I joined the Silent Slayer project team mid-way through production and led performance optimization efforts in order for us to ship on Quest 2.
I joined the Out of Scale project team late in production and led performance optimization efforts in order for us to ship on Quest 2, while also solving platform specific rendering errors.
PBR-Lite Character Shader
Fangs - Hidden Leaf Games
The character team on Fangs heavily preferred a hand-drawn, non-PBR texture pipeline. By contrast, the environment team worked within a fully PBR material pipeline. Due to this pipeline conflict I took it upon myself, after consulting with my tech art lead, to create a "PBR-Lite" shader for the characters. The result was an unlit, LdotN-shadowed material that used all of the ORM maps already created for the characters, but also allowed shadows to be defined as a blend between a diffuse-light and diffuse-shadow texture.
Here the PBR rendered result on the Right is compared to the unlit PBR-Lite material on the left, settings tweaked to match as closely as possible, using a darkened copy of the diffuse map for the shadow map.
After edits by the 3D character team, the PBR-Lite character more closely matched the artist intent.
Explorations in no-post-process cell shading for mobile VR
Personal Project
Here, an unlit master material uses an LdotN lighting calculation, mapping it to a 256 color palette for the pixel color.
This is some of my own exploration into VR-compatible cell shading with an efficient art pipeline for a solo dev or small team.
Hand-drawn post process and character materials
Slam Dunk, Talkin' to the Rim - Toei Zukun Laboratory
I created post process materials and character materials to create a manga-style look for this mobile AR app.