Jon Ludwig - Unreal Engine Tech Art Portfolio
A selection of projects that I have contributed to or created.
Performance Optimization for Mobile VR
Schell Games
Project Freefall​
I joined the Project Freefall team at various points in development, including during the lead-up to launch, and lead the performance optimization efforts in order for us to ship on Quest 2, 3, and PC with PC/VR cross-play. I audited and authored all art assets added to the project, built all materials, built a lightweight and artist-friendly scalable lighting system, and also was in charge of certain gameplay elements when performance was a concern.
Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire
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.
Out of Scale
I joined the Out of Scale project team late in production and lead 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
I joined Hidden Leaf Games around 1.5 years into the development of Fangs, to firefight performance concerns and serve as technical artist for the character and VFX departments. My responsibilities included VFX performance audits, building technical animations systems, developing a performant minimap system via blueprint scripting, and character materials.
The character team on Fangs heavily preferred a hand-drawn and 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.
Self-Released Solo Projects
Hypernoodle Games
Crane Pop
I created a 3D VR version of the Suika Game video game, a sort of physics-based merge game, and published it on the Meta Quest App Store. My goals for the project were to learn integration of Meta Platform tools and XR functionalities into an Unreal Engine project, and to build something with extremely simple graphics so that GPU performance would not become a concern.
Root Beer On Tap
I created a 3D VR version of the Tapper arcade game, and published it to Steam. This was my first commercial release, and thus my primary goal was to learn all aspects of the Steam release process and requirements while creating a fully featured game. I supported all PCVR headsets available at the time of release.
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.
App prototyping, hand-drawn post process, and character materials
Slam Dunk, Talkin' to the Rim - Toei Zukun Laboratory
For this project I initially created the prototype which secured Toei Zukun the contract to build the full app. Once we entered production, I created post process materials and character materials to create a manga-style look for this mobile AR app.