Lighting in Civilization VI:
I helped to establish the lighting system for Civilization VI. Because we wanted to have a dynamic time of day system, I worked with our art director and graphics engineers to establish a PBR workflow, and a more unified lighting system that would make it possible for all of the content in the game respond to lighting changes in a predictable way.
I was also in charge of actually authoring the lighting for the game. The lighting in the game had to be dramatic, interesting and maintain the stylized art direction of the game. At the same time remain readable at all times of day.
I did the lighting and color grading for all 20 leaders. The challenge was to create a lighting setup that would be flattering and complementary for each separate leader.
Each character's lighting setup consisted of an HDR cubmap, three shadow casting directional lights, as well as a color grading LUT. I also helped to build and maintain the tool used to create the light rigs in the engine.
Character models by Matthew Kean, and graphics programming by Kiran Sudhakara.
Wonder movie system:
I established the pipeline for creating the wonder movies which were used in Civilization VI to show the completion of wonders in the game. This involved managing artist authored visibility animation for individual meshes on the model, doing processing on the models to reduce draw calls by merging objects that had the same exact animation, automatically removing some faces that would not be seen during the animations, as well as doing several iterations on improving the speed of our export process since these assets contain large amounts of data.
Wonder model and animation by Rambo Siu
Hair rendering:
We knew that the leader characters were going to be a big part visually for our game so we wanted to really try to push some novel rendering techniques. One of the biggest one that we did was the hair rendering since a lot of our characters have very volumetric facial hair. We decided to do full strand rendering which we felt would give us the most compelling look.
I created an exporter in Python to be able to output splines from Maya along with skinning information, as well as wrote the importer in C++ into our engine. I then and worked directly with a graphics programmer implementing the hair rendering, by providing feedback, test example hair files files and serving as a liaison to our lead character artist who was authoring the Leader characters.
Civ 5 VFX:
I worked as a VFX artist on Civilization V, and was then Lead VFX artist on all of the Civilization DLC and expansions. This involved creating in-game effects, as well as environmental VFX for the leader background environments.
