As a rendering engineer on THPS 3+4, I spent much of my time on the project collaborating with the various art disciplines in order to help them make the game look the best it could. Sometimes this meant extending UE4 in order to achieve visual effects that would have been difficult-to-impossible in the default renderer, such as the extension of the material graph system in order to allow post-process materials to read stencil bits. Sometimes it meant maximizing artist efficiency by simplifying workflows and automating tasks, such as a reorganization of UE4’s model importation code to make it quicker and easier to set per-platform LODs across the project’s six platforms.

 
   I also resolved a number of graphical bugs. This included both smaller fare, such as a platform-specific landscape bug which was rooted in the height map LOD generation as well as a larger issue with light leaking during hair rendering, which required a substantial rework of the hair lighting shaders in order to resolve.

    Besides graphical work, I also completed a variety of performance-related tasks. I prototyped a system for grouping identical static meshes into a single hierarchical instance, allowing it to benefit from instancing in the finished build, while remaining convenient, separate meshes in editor. I also created an editor function which scraped asset information from packaged builds and compiled it into an easily searchable Excel sheet in order to more quickly identify problem assets.