VR character improvements

In this project, I revised VR characters for my job at V-Armed to enhance its visual quality and performance by refining and developing custom shaders for skin, hair, clothing, and especially the eyes.

The side-by-side comparison showcases the improvements between the old and new models, highlighting the increased realism achieved. A short video demonstrates the eye shader in action, revealing parallax movement of the Iris while staying within performance budget of a VR project. I was the sole person responsible for developing automating rigging and shader pipeline in a way that all junior artists could work on the project in a drag and drop way. Some tools (not shown here) for Maya, 3ds max and other intermediary software were also developed to achieve this goal.

To optimize memory, textures have been packed with normal maps using BC7 compression (NRS or NAR) and derived with custom hlsl node which was more foolproof than using the included node with UE4.

This is in no way the best character for a video game in the general sense, but for VR it's a big leap in visual fidelity.

Clothing in this example not done by me. Modelling for cloth and cloth texture done by Yogev Levy.

Unreal Engine

Eye Shader Parallax Occlusion in action with minimal instruction count and texture lookups

Packed textures with Normal and HLSL code to derive normal Z (linSRGB BC7 does not work with unreal's own derive z node)

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