Impulse Gear
Senior Technical Artist
At Impulse Gear, I focused on optimizing and polishing art assets and levels to ensure Larcenauts was shippable on Meta Quest 1. This involved extensive cleanup of meshes and levels, including fixing broken lightmaps, adjusting LOD view distances, and reducing material counts. I often needed to analyze assets on a per-level basis, finding clever ways to instance or combine. Additionally, I helped enhance visual variety and improve set dressing by creating efficient, reusable modular assets.
Art
- Crafted highly optimized shaders and materials, enabling a range of reusable dynamic visual effects.
- Facilitated artists in achieving their desired effects and animations by integrating with gameplay systems via code.
- Used special material effects to compensate for the absence of post-processing features like bloom and blur.
- Created or refined “hero” assets, maximizing UV space efficiency and rebaking textures for improved quality.
- Created modular assets that could be efficiently combined to create unique looks.
- Helped optimize and light levels.
Engineering
- Optimized multiplayer shooter game to run on both PC and the original Quest VR headset. Significantly reduced draw calls, triangle counts, and shader complexity while preserving visual fidelity.
- Used strategic asset instancing and combining in problematic areas. Utilized Unreal Insights and RenderDoc for profiling.
- Rigged, animated and created Animation Blueprints for hero assets.
Other
- Designed the map layout for the first ‘payload’ mission, carefully balancing visual aesthetics with gameplay mechanics to ensure an engaging and cohesive player experience.
