Splash (2022-2023)

https://www.splashmusic.com/

Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2099830/Splash/

Summary

Splash is a stylised 3rd person multiplayer music experience created in Unreal Engine 5. Experience an endless music festival in a neon city that never sleeps. Enormous crowds have gathered to watch you perform. Customize your avatar, choose your music pack, and step onto the main stage. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2099830/Splash/

I was onboarded mid development and my responsibilities as a Technical Artist included:

  • Rendering & asset optimisations

    • Identify and resolve CPU / GPU bottlenecks

    • Addressed performance issues in main level map so that it can run on lower end devices and reach 60+ fps on higher end devices

  • Advise on best practices for creating 3D assets to ensure they fit within budget constraints

    • Modular architectural kits

    • Modular characters

    • Nanite compatible assets

    • Adjust assets so that they work with Lumen

  • Create materials and Niagara VFX

  • Create art tools for level designers

Details

Character Customisation Compatible Assets

Split up the character into modular skeletal mesh assets to be ready for the character customisation system. I set up a master clothing material that will allow the devs to drive the parameters via data table.

Foliage & Wind system

Global wind system that drives custom material functions that I created to produce the wind effects for the foliage in the game. This is driven by a wind actor blueprint that I have created and placed into the level. It supports Directionality, Wind Speed and Wind Intensity. The wind weighting and variation are driven by vertex colours.

Models were created by senior artist on the team.

Red channel masks the intensity of the wind

Blue channel is a random value between 0-1. Used to offset the wind animation to give variation.

How both channels look combined

Interactable Foliage

Blueprint system that loads in a physics based actor when the player is within range. Swaps out to a regular static mesh to save on performance.

Spline light placement tool

Created tool for level designers to quickly place patterns of light bars along a spline. Traces down so that it automatically snaps to the bottom surface

Reworked buildings to use cubemapping interiors

Audio Reactive VFX