Foliage Deformation
With weather playing a much larger role in Just Cause 4, we needed to improve our foliage animation.
The previous shader just applied a noise map to trees. This did not look very convincing at higher windspeeds, nor for larger vegetation like palm trees.
The new approach was to store branch pivot information in the vertex data, including a simple hierarchy of branches. The data also included in which direction the branch is pointing so that we could rotate branches into the wind at higher speeds.
Destruction
During pre-production and early production, I was responsible for prototyping and designing large scale destructible objects. These large scale props ranged from suspension bridges to greenhouse domes.
The more complex destructibles had a signal system in place to only awake parts which were directly affected to reduce performance overhead.
Volumetric Clouds
After the initial implementation of the raymarched cloud system, I took over the work and was tasked with bringing it into a form we could ship. This meant going through the system to verify all the math and functions actually work, generating of better noise textures as inputs, adding new functionality to the raymarch shader and tuning it to work together with the rest of the physical sky system.
