VR VFX & UI, 2019 - 2020
A collection of VFX & UI work targeting Oculus Quest 1.

Tools: Unity, HLSL, C#, Houdini

Usually paired with an art director or concept artist, I created several visual effects for a few of Meta's VR apps using Unity, C#, HLSL, and Houdini. The work was primarily targeting Oculus Quest 1 which came with extreme performance constraints.

Mesh-based approaches with little to no transparency were preferred, often packing data into vertex attributes for the shader to leverage. The goal was to reduce draw calls, reduce the number of materials, and move computation to the GPU as much as possible given that the CPU was often the bottleneck.

For the wind streaks effect above, the geometry was extruded in Houdini from simple curves. Then the UVs are defined from 0 to 1 length-wise to be able to animate the streak in the shader.

In addition to VFX, I also worked with UI artists to efficiently implement their After Effects designs inside of Unity. Using SDF assets was often a good way to minimize texture size while maintaining visual sharpness. At times, I would procedurally create certain shapes in shader directly to be able to easily animate them without using texture sheets.