Overview

Company: Santa Monica Studio
Game Type: Third-Person Action-Adventure Game
Team: 200+ entire team, 6+ graphics team
Role: Graphics Programmer
Technologies: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PSSL, C++
Span: May 2018 – Present
[Website] http://sms.playstation.com/

Contributions

• Owned the material system and handled cross-team communication, optimization, build pipeline maintenance, hot-reloading, work flow improvements, and new features
• Devised the sky rendering tech for Vanaheim time of day and worked with tech art to implement and optimize the rapid transition between states
• Expanded the sparkle tech to respond to all lights and indirect, be display agnostic, and provide greater artistic control, which saw heavy use on snow and sand
• Hunted down complex bugs in a wide breadth of areas, e.g. tessellation, particles,  render state, culling, etc., to reduce the workload of peers during close out
• Assisted UI in getting photo mode to fit in our memory budget by expanding the runtime color correction options so they could replace the 3D LUTs used prior
• Spearheaded the post-launch black and white mode and put in extra effort to ensure that the basic combat indicators, e.g. attack circles, remained readable
• Implemented support for arbitrary clipping groups to accelerate the UI team’s work when adding scrolling panels and reveal effects
• Optimized various graphical components of the game including high-level reorganizations and low-level optimizations like vGPR reduction
• Collaborated with artists to devise and integrate new technologies to address issues and improve graphical fidelity