UEFN - Talisman Demo

2024 has been nuts, and this project was the one that started it all this year!

The Talisman demo for UEFN had the primary goal of testing out the absolute maximum of how much fidelity and content we could conceivably shove into a single UEFN map, all while still having room for a fully custom metahuman hero character, gameplay and audio. This specifically meant: the entire environment, meshes, textures, setdressing, had to fit within 200MB and seamlessly scale down all the way from a high-end PC to mobile.
Looking back, I still can't quite believe that we managed to pull this off. You can red more about the demo here: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/talisman-environment-template-in-unreal-editor-for-fortnite

My main responsibilities for this project were hard surface modelling, setdressing, pipeline / mat work R&D, decal and mesh decal creation and material initiative / shader look ownership.

On the material side of things it became quite obvious that we had to be quite inventive and do as much of the unique material modulation procedurally in engine. While I worked on the initial proof-of-concept material, I later had the honor to work with the two absolutely incredible Principal TAs Yann Provencher and Olivier Beierlein who took my initial findings and rebuilt the entire material setup into something truly incredible. None of this would have been even remotely possible without these two. My colleague Saga and I were fortunate enough to be part of a Tech Talk at GDC during which we explained some of the details of Oli's and Yann's superb work: https://youtu.be/aoLFt6bBWbU?si=mtntHSF-WjlfLCJG&t=2542