Tomb Raider Reloaded - Tech Art and VFX

This is a compilation of tools, tech and VFX I made for the game Tomb Raider Reloaded, developed by Emerald City Games and published by SquareEnix London (which became CDE).

I worked in this project from start to finish as the lead VFX and Tech Artist, and all VFX were made by me and Albin Desboeufs. I don't have good videos of absolutely all the effects I made, but you can see all the game's playthrough on the part 1 of this reel.

Splash Art shader

Fire effects (Purple portals made by Albin)

Fire Spell

Electric effects

Boss cards

Yeti Boss battle effects (Icicle Projectiles and trails on the slap attacks were made by Albin)

Experimental water shader for a boss battle

Hydra Boss effects and Water shader

Crocodile Boss effects

Crocodile Shader. It creates the illusion of transparent water by clamping the vertex positions at the water level and projecting the mesh forward according to the Camera Vector

Experiment with a coin shader. It didn't make into the game but it looks cool

Wet Floor shader with fake reflections

Crystal Shader

Rat Particles. The rats are animated in the shader with only math

Water Hair shader

Midas Golden palm attack, with fake shadows for the anticipation, and golden hand prints on the ground

Spider Boss intro and death effects

Spider attacks and fake holes on the ground

Spider shader. The spiders are animated using math on the vertex shader, all controlled by moving them across the map

Mash effect for the Wolf Boss

Spline tool for the dashed lines on the Dungeon Maps

Sprite shader for the dashed lines on the main Map. They had to be sprites, so I found a math to curve them randomly depending on their position on the map

Highlight effect for UI tutorials. A script passes the rectTransform data from a sprite to the background and samples a soft circle that erases the darkened image

Bat swarm using particles and vertex animations

Different types of UI banners. The shader supports a soft mask for the art inside the banner