Elena is a first person exploration game in which the player plays Anna, trapped in her own house, and has to find out what happend to her husband. In cupboards and drawers she can find items and documents that reveal the truth. With the help of a mysterious caller she embarks on a search for an explanation for her husband's disappearance.

The game is a usual PC game aswell as a VR game, playable with the HTC Vive and began as a student project at the Stuttgart Media University. I am one of four 3D artists who contributes to the game and also fill in the role of the technical artist.

My responsibilities in that field includes:

   - Importing all created 3D assets in the engine, fixing mesh errors, broken UVs etc. along the way

   - Creating shader networks for all materials in the game

   - Monitoring performance and optimizing existing content to achieve the targeted frame rates not only on high-end PCs

Note: Since this project was a collaborative effort, many assets in the images are not done by me. My contributions are always listed in the corresponding texts.

The player explores a house that exists in two versions: A clean, bright and colorful version and a old, dirty and dark version, that grows as part of the story. In the image below you can see both versions of Anna's atelier. While we often created two versions of objects, it was clearly not possible to create two entirely unique houses. So I created a shader to dust objects automatically.

As seen on the example of the coffee machine (made by me) you can see how the shader hulls the surface in dust corresponding with the exposure of the surface, using the world normals and considering the normal map of the object. Additionally, I used the ambient occlusion map to emulate the effect of dust accumulating in crevices and corners (an effect that later got scraped due to perfomance reasons especially in VR).

Additionaly to the dust shader I also created one to adjust the colours, pushing the textures to a dark, desaturated green.

The cellar is a room with the interior mostly done by me. The only objects visible that are not modeled and textured by me are the lamp on the left side and the textures of the posters in the back. The floor features a shader that blends between a broken and intact version of the tiles using vertex colors, as visible in the small image.

This centrifuge is part of the second environment of the game, set in the the not-too-distant-future. The textures rely heavily on details baked from a high-poly-mesh and are mastered in substance designer, with some cleanups done in Photoshop.