Hunting Simulator 2 (2020) - PC/ Xbox/ PS4/ Switch

Hunting Simulator 2 is developed by Neopica and published by Nacon, using Unreal Engine 4. In HS2 my main role was Environment/Vegetation artist, with some technical tasks during the development of the game.

Similar to Hunting Simulator 1, the goal was to recreate existing locations consisting mostly out of nature habitats. Each level would be set in a specific biotome and would be 16km² in size (with a few exceptions). Because of the level sizes, we decided to go a lot more for a procedural workflow in comparison to HS1. All vegetation is scattered procedural using Houdini. For the terrain creation we also swapped World Machine to Houdini for ease of integration.

My first task on HS2 was setting up the main workflow for vegetation, since all of our maps would be very vegetation heavy, it was extremely important that we had good looking assets that were optimized. Each tree would first be blocked out in Speedtree. When we had the general shape, we would make highpoly branches that are baked down into a texture atlas. This texture atlas contained all leafs/branches that a specific plant/tree species could use, this made sure that we didn't use too many different textures. All lod where also created within Speedtree, but for billboards I opted to use the imposter render method from Ryan Brucks, because this method of rendering billboards within Ue4 would give us the most control and best quality. The main downside of this method was that every time the color or shape of a tree changed, I would need to re-render all of the billboards.

Aside from vegetation I also set up bullet decals, footprints and other particle effects when interacting with the environment. I was also responsible for optimizations and art bug fixing. This included a lot of changes that needed to be made for the game to be able to run on the lower hardware of the Nintendo Switch.