Niantic // Adding a New Faction to Ingress
Niantic // Ingress // Machina
Tech Artist - VFX - Rendering Engineer - Audio
Rendering potentially hundreds of these visuals on low-end mobile devices
Portals grow from lvl1 - lvl8
Fun things
Making the effect was a blast - the concept being a digital virus that's come to corrupt portals worldwide. Used a simplified mesh emitter that could only be a max of a few particles to conserve resources, and ran optimizations such as GPU instancing, mesh instancing, reducing textures, and adding LODs for some of the particle systems
Challenges
Needed to do a lot of optimization to make sure this worked, spent much more time optimizing than designing because of the need for this particular asset
Any changes to map objects on a geolocation game ends up being the biggest CPU/GPU sink
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