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

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ingress/comments/yx3whm/red_portal_level_8/