Project Ethos (Public Beta)

I am excited to share some of the environment and technical art development I owned during my time as a Senior Environment Artist at 2K Games - 31st Union, working on the third-person shooter Project Ethos. My primary focus was establishing and maintaining scalable, performant environment systems while translating high-level artistic direction into tangible in-engine benchmarks. Below is a breakdown of the specific pipelines, shaders, and terrain systems I owned from the game's official public Beta test:
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Global Terrain Material System: Architected, implemented, and optimized the global terrain master material system used across major game zones. Developed a modular layering workflow, an organic shoreline blending system, and dynamic environmental math (such as ice cracks, camera distance based tiling, and micro/macro texture blending) to ensure distinct biome transitions within a strict performance budget.
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Lobby Hologram Earth & Banner Shaders: Volunteered to spearhead the visual R&D for screens and hologram materials. Analyzed and re-engineered the rotating Hologram Earth in the game lobby—reducing complex, multi-layered transparent materials down to an efficient setup. Added a dynamic day/night effect that significantly lowered runtime cost while elevating visual fidelity.
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The Jumbotron System: Collaborated closely with rendering engineers and concept artists to create a massive, triangle-shaped broadcast screen for the main lobby. Developed a custom coordinate and transform-driven material logic to handle dynamic character displays, parallax depth effects, and background visual effects.
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Special thanks to the incredibly talented team at 31st Union for their constant collaboration and support!