Photogrammetry

On Project Ragtag, I served in a cross-functional look-development pod responsible for establishing environmental visual targets and scalable workflows. I collaborated on the R&D of photogrammetry and PBR pipelines, prototyped custom shaders, and resolved technical bottlenecks to ensure visual fidelity didn't compromise performance. To achieve peak fidelity for the desert biome, I participated in onsite photogrammetry expeditions to Canyonlands and Arches National Parks in Utah, as well as Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada—coordinating with a multidisciplinary team of environment artists, technical artists, and lighters to translate raw scan data into production-ready assets.

The pipeline involved capturing extensive scan data of rocks and surfaces and converting them into point clouds to generate high- and medium-resolution source meshes. From there, we authored game-ready low-poly assets with clean topology and baked a full PBR texture suite, including diffuse, normal, height, and AO maps. The final pass focused on delighting the diffuse maps to produce albedo data, deriving roughness maps, and making the surfaces tile-able. These maps were then packed to reduce texture sample counts and the height data was further utilized in custom biome-specific terrain shaders I authored. Once we had a working library I utilized them in small look development scenes that allowed rapid iteration and art direction approval before rolling out wider to the general team for use.

This is a small sample of raw point cloud data derived the the photographs, not all of these were directly usable:

Here are some surface and rock samples in various states of completion. For roughness values, the team standardized value ranges for sand, stone, and desert varnish so that the resulting assets lit consistently.

I authored a delighting utility in Substance Designer to derive albedo maps. It was mainly effective with ambient sky lighting, not direct sunlight which we attempted to avoid as much as possible during captures.

Some of my early environmental look development explorations using the scanned library.

Additional shader explorations I did for the desert biome; world space rock striations and sand sparkles.