Desert Rock Formation

Project Overview

This project focused on creating a highly detailed procedural rock shader system for desert environments. The goal was to achieve photorealistic weathering and erosion effects while maintaining real-time performance in Unreal Engine.

Technical Approach

The shader utilizes a multi-layered approach combining height-based blending, vertex color masking, and procedural noise functions to create realistic surface variation. Key features include:

• Procedural erosion patterns using Perlin and Voronoi noise
• Dynamic weathering based on surface orientation and exposure
• PBR material blending with custom roughness variation
• Distance-based tessellation for optimized performance

Challenges & Solutions

One of the main challenges was balancing visual fidelity with performance. The initial implementation caused significant performance drops on lower-end hardware. To address this, I implemented a LOD system with distance-based material complexity reduction and optimized the tessellation parameters.

Results

The final shader system achieved the target visual quality while maintaining 60+ FPS on mid-range hardware. The procedural nature allows for easy variation across multiple assets without requiring unique texture sets for each rock formation.

Key Learnings

This project reinforced the importance of early performance profiling and the value of modular shader design. The procedural approach not only saved memory but also provided unprecedented flexibility for the art team to iterate quickly.