Lock & Reload is a first-person 'on-rails' shooter designed for mobile devices. I led the team at 8D Productions, in addition to working as a programmer and tech artist on the project.

Engine | Unity  Tools | Blender  Languages | C Sharp, ShaderLab   Version Control | Git / GitHub Duration | Feb 2022 - Jun 2024  Team Size | 8  Roles | Lead, Technical Artist, Programmer

In order to enable the use of real time 3D rendering on mobile hardware, the approach to lighting needed to be a cheap one. Before fully implementing all the shader functionality, I was concerned that the Blinn-Phong reflection model could not be used and an approximation would need to be implemented. Luckily, the toon art style chosen for the game does not require a large amount of the data seen in physically based rendering to pull off, such as high-resolution texture data. By utilizing a few techniques already common in the industry, a stylistic look could be achieved with no noticeable hit to performance on modern mobile hardware.

One of the biggest optimizations that can be done for lighting on mobile devices is to only utilize one main directional light & to bake all the other lighting for static objects into texture maps. To light dynamic objects as they move through the scene, light probes are used to pass an average lighting from the baked lightmap to the model.

While implementing a Blinn-Phong BDRF was not a bottleneck for modern mobile hardware, it is yet to be seen if the model holds up on older devices. The research into physically based rendering is vast, but similar research on non-physically based rendering appears to be dragging behind.