Dragonflight - World of Warcraft - Azure Span Ice
One of my responsibilities for the Azure Span was designing a new parallax shader and building a new ice kit that would show off its capabilities. I like the more technical tasks so this one was a treat. Working with our graphics programmers and starting with prototypes built in Unreal, we made a shader with three different layers of texture scrolling, and depth controlled via a heightmap. I did a ton of user testing and documentation to find something that could meet our visual goals and hopefully isn’t too confusing for other artists work with.
Lava pieces I believe were done by Tai Walker or Cory Carillio.
The ice texture on these pieces was done as a Designer tileable. I unwrapped it seamlessly on a lowpoly blockout and vertex-blended in the snow, then cut additional edges into it and moved them around to follow the forms in the texture.
I tried the ice spikes a dozen different ways. I had hoped vertex texture blending would do the job, but doing a unique ZBrush bake won out in the end.
Icebergs off the coast of the zone.
