Building on my original Legend’s Guild level inspired by RuneScape, this rework was created to celebrate the release of Necromancy leading into Halloween 2023. The goal was to re-light the entire level and implement a fully dynamic weather system to create a stormy, surreal atmosphere set on a dark and gloomy night. The lighting and color choices were heavily influenced by the visual tone of RuneScape’s Necromancy season.
To achieve the 'necromancy inspired' aesthetic, I performed a full overhaul of the original master material. Several previously separate material instances were consolidated into a single, more robust master with extended controls. This new master also supported a wide range of weather-driven effects including wet surfaces, puddles, splashes, and water flow that could easily be enabled or disabled in the material instance, or dynamically by the weather system.
Ultra Dynamic Sky (by Everett Gunther) powered the rain, clouds, lightning, and splash VFX. I integrated it directly with my custom material setup to dynamically enable wetness, drips, and other surface effects based on weather conditions and time of day. The flexibility of UDS allowed for detailed art direction of the storm effects, supporting the eerie, stylized tone I was aiming for. I also created custom VFX for concentrated falling water using animated textures built in After Effects. Lightning strike placement was driven by UDS as well, letting me control start and end points, timing, and visual style for each bolt. In real-time, the scene cycles through lightning and thunder sequences, shifts in rainfall intensity, and occasional breaks in the clouds revealing the moon.
This project coincided with a period where I was gaining more experience with pipeline and tool development in my day-to-day work. It became a sandbox for experimenting with complex systems, balancing cinematic presentation with real-time performance. Integrating weather at this scale helped me refine my workflow for incorporating larger systems into a scene, complementing much of what I’ve been learning professionally over the past few years.
