Halo Infinite: Shader and Environment Pipeline work & experiments

A few snippets of some shader and environment pipeline work I had a large hand in. Chiyo lai, Evan Liaw and I worked with Mikael Nelffors and the rest of the team to come up with solutions to massive open world challenges.
Halo infinite was developed in a proprietary editor environment, which meant we needed to develop, implement, and invent (often novel) solutions to workflows.
Though rocks and cliffs may feel "everyday" to players and viewers, super-massive, continuous surfaces are some of the more challenging environmental subjects to portray. Many games at the time of Halo Infinite's release relied on many small rock assets clumped together in order to make mountainsides and cliffs. This can sometimes (often) result in a very gamey feeling of many small things stuck together. Many people worked on large scale sculpts of massive cliff assets, but maintaining resolution was difficult. The Biomes team and I endeavored to devise a solution to this, and so created a shader system which allows for virtuously seamless, cascading layers of detail, modulated by camera distance.
In the video you'll also see shader solutions for terrain inheritance, which considers asset/vs terrain normal transitioning and vector masking.

I've also included a few fun shots of some experiments I did using substance designer to create a "Rock Ubergenerator" which was used to generate nearly all of the various rock/stone/cliffside texture-sets in the game.
Substance designer was kind enough to implement a "displacement to mesh" export during this time, and I used my ubergenerator with a customized tri-planar projection displacement to create rock variants from simple smooth shapes which could be generated from designer block-ins. Prioritizing pipelines, technology, art and design direction is an important focus that I will carry into future projects.