Liam Armitage

VFX & Technical Artist

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Changeling VR

Lead Technical ArtistXana AdhocSummer co-op

Changeling VR is a mystery game for PC VR, made at RIT and out in Early Access on Steam. I was its lead technical artist for the summer of 2023, and a core part of the optimization that took it from 2.5–10 FPS to 90–120 FPS.

UnityURPShader GraphHLSLC#

What I did

Nobody can play a PC VR game at 10 FPS, so most of the summer went into asset and VFX optimization:

  • Generated LODs for the game's assets in bulk, then refined them.
  • Found the expensive materials and replaced them with cheaper URP ones.
  • Audited and optimized the static and dynamic lighting in several levels.
  • Wrote utility shaders: outlines, dissolves, and a Kuwahara painterly filter tuned to be cheap enough for VR.

I also set the standards the rest of the team followed, and wrote down the art pipelines so new assets stayed inside the performance budget without losing the game's look.

The game

Over seven levels, you step into other characters' memories to work out what is wrong with a family's baby. More than 300 people from RIT's School of Interactive Games and Media built it over five years, and RIT's MAGIC Spell Studios published it.

The official trailer. It shows the whole team's work.
A grey living room; a woman made of shifting rainbow color sits on the couch beside a man with his head in his hands.
Inside a character's memory, the room goes grey and that character glows.
A giant wooden rocking horse and a teddy bear under a purple sky full of flying toys.
A giant rocking horse in a sky full of toys.
A black-and-white night street with graffiti tags drawn over the wall.
A black-and-white street, tagged with graffiti.