The Ruby franchise was an ongoing ATI demo series. Whiteout used a variety of new techniques including offset mapped refraction, animated wrinkle maps, procedural snow, and GPU fur and particles.

I was in charge of facial animation, skin shaders and look, ice and snow. I worked with the production company, who did the mocap and animation, to clean up assets from MAYA to Sushi, our proprietary engine.

I painted facial targets for wrinkle animations and sculpted normal maps. I developed shaders for many materials, snow mountains, displacement shader for ice, etc. I was also responsible for all lighting and shader visual consistency. This demo was in HDR, (or more bits of info than were visible on screen) so lighting was a bit of an art. This demo also used spherical harmonics to dynamically light moving characters emulating global illumination.

Again, working with programmers, I would get hooks for textures, and parameters I could adjust to get the desired visuals. This demo team was comprised of 3 graphics engineers and 3 artists.