Assassin's Creed Shadows - Seaweeds, Aquatic plants shader

On Assassin's Creed Shadows, I was responsible for all underwater and floating vegetation.
Seaweeds on shore and in general aquatic plants.
I was creating assets but also the shader tha would drive them , textures and materials , behaviour and also tools for the pipeline.
Underwater assets were particularly interesting to create.
I first made the assets I had in mind , and then started to figure out the combination of movements and waves that would look like underwater sway and current.
It was interesting to work on some way to fake the player in the shader using distance fields, to push out the plants in water but also outside. Since I couldnt use the standard vegetation method due to technical reasons.
The entire process was also complete with some custom tools in Houdini that I made to paint the needed information.

I particularly enjoy such tasks , where I could practcally create everything in the pipeline of an assets.
From assets and texture , to shaders and tools. Its unfortunate that this takes up such considarble time that is a rarity.

I was lucky enough to work with incredibly professional teams.
This game is a huge collective effort.
My congratulations and big thanks to everyone in our Sofia studio,
my team specifically - Tech Art , and everyone in Quebec and every other studio we worked with on this project !

Thanks to Vincent Lamontagne , for the art direction
Thanks to Nikola Valkanov for the awesome scatter rules for underwater, rivers and oceans.
And the aweosme biome team in Quebec