Golden Bark - Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok

One of the more major tasks I had during Assassins Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok , was making the bark of the trees in the world golden.
Even though this was a huge factor in creating this magical world, it was an almost impossible amount of work to rework and recreate hundred trees and use them to populate square kilometers of land. This wouldve been a huge workload , but also a high strain on performance and memory.
There were a few unsuccessful attempts.
The solution I ended up with was a custom shader. We replaced all tree shaders with the new one , and I used some trickery to get the available information , like instance locations , gradient , existing roughness maps and normal maps to create a procedurally driven golden bark effect. With a few parameters working on different types of bark/species.
The end results was pretty cool and fun to create for such a large scale redressing.
Thanks to
Art direction: Eddie Bennun, Nikola Stoyanov
Technical art direction: Yavor Yakovliev
Lead environment art: Nikolay Peev, Biser Parashkevov, Martin Kamburov
And the whole dev team !