This talk breaks down the shader-driven approach behind Ambrosia Sky’s volumetric destruction system and fungus animation pipeline. It covers how we overcame technical constraints while creating dense, reactive fungus species in our environments to meet art, design and gameplay goals. Through examples from development, it explores a hybrid pipeline of Houdini and Unreal Engine, using Vertex Animation Textures (VATs) alongside shader-based vertex deformations in Unreal to achieve visual complexity in reactive environments.
