Hey RTVFX people! I’m a long-time lurker, but first-time poster. Until an unfortunate recent layoff, I’ve been doing VFX at Polyarc Games. This is a studio mostly known for the Moss VR games, but they’ll be releasing Moss 1+2 in Non-VR format as Moss: The forgotten Relic on July 16, 2026.
Anyway, I’m planning to use this thread to post some breakdowns of VFX work I did while at Polyarc. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have and of course would love to hear any feedback!
(Not sure if I need to do something special to make Imgur gifs embed properly.)
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Here is some environment/skybox work I did for Moss book 2 that will also be part of Moss: The forgotten relic.
Moss 2 Void Breakdown 1
The idea here was that a character had begun tearing holes in the fabric of reality. These tears we dubbed “voids”, and were initially supposed to be a gameplay mechanic. However, that mechanic ended up getting cut. Tyler Walters had begun experimenting with the look of these voids for that mechanic. While the mechanic was cut, we still needed a big void in the sky of the final environment of the game, to help tell the story. So, I took Tyler’s initial void material and fleshed it out further to become integrated into this skybox/environment.
The debris floating in the sky is all mesh particles that are Unlit and have fake highlights and shadows coming from the shader. I also was using the world space position of the big void to make the debris lighting brighter as the particles approached the void. Both the rocks and even the dust motes are being pulled toward the void using particle attractors.
Moss 2 Void Breakdown 2
The sky warping in the breakdown is UV distortion built into the skybox material itself, not refraction. We found refraction doesn’t work well for persistent elements in VR due to the nature each eye having a slightly different camera position.
Most of the other void elements were kept as separate planes in the sky, to reduce shader complexity of the skybox material. In VR the player has full control of the camera, so there are a lot of scenarios in these levels where the player they could be seeing parts of the skybox, but it wouldn’t make sense to pay the shader cost of the void elements for every pixel of the skybox being rendered.
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