I have had a big input regarding the end boss battle creating the flowmaps for the lava on the planet. The shader that loops the fire and is mold-able to be believable lava, the shield around the arena and the shader and game-play elements that remove the floor during the battle.
Most of my work is to be seen in the: Endgame playthrough
The planet consists of a noise textures going over a flow map generated from a particle sim with Houdini. The sim was then rendered out in a high res texture and used into the shader as a height map and a flowmap variating height speed and colour of the lava.
For the fire and shield we had to use different techniques to make a believable hot planet. the shield uses a lat postfx framebuffer projected on the surface so we could create a believable heat distortion. The shield makes use of a couple of different uv channels for the tiling of the plasma and positioning of the shield guards that push the plasma up.
One of the drawbacks of the postfx buffer technique is that we were not able to use any forward rendered fx behind the shield. to combat this and stay within budget i ended up using some of the same techniques as the transition shader to run on a loop, different noise maps and distortions on basic models all set up as a a billboard. scattered and hand-placed around the base.
