- Initial Standard : The project's character clothing used the standard normal, specular, diffuse uber shader. There was an interesting tweak to the specular to 'pop' more detail with front facing normals. And that worked great on surfaces such as leather and velvet. But not so much on on cloth and materials where specular was minimal.
- Hue Shift Pivot : Adding a complementary hue shift to the tangent facing normals of the material colors on the character's cloth pumped up the palette. I utilized calculations already being processed to add minimal perf cost to the process.
- Art Direction : The art director liked the expanded palette, but felt my shaders defaults were too heavy handed with color usage. I worked with him to dial down many of the settings(it's easier to rein a shader artist back to push him for more:). The Lead Tech Artist also exposed a custom sample of the dominant scene light. Changing the shader to sample the complementary color from scene lighting as opposed to local material colors. The final look something more along the lines of the palette brilliantly achieved in Unchartered 2.