Bryn Morrison-Ellliot (head of art): On the technical side, we explored many things to achieve the style. We looked into mipmapping and pixel brushes to get crisp line work and edges that stay consistent at varying distances from the camera. Custom lighting to keep colour difference crisp and stylised. For the PlayStation VR2 version, we improved all these features. In previous versions, due to limitations, we were limited to a set number of lights per scene and utilized a lot of vertex lighting.
Vertex lights calculate per vertex instead of per pixel, which is cheaper to calculate but with a caveat that vertex lighting does not calculate shadows. In the PS VR2 version, we had the performance budget to replace many of these lights with dynamic lighting that create shadows and add depth.
For the PSVR 2 version, we felt it was important to update the render pipeline because the previous one was made specifically for the Quest and its capabilities/limitations and wouldn’t support high quality shadows, points lights and screen space effects (post processing).
These are all features we wanted to include as we knew they would add depth to the scenes which we felt would improve the tone. Jurassic World Aftermath Collection has some scary and tense moments when exploring rooms and corridors, added shadows, volumetric lighting and ambient occlusion crank that experience up to 11.