Unreal Engine Graphics Programmer (Advanced Shader Development)

• *Upwork Job Posting — Unreal Engine Graphics Programmer (Advanced Shader Development)**

We’re looking for a highly skilled Unreal Engine graphics programmer with strong experience in real-time rendering and shader development to implement two advanced material systems:

### Scope of Work

You will develop **two production-ready master materials** in Unreal Engine:

• **Silhouette Parallax Occlusion Mapping (SPOM) Material**
• Similar to the technique used in *Crimson Desert*
• Must support **true silhouette/profile displacement**, not just standard POM
• Should replicate behavior described in CryEngine’s silhouette POM documentation
• Clean, optimized, and scalable for real-time use
• **SSDM (Screen Space Displacement Mapping) Material**
• Based on the technique demonstrated here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQoDpv04FPo

• Should approximate screen-space displacement behavior with stable results
• Must be performant and usable in real production scenarios

### Technical Requirements

Both materials must

• Be built as **clean, well-structured, optimized master materials** (not messy prototypes)
• Support **Material Instances** with the following inputs:
• Albedo / Base Color
• Normal Map
• Height Map
• Packed ORM map:
• R = Ambient Occlusion
• G = Roughness
• B = Metallic
• Be compatible with:
• **Unreal Engine 5**
• **Unreal Engine 4.27**

Please note the shaders should support Unreal Engines various rendering modes: raster/ray-tracing,Lumen, & path tracing.

• Be optimized for real-time rendering (reasonable instruction count and performance)

### Reference Material

• CryEngine Silhouette POM:

https://www.cryengine.com/docs/static/engines/cryengine-3/categories/1114113/pages/1048726

• Additional breakdown (SPOM + SSDM context):

https://3dnchu.com/archives/crimson-desert-spom-ssdm/

• SSDM research paper:

https://www.divideconcept.net/papers/SSDM-RL08.pdf

### Deliverables

• 2 finalized master materials (SPOM + SSDM)
• Clean, readable material graphs (well-organized, commented)
• Example material instances demonstrating usage
• Brief documentation or notes explaining controls and setup

### Ideal Candidate

• Strong experience with **Unreal Engine material editor and HLSL/custom nodes**
• Background in **real-time rendering techniques** (parallax, ray marching, screen-space effects)
• Familiarity with **CryEngine rendering techniques** is a major plus
• Able to balance **visual fidelity vs performance**

### Bonus

• Experience implementing similar techniques in shipped titles
• Ability to suggest optimizations or alternative approaches if needed

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• *To Apply**

Please include

• Examples of advanced shaders or rendering work
• Any relevant Unreal projects or GitHub links
• Brief explanation of how you would approach silhouette POM or SSDM in UE

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This is a focused, technical task — we’re not looking for basic POM. The goal is to achieve high-end, next-gen material fidelity comparable to modern AAA techniques.

If you can, please answer the questions

Question 1 (SPOM depth test)

How are you planning to handle rays that exit the heightfield beyond the mesh boundary?

Question 2 (Silhouette validation)

Will this produce correct silhouettes against the skybox, or only approximate edge fading?

Question 3 (SSDM reality check)

How do you plan to handle temporal instability and missing data outside the screen?

Question 4 (Unreal-specific constraint)

“What parts will require Custom HLSL vs Material Graph only?”