In each Borderlands game there is elemental damage, and characters who die when under elemental effects have a special death effect. We internally call this a tech death. While most of these are simple dissolves with an associated Niagara particle, we wanted something special for cryo deaths. The idea is enemies stay present but frozen for a bit while allowing body parts to shatter off. And, all of this needed to work agnostic of the gore system. It was particularly challenging but the result is one of the more enjoyable status effects in the game. Previous methods proved to be too memory intensive for the more detailed enemies in borderlands 4 so this time we created the effect by reconstructing the mesh in niagara particles and breaking parts off of this reconstructed mesh.
To achieve this I worked with a programmer (Manny Carrasquillo) and an FX artist (Anthony Damiani). My role in this was creating the prototype, and later the overlay shader and materials as well as getting some of the FX work functional initially.