Product work | Range Shader
The solution for the last week overlay "issue" was to just use the Unreal Engine overlay material option, which allows to add a material on top of another material.
The range shader I made is created out of 2 parts:
The outline material
The outline was created mainly with the help of this tutorial, which does a very good job explaining all the whys and hows. I was planning initially to try to have both parts of the shader in one material instead of two, but after a bit of experimentation I realized it is not possible with the edge detection method used to create the outline. The outline shader had to be a post processing effect.
The overlay material
When it comes to the overlay part it was mainly experimenting with nodes until I reached the look I was after.
The tricky part was to figure out a way to allow for 3 different colors to be picked within the material instance. The engineer would later on link that to code for a color to be assigned automatically to a tile in dependence to the range the house that sits on it is. The quickest and most efficient way turned out to be using an "if" node. The node allowed me to compare a static value with 3 different variables and based on the result to pick a predetermined color for the shader.
The shader was shown to the art leader and to the the shader and texture artist and received positive feedback. After the shader will be implemented in the product by the engineer, I will tweak the colors and scale of elements to match the product better.
Product work | Water Shader
The water shader was created for the canal that will surround the city. It has the following functionalities:
Refraction
Ripples are created when the water touches another object
Depth and flow
Top layer vegetation build up
One of the issues I came across while working on the water shader was that the ripples were not functioning correctly when the water shader was applied to the canal meshes.
Since the ripples were working on the outside of the canal I assumed it was because of the closed space in the canal. However, when I used the water with a well mesh I got from Quixel Bridge, it worked correctly, so the problem has to be in the mesh and its UVs ()
Per general, when it comes to implementing the water in the scene it is important to note that the depth, color of the bottom layer and lighting influences the color of the water.
The water will have to be applied to a spline to avoid UV distortion and break of flow.
The general feedback received for the water shader was positive. The colors and scale of elements will be changed to match the product once the shader will be implemented.
Additional
Besides working on the product and the general discussions with the team, I also gave feedback to my peers, in particular to the other shader artist, Talitha, on the blueprint shader she was working on.
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