Materiels in Unreal Engine

I really enjoyed this lesson and found the process to creating the materials quite easy to follow along with. I already had some experience working with materials in Unreal but I learnt a few neat little tricks to expand my knowledge. In particular, I had always struggled with creating glass, but Pat took us through a very quick lesson on it to get me started, I didn’t think it would be so simple as adding a vector 3, 3 vector 1’s and changing a setting or two on the materiel itself.

 I found that working with constant vectors was a new process for me and discovered how powerful they can be and to adjust certain properties through multiply and add nodes was very cool. I also had no idea about using grunge textures to make quite significant changes to a materiel, in particular making a bright and shiny metal appear dull and brushed or slippery looking floor appear look normal and dry. A lot of the changes were simple experimentation with basic nodes to get varying results, something I had never really done before.

Anyway, here are the results of the lesson as spheres and applied to an environment:



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

World design in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Image
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a game set inside the mind of a Celtic warrior and depicts her struggle with psychosis. As the theme hints, the game is rather dark and filled with Viking style ruins and buildings and depicts many forested areas in keeping with Celtic and Viking tradition. Because we are inside the mind of Senua (the main character) there is a wonderfully crafted and unique setting that shifts and changes as Senua traverses her environment. Elements from her reality and her mind clash as the player progresses giving unique and interesting ways to solve puzzles. The world leans toward a linear approach in its exploration, with the player being able to progress in one direction most of the time. Levels can be confusing at times as there is no minimap or map in general for the player to gain reference, simply the players own sense of direction. This is a great break away from the overreliance on such methods in modern games and I feel that if Ninja Theory had im...
Read more

Kairo and Abstract Art

Image
After playing through Kairo (Richard Perrin, October 2012) I found that while it lacked a lot in gameplay (it was extremely confusing at some points and way too simple in others) some of the shapes I actually found quite pleasing. The sheer variety of abstract shapes that the creator managed to achieve with simple cubes was very surprising. However, in terms of abstraction I honestly believe Kairo represents abstract art quite successfully. All of the levels use minimalistic shapes to convey an idea or image of something recognisable to the player. One such example is the level in which the player finds themselves in a garden type area with trees made of intermittently placed cubes. Image retrieved from: http://www.electrondance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/kairo-garden-crazy-theory.jpg This level alone shows what can be created purely just by using cubes and while some of the objects of the objects can be hard to read or interpret, the skill of which they have bee...
Read more

Baked Lighting in Unreal

Image
This blog post will revolve around using baked lighting in Unreal engine 4 to create an interesting scene from purely grey materials. This exercise was a lot of fun and taught me a lot about how to utilise baked light maps from maya to give more detailed lighting on objects. I also leaned a fair amount about the lighting in Unreal such as using a plane in conjunction with a spotlight to reflect color onto an object from outside the scene. Here are some examples: This is the basic assets with no changes to lighting: This is where the light source has been changed to static. As you can see it gives a much darker appearance: Here I have increased the resolution of the baked light map to make it more detailed so the light can catch on more areas: In this shot I have placed a flat plane outside the widow with a spotlight facing it to reflect back some color and stronger light: And in the final shot I have added some color to the light source, some blue...
Read more