IBY'S DEV DIARY

Object fades based on camera position This is a bit of a side-experiment i wanted to do. I found a Twitter post by Tom Looman where he made a character fade: Quick character fade test using Dithered Opacity Mask in @UnrealEngine 4.11 (with TemporalAA enabled) pic.twitter.com/XJ73XfPGiq — Tom Looman (@t_looman) April 17, 2016 I wanted to try figuring how to fade object while ensuring it keeps its lighting properties, like the way he made. From what I can gather from his tweet the material he used was masked which makes sense as it keeps all the lighting information. Also translucent would just look weird. He enabled Dithered Opacity Mask and Temporal AA along with some material Maths: @Scourged_Wolf @UnrealEngine Dither effect is just a checkbox (in 4.11) and material FX blends alpha, cam pos vs obj pos distance — Tom Looman (@t_looman) April 20, 2016 Here is the material setup: Material Setup using Tom Looman's approach. I divided it by the object ra

Distance Field Foam Vectortoradialvalue, DistanceFieldGradient used for U channel and DistanceToNearestSurface used for V. I thought about how texture coordinates worked and how VectorToRadialValue worked. Both being gradients in R(U) and G(V), I had a theory about creating coordinates based on using Distancetonearestsurface node as G(V) channel and have VectorToRadialValue or Distancefieldgradient node as the R(U) channel. I was initially going to use the DistanceFieldGradient node that I learned about when making the distance field flow map. This is because the node had that Texture coordinate look to it but it adds a lot to the shader instructions so I went with VectorToRadialValue node. I extracted and used maths for the R channel from VectorToRadialValue and it produced the coordinates I wanted. I then added this coordinate to the noise based foam I made earlier using Alex Vinogradov's approach. I later decided to add Distancefieldgradient node just to see if it pro

I was doing further research on distance fields and stumbled across distance field flow maps in the UE4 forums. I'm looking into adding flow maps as the final feature of the water surface.  However, it works a lot different from what I intend to create. I was going to use flow maps for vertex painting rivers. Distance field flow maps change the direction of the flow when an object is overlapping the water surface, thus producing a more convincing result. It might be an idea to combine this technique with the flow map I intend to make. Here is the thread for the distance field flow maps:  https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/47456-distance-field-flow-map

After completing work on the Gerstner wave. I remembered that there were water foams in the water system mentioned in Simon Trumpler's Blog. The foam uses 2  unique looking textures panning that uses a disk mesh however the Mesh UVs made the foam. I've also been looking at other water foams other artists have made. I noticed that Alex Vinogradov also produced the same result using a similar technique as Simon's method but with traditional noise textures. It produced a uniform result with the noise texture he used. Basically, we just spawning some meshes around object with random rotation and distortion and dissolving the texture with alpha erosion #gamedev #indiedev #UE4 #realtimevfx pic.twitter.com/UhDoS9zOz1 — Alex Vinogradov (@yarpoplar) June 28, 2018 You can see the full guide here:   https://www.artstation.com/artwork/20Kzy I recalled that Vectortoradialvalue is a node in one of my older projects that force distorts the texture Coordinate into