IBY'S DEV DIARY

I've broken down the environment assets into a list: -Rocks -Skull Rock -Mountains? -Grass, Plants -Palm tree -Water system -Desert landscape that includes:     - Sand Material variation     - Moss Material? I was researching ways to make my own sort of stylised environment. I also made some modifications by making the skull waterfall appear as if it came from underground as a dungeon entrance that recently erupted from the ground and not as part of a mountain. But at the moment that's something that needs further research. After finishing the tutorial from substance designer I made some initial textures. I do plan on using these textures as part of the sand material for the landscape of the environment. I also hope to make it look similar to Journey's Sand.

I finished going through the basics of Substance designer tutorial. I think I more or less grabbed the concept of how to work with the software but I'm thinking of using Substance Designer to make initial textures like some noise and then use UE4 to complete the whole material. I could use the Substance plugin and its a great plugin but I prefer not to use an external plugin. I want to try and use UE4 in its normal form and I don't want to get issues later on. It's now onto making the textures for the environment. First, I need to make some Sand and rocks texture. So I will be focusing on that.

I've not worked with substance designer in a while since year 3 of BA Games Design Course. I never thought I'd need to use it because I prefer using the traditional sculpting/painting techniques to create the textures. After learning a good deal with UE4's Material Editor, the thought process of creating procedural materials can be transferred to Substance designer. It might also teach me something that I haven't learned in UE4's Material Editor. Anyway back to the matter, I need to relearn Substance Designer to create the material for the landscape in the Environment.  So I'll be following these tutorials as fast as possible:  https://academy.substance3d.com/courses/Creating-your-first-Substance-material/youtube-y8q6-tgQjZc

Last year I remember reading up on of one of the Blog posts on Simon Schreibt, Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag – Waterplane, where he explains how in Assassins creed Black flag the water is hidden when boats are overlapping the water plane. I was really curious how this is done so I thought I'd try this out for myself. I did some research on how i can do this and found a tutorial by Nilson Fernandes de Lima where he uses Stencil to mask out water for boats:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69YfV8ru-ZM&list=PLfJSXC5qE3FxxKvT2-l2CN6qTSvGdgVq9 I have managed to implement his method into the water system: Cube setup to custom depth stencil value to 8. When not rendered in main pass, it can be used to hide the water Plane. Material Setup for custom Depth Stencil if it's equal to the stencil value parameter then the opacity is set to 0 Settings for Stencil in the details panel of the object. Custom Depth Stencil Value must be the same as the material parameter ...

I thought it's about time to start working on creating the environment to showcase the water in the best way possible. It was suggested that I create this really cool Skull Waterfall environment concept art by Andrey Egorov: However, I will be using this concept as my initial inspiration and will be making my own iteration to the environment so it will not look exactly the same as the concept. It takes a bit of time figuring out and creating some of the features for the water shader. While I do this, I can work on creating the environment so I will be working on the water shader in small increments.

I used everything I've learned from creating the water and used it as part of the water. However, I had to modify certain areas of the map such as the Normal, Highlights, Colour and a few other changes. An extra feature I added was to vertex paint the opacity in case of manually hiding away certain areas of the waterfall. With some further minor modifications, It might also be used as River easily. During development, I was able to produce this nicer deep blue effect. I preferred that method more but it wouldn't make a convincing waterfall/river. Foam As mentioned in the previous post, I used the Vertex Normal along with Distance fields and Vertex painting. However, I made it so that the foam is distorted based on the normals of the river as having it like the sea shader would look weird because of its calm looking nature.