Planning Stage for the Environment

-
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.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Environment Showcase Concepts

-
Image
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.
Read more

Distance Field water foam

-
Image
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
Read more

World alignment (Tri-planar mapping)

-
Image
From reading the UE4 documentation, I found out that material functions are a bunch of nodes packed into one node. I figured out the Math behind how world alignment works by deconstructing and experimenting with the World Aligned Texture node. This node is one example of a material function. It is also widely known as Tri-planar mapping in substance painter. Material Function for Tri-planar mapping  This gave me the idea to make a block out material which can have grids, scale without texture stretching and change colours the way I want it to. I also wanted to add the functionality of animating the material. I did this by making some modifications to the World Aligned Texture material function. Modified Material function with comments to help understand which part is doing what. I found that substracting the WorldPosition from the Object Position will force the material to move along with the object and not have a weird scrolling effect whenever you move the object.
Read more