Tech - Week Three
- Feb 2, 2015
- 2 min read
I started this week by getting to know substance designer and how it works. Apart from doing the very basics in 3ds Max I have previously only worked with one other node based material system (Unreal Engine). But it didn’t take me long to work out. I quickly realised how powerful and versatile a piece of software substance designer was and was able to completely procedurally generate materials without the need for sculpting or baking and information. I took the first part of the week to learn this so that I wasn’t going in completely blind when working on the materials for the project. In that time I create a substance for generating bathroom tiles not the most relevant but as an exercise was unquestionably useful in learning my way around the software and what its strengths and limitations are.
Example of tiles made from substance. More at:
My main focus for this week was to complete 2 materials, ‘Wire Mesh fence’ and ‘Scaffolding Fabric’, and start the Ocean shader in UE4. For the 2 materials to be complete they had to be fully working in engine with parameters exposed to make them as versatile as possible.
Unlike CryEngine, Unreal Engine currently doesn’t have a default water shader. This meant that we had to make one. But doing this has its advantages. It means that we can optimise it to better fit our needs. I have never made an ocean shader before so I started with researching into what other people have already made and looking into how they went about tackling it and what produced the best results. Most water shaders are done by panning Normal maps over the top of each other and using a height map to get the displacement of the waves.
I wanted to make it as optimised as possible so reducing the amount of texture samplers used and keeping the amount of instructions down to a minimum was key. I have a good understanding now of how I’m going to do this and have done some experimenting but is something I am hoping to get finished at the start of next week. Next week is dedicated to finishing the Ocean shader and working on all things vertex painted. A way we can add layers of detail not possible by just applying just a single set of textures.
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