Tech - Week Four
Following on from last week we have still had our focus on materials this week. I have managed to get the Ocean shader working to a point in which it is workable for what we need it, as well as working on shaders that use vertex painting to blend materials to add additional detail otherwise difficult to add.
The ocean water shader proved to be a difficult one to get right, as I was trying to keep it as cost effective as possible. To do this I have only used 2 texture samples and instead opted to use a combination of sine waves to create the displacement map. This has led to problems as it makes the waves obviously repeating but I feel I have managed a good balance between the repeating of the wave pattern and not overcomplicating the shader by adding more and more layers.
However using maths in the shader to create the wave pattern meant it was easier to add water foam at the peaks of the waves which has added an extra level of detail to the water that I may not have previously been able to add and keep it within the restraints. The water is working well for us now but I may go back to it at a later date to try and further optimise it and try and reduce the repetition on the wave form even further.
After I finished with the ocean water I went on to creating a cobbled floor material. We wanted it so that it was easy to add detail to the floor and soon realised that vertex painting the detail in was the way to go. After baking the base normal, height and AO map in 3ds Max I was able to use Substance Designer to create all the maps and masks needed to setup the material in engine. I now works so that you can set the base griminess of the cobbles in the material instance and then paint in both moss covered cobbles and puddles onto the floor. Using the height map edited in SD the puddles blend into the gaps between the cobbles and is all the parameters to how the water forms are exposed making it extremely versatile and editable on a case by case basis.
Taking what I learnt from making the cobbled floor material I have also applied it to the tarmac material and made a vertex paint master material which allows the artist to input any textures they have made and a mask to paint up to 4 different materials from the one shader without having to do any of the setup.
Going into the next week I’m going to be moving my focus back to the blueprint tools and getting the modular building system ready to be used in the demo level. Kit is working on modelling the modular building pieces and after the next two weeks I hope to have the tool ready so that when he has done those he can use it with his models straight away and continue building up the demo environment. To make sure that it’s useable by then I will be opening it up for testing externally and getting people to test it and hopefully break it so that I can fix anything that needs it before we go about using it ourselves.
