UNREAL ENGINE 5
BLENDER
Through this project I explored Unreal Engine's Substrate Slab BSDFs and how these new shaders work in combination with traditional Parallax Occlusion Maps, World Space Operations, UV Animations and Vertex Animations.
Furthermore, I gauged the Shader's performance at different optimization levels to determine it's viability for real-time applications.
This creature is based on the following 2D Concept by Dave Melvin:
MATERIAL FEATURES
SUBSTRATE PARALLAXING
For the parallax effect I used parallax occlusion mapping in combination with substrate shaders which allow for using two BSDFs layered by thickness.
I created two different Normal Maps: Surface and Internal, then parallax mapped the internal layer by a specified substrate thickness to achieve the internal organ look.
The same technique was also used for the emissive layers.
Surface Normals
Internal Normals
Surface Emissions
Internal Emissions
VERTEX ANIMATION
For the breathing Vertex animation I used a hand-painted mask with a sine wave multiplier and additional time period as well as intensity parameters to achieve a frog-like expanding membrane look.
Breathing Material Function
WORLD SPACE IRIDESCENCE
For Iridescence I used World Space operations to lerp a Hue Shift based on Pixel Normals and Camera Vector with the Base Color, this gave me a subtle Oil-Slick Aesthetic which covers the creature's skin.
EMISSION MODES
PULSE
FLOW
For the multiple internal layers, Besides Parallaxing I added two effects, Pulsing and Flowing. For Pulsing I simply animated the intensity of the Emission Map with a Sine wave. For Flowing I rotated a Tileable Texture over time as a Multiplier for the Emissive Intensity which gave me a smooth flowing effect throughout the internal emissions.
To parameterize the effects I added a switch to select between the two behaviors or even combine the pulsing with the flowing.
ANIMATED EMISSION LAYERS
The surface layer consists of 3 Kinds of emissive behaviors:
-
Static Tail, Ear and Arms Emissive
-
Breathing Throat Membrane Emissive
-
Micro moving stars-like dots Emissive
To achieve this these three effects I used different textures with different operations being applied on them, then these operations were added to combine in a material function.
The static emissive is added last as it is.
The breathing throat membrane texture is localized to the throat only and is multiplied by the same sine wave as the vertex animation displacement mask.
The micro dots are painted evenly and then are multiplied by a tiling rotating noise texture to give them the illusion of random generation across the surface.