My submission for the 2017 Blizzard Student Environment Art Contest! Everything was concept, modeled and textured by myself over the course of four days! All of the assets you see on this page were made by myself. All screenshots and video where taken directly from Unreal Engine 4. If you have any questions feel free to send me a message on Twitter, @grossbloy.
Master Material Instances
Because of the tight time frame of the project, material optimization (and organization) was essential. The master material (pictured below) is what controls all prop and foliage materials in my level. Because of the variety of movement in my level, I also had to implement various parameter switches to control the vertex animation of each object (ie: Bobbing up and down, blowing in the wind, or rotating side to side).
Master Water Material
The master water material utilities a combination of panning normals and fresnels in order to fake transparency and depth on an opaque material. Once the base colors have been calculated, I mask out the edges of the objects using a clamped distance field map in order to bring in the color of the wake. The Gerstner Wave offset function was made based on a fantastic tutorial by Daniel Elliot.
BUOYANCY Material FUNCTION
After I put together my gerstner water function, I realized that all the objects I had placed in the water needed to match the movement of the water. In order to accomplish this, I created a buoyancy material function that's primary function was to offset an object's vertex position on the z axis equal to the amount offset by the master water material's gerstner function.
