Technical Materials
During my time at 31st Union I was tasked with authoring and maintaining workflows for our various gameplay and ui systems. Below is a collection of an assortment of materials I authored for the Design, Systems, UI and Environment teams.
Gameplay Materials
Armor Pack Fill Master Material
This fully procedural (texture-less) armor pack material system was set up to display it's current armor charge via material fill; as well as supporting rarity types, material animation, and other requested visual / technical features.
In-Game Currency (ORA) Master Material
UI SDF Master Material
Technical UI/UX
Because of Project Ethos' unique game mode and platform requirements standard texture-based workflows would have required a huge overhead -- so a decision was made to switch to a fully procedural SDF based master material workflow.
Below you can see each step of the shader as I author it from prototype to finished system!
Step One: Prototype
So right off the bat I knew our primary feature request was a 0-1 fill mask to communicate how much xp you had accumulated / had left before upgrading to the next medal.
On the left you can see some initial tests (using textures) demoing how this would work & plug into gameplay systems.
Step Two: Feature Implementation
Once the prototype was approved, I moved on implementing the math required to support SDFs and adding each requested feature -- from visual features to gameplay features.
Below you can see how I'm blending each "feature" into the master material. The feature I am testing in the video is the angled texture-less "glint" animation.
Step Three: Asset Authoring
So now we have our Master Shader set up with all the requested & expected features. Now our next step is to create the Material Instances we need to start plugging these in to our UMG and in-world elements.
Below you can see me adjusting color values and visual features for each tier of medal (from Bronze to Diamond)
Step Four: Final Polish Pass
Now that we've set up all of our material instances the last step is adding our faction glyphs and submitting for final review!
Below you can see the final approved medal set!
