Week 12 - Shader Experimentation

 Lighting / Shader Research

Continuing last weeks assignments, I was tasked with playing with different ideas for how our game's main shader could look.  For this experiment, I continued the scene I made last week and worked on making a shader to utilize scene depth fog so our team can programatically set how foggy the scene is without affecting the overall lighting through the exponential height fog.

Unfortunately Unreal 5.4 removed one of the key settings for post process materials, 'Render Before Tonemapping' was removed, as such it breaks a lot of the previous tutorials. You can see some of the examples of how this changes the visual look of things here.

Scene Depth + Pixelation Shader

Overall the shader complexity is relatively low, only showing red on overlapping smoke particles in the distance and the transparent glass on the police car.

Overlay Material

The overlay material was made largely in concern of emissives within the shader, as well as the effectiveness of  highlighting objects while the scene is heavily obscured.