Week 50 - Industry Review Cleanup Part 3

 For this week I mainly worked on finalizing the renders for my player VFX post and creating several of the video features for it. I decided to only focus on the player VFX as I find them to be more portfolio-worthy than any of the environmental VFX I've made. However, work on this was halted due to needing to render out the beginning and ending cinematics, as everything is run through the sequencer, nothing exists outside of Unreal in high quality.

Another part of this week has been tweaking the final hair mesh for renders in Marmoset according to feedback. I'm a bit worried about this one, as the final product I made was too realistic compared to the cartoon style of the cinematic for Common Art. As a result, I'll be finalizing it without any attachments, or at least minimal, to the cinematic it would be used for.

Week 50 - Thread Between Us, Final Submission

 For the last submission, I made some minor changes to Sol's hair model, adjusting the length of several strands and adding a bit more variation to the curl patterns.

Feedback as mentioned

Additionally, I made some slight tweaks to the base yarn mesh, including a long, coiled, string around the ball to be unfurled in the scene where the yarn trips Luna. Additionally, I added more topology to the strings overall.

Week 49 - Industry Review Cleanup Part 2

For this milestone I looked at cleaning and documenting the Regradable VFX that aligned with a Character Technical Artist. I decided to focus mainly on the VFX that targeted Eli, our main character, directly in one post. This would mainly focus on the:

• Eye shader
• Glitch damage VFX
• Sludge VFX

Eye Shader

Example of Eli's emotion changing with the animations

Debug version of how Eli's eyes work, it uses a face texture that moves up and down to dictate which emotion to display

Rendering for Artstation thumbnail, it ended up taking a Fortnite aesthetic, rendered in Marmoset Toolbag

Glitch Shader

This and the Eye Shader were the two largest shaders I worked on. This one was specifically meant to be used in instances of our character being damaged, and it overlays 5 different visual systems overtop of one another, including noise, glitch lines, chromatic aberration, pixelization, and a hue, saturation, & brightness adjustment.

These systems can be mixed-and-matched or used all together in specific material instances as the designers see fit.

Poison Overlay Shader

This shader was a late addition and basically is used to show some effect is being put on Eli as he walks through the sludge in the levels. Its relatively simple, however it uses a special trick for the gradient so that regardless of the world position Eli is at, the gradient always maintains it's percentage without relying on uvs.

Week 48 - In Plain Sight

Colour changing material for background characters, allows designers to change the colour of NPC clothing quickly

hair shader

consolodate both card-based hair designs and curve-based hair designs onto the same material allowing them to get maximum customizability on both

Work in progress hair for background npc