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 21 - Procedural Building Generator for Houdini Engine

A big part of our game's environment revolves around the crushing ecosystem of brutalist-styled buildings surrounding us. To avoid having our Level Designers and Environment Artist working overtime polishing pixels, I started looking into different ways we could procedurally make the buildings and slot in our different modular kit pieces in a way that was both: easy and fast.

Reference Images

A sketch detailing the concept of breaking buildings up on a grid system in the three primary axis with different pieces that can be slotted in.

For this project I ended up looking a lot at SideFX's Project Titan tutorials since they developed a plugin specifically for this purpose. However I found that through all the provided literature/documentation, a step very early on in the process is often overlooked/missed. This is most likely due to an update later without updating the resource content.

Resources:
https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/building-generator/ https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/project-titan-building-tool/ https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/labs--remove_inside_faces.html https://80.lv/articles/learn-how-to-make-procedural-building-generator-in-houdini https://forums.odforce.net/topic/54726-building-generator-from-image-houdini-beginner-tutorial/ https://80.lv/articles/setting-up-playground-generator-in-houdini-unreal-engine

Example of SideFX's plugin

The best resource I had on this experiment was the Project Titan tutorial file which allowed me to poke through how each option works. However, the two biggest take-aways from this file was the complex nature of the architecture being generated and the in-engine designs being made.

To align our style with brutalist architecture, the ornate style of the tutorial style is not necessary. Rather we will be focused on specifically blocky architecture, as such the beta version of this tool is primarily focused on singular rectangular architecture, with notes to expand in future iterations

Another aspect was the fact that all of the geometry being entered was focused on geometry being made in Unreal rather than an external program like Maya or Blender, this required 'normalizing' the input files and ensuring, regardless of input and size, that the files work together.

A complex version of the building generator.

The main problem of this complex version is in regards to optimization. The way the primary blockout is made relies on overlapping the two cubes rather than merging them together by the vertex. A big part of this generator is to allow the Level Designers to make buildings that best fit their need. If I have to provide base shapes for them to use, it is more restrictive than necessary. This causes the generator to create wall geometry in the inside faces which is unecessary.

Enjoy some errors

Week 14 - Procedural Foliage Methods in Unreal Engine 5

WIP Beauty Shots

Procedural Vine Tool in Houdini

In hindsight, maybe this as my first Houdini project was not a great idea. But then again, I've never been one for good ideas or healthy work mentalities.

Faced with the understanding that I had an incredible amount of R&D waiting to grab me over break as I tried to enjoy my break in peace, I decided to lean into the workaholic lifestyle and shape my Technical Art final to break some of those topics down. The biggest curiosity for me was how we could implment limited artists to make assets as fast as possible without losing quality or artists sanity.

As such, proceduralism and Houdini's open arms took hold. I decided to go with a procedural vine tool since it has the most potential to be used in the levels and covers areas that Speed Tree cannot, aka fitting vines to custom meshes.

An example of Parameters available in the system. I wanted to provide as much possibility for optimization support as that is a big concern of my team for the inclusion of foliage and city environments, these settings would allow for a range of polygong counts on the assets utilizing this tool. I also included some lesser-utilized tools, such as 'Growth', which will essentially dictate how much the foliage has grown up the asset, incase there needed to be tweaks in the future.

Assembling in Engine

For the specific hero prop of the church, and since this is a cinematic scene, it utilizes three different instances of the vine mesh: the base wood vines, a smaller leaf inner layer, and larger leaf outer layer. I am running into an issue in Houdini with getting the materials connect with the appropriate group, or even seperate into two seperate materials (vines and leaves) so I created a parameter on the options tab as a temporary solution (Full Bush / Seperate Leaf & Bush)

Scene Assembly

All 3D models are taken from Fab or are a Megascans asset with some slight editing to the church to remove the vine spawning from the inside of the mesh. I also made sure to put some time into lighting the scene appropriately so that all details could be fully seen and appreciated 

Foliage Master Material

I have to admit, this was not my initial idea; it was inspired by two of my mentees own personal projects - one made a master material for a small environment he was making to save time on making new materials for everything and the other has been doing a shader study on Breath of the Wild's grass - shoutout to both of them!

After digging through many AAA games, but most notably Wayfinder, I've noticed that many many studios use a small number of master materials to create all of their objects, instancing them with various parameters. I wanted to take a shot at this since I will be working with Regradable's Art Lead and 3D artists to develop further environment tools for them, including a procedural building generator to work with a modular kit.

In it's current state, this is very bare bones but allows for easy customization of foliage tools to the best of my ability. While I'm still working with the placeholder foliage I have the wind speeds set up on a Material Parameter Collection so they can be automatically updated as needed. However I do plan on updating this, or at least tweaking the formula as soon as I get further variations in.

Reference Board

For this project I knew I wanted to use this tool for Regradable (check out my other work for that here) which takes place in a futuristic dystopian city, which immediately took out the most fun option for scenery haha. As a result, I took inspiration from a buddy playing through Red Dead Redemption 2 and my favorite region, West Elizabeth, a region taking a lot of inspiration from Colorado, northern California, and the panhandle of Oklahoma

General Resources for this Project

How To Make Landscape Layer Materials with Natural Height Blending in Unreal Engine 5

HOUDINI 101 - 10 - Organizing Node Networks

Beginner PCG Tutorial | Unreal Engine 5.4

Optimized Stylized Grass texture by VFX Therapy

Project Titan Ivy Tool

Current Critiques/To-do

• Better naming for parameters - i know what they mean, but test subjects (aka random people in the cohort) do not - that is a problem.
• Material difference between vines and leaves
• Add more variety of plants outside of daisys, spruce_tree_01, and a vine texture from google

Caden (UCF GaIM Alumni)

• I don't think the lights inside should be flickering, it looks like a bug and is otherwise unnoticeable. I'd just remove it
• The depth of field causes a great deal of issues with certain parts of the foliage that should be in the midground, but for whatever reason appear in the fore / background because of the blurring
• your composition is good, but I think the actual model for the church is somewhat lacking. I can't put an exact finger on it, but it somehow seems out of place / noncontiguous with the rest of the environment. I blame the detail of the ivy - maybe some more grunge on the church?
• I think that, while the scene doesn't appear static, I think it is missing some points of intrigue beyond just the church. Maybe some particle systems of bugs or god-rays could add some interest

Chandler (Cohort 22)

• The ground texturing feels quite flat. It could be from the DOF but i think it could be pushed further regardless. If you're unwilling to push higher fidelity on the landscape mat (which is fair) then i'd up your foliage actors in general, the church is being overtaken by vegetation so it's make sense that the surrounding area is quite consumed by nature im thinking more of the context of the scene here

Week 13 - Studio Logos & R&D Outline

 

Logo Vectorization

Current Research & Development

Current R&D Prompts to research based on feedback from 11/20/25 Art Style Guide Presentation

- Splines for the arms

    - How would this interact with the rig on the model?

    - What is the best way to texture this?

        - Material with tiling uvs?

        - Shader with world position?

    - Cheryl has a vine-arm rig, would this be fine to use as a base or do we need to tweak it?

- How does Unreal 5.4 Post process material changes affect the shader on a numerical level?

    - Is there an easier way to tone down/bring up the emissive intensity of neon signs in side of the scene depth fog without affecting performance?

- What are the steps and best processes for mimicking the shadow look of The Long Dark

- Is there a way to procedurally assemble buildings utilizing Houdini?

- How do-able is procedural movement for multi-legged creatures?

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.

Week 12 - Art Style Guide

Lighting / Shader Research

One aspect that is keeping our team on edge is how the final game will look in comparison to the two main contemporiaries we're following: Firewatch and The Long Dark. To better research this topic, I decided to make a lighting scnario to better mimic and extrapolate what aspects of these two games we want to take inspiration from. I utilized POLYGON's Sci-Fi City Pack

Environmental Design

Rich Pocket in Poor Area (Rich Business/Warehouse with rich/fancy establishments near it, surrounded by poor buildings) - No Nature versus Nature

I continued to use the POLYGON's Sci-Fi City Pack to create a version of the environment in the lower sector with a pocket of the rich upper crusts invading. These scenes were meant to focus on how we could visually convey the difference between the two communities. The lower sector was focused on brutalist architecture as well as taking inspiration from street vendors and what kind of props might be outside their stalls.

The second version involved introducing small bits of nature to the scene, within Regradable, nature isnt taking over the land, but rather being slowly reintroduced into a world that forgot about it. As such, unlike games like Horizon Forbidden West or The Last of Us where nature is reshaped into human communities or retaking the land, we are seeing it in it's infancy.

Movement VFX

VFX - Movement - Motion lines or motion blur

For this VFX theres a lot of different routes that can be taken, in this instance I wanted to focus on the three aspects of the game that really stood out to me: the fast pace movement of the character, the passive nature of our character, and their primal connection to nature. During our ideation phase, the idea of leaning onto butterfly/moth imagery with the transformation from caterpillar to caccoon to butterfly representing the journey of our character.

Core references / Reference video