One of the responsibilities that I had in War of the patriots ( seneca mod project ) level was to make a high quality matte painting along with the windows displaying the huge scenery which made a huge role displaying the hotel scene in our mod. The shader for the matte painting had to work harmonically to present the scene in a sad, depressing and as much realistic and sleek looking as possible. The final result was 2 complex shaders for both the window and the skybox/matte painting displaying: moving fog, flickering lights for the skybox along with rain effect and distortion for the window shader.
Since the scene was very dependent on the one and only window that it had, It had to be a strong piece reflecting the mood onto the room. As I was doing the concept art I thought of adding fog and maybe if possible flickering lights onto the background, but the basic unreal shaders wouldnt be fit for this complexity so I had to customize my own and create a shader specifically for showing off all those flickering lights, in high quality with enough randomness that it wouldnt make it arbituary and fake. As I was doing the window shader, I started experimenting with the window and tried to follow my original concept to include rain in there. But with the time constraints that I had-1 week- to finish the window, skybox shader along with troubleshooting of every other artists shaders and synching the level together I came up with my own custome rain shader and after some polishing and tweaking with the help of "Sean Gurdon"-level designer" I was able to tie the whole thing together and pushed the technology that unreal3 engine offered to create a unique sceneary.
Visual effects:
After the level has been fixed of all bugs and we had the last week of tweaking and finilizing the look of the level, I spent more time fixing the scenery and window to give more umph and energy into it. I again went back to my original concept designs, and planned to include lightning streaks, dynamic lights and sound.
The best way to make the lightning effect happen was particle effect. Its cheap, easy to render, and has randomness.
The lightning particle's core is built on SubUV technology which allows different variations of images to be put beside each other on a map which would allow the engine to pick different pictures and randomly covers the mesh/particle points with these subimages. The first time i stumbled upon SubUVs was when I was working with UDK and importing speed trees that I made inside of the Speedtree modeller.
Rain shader
The rain shader that I've made for the main window in War of the patriots -seneca mod project- is a complex shader which creates moving distortion rain drops on the surface making the image behind distorted and with a good sense of direction and extra texture work I was able to create a unique look for the window shader which at the end tied up nicely with the lighning, dynamic lights and sound effects.
It consists of 4 sections of Diffuse, opacity, distortion and rain. THe shader is able to contain specular texture, power and emissiveness if needed.
The window shader on the other hand was very simple and straight forward to make. it consists of 2 main channels of emissiveness and diffuse. Emissiveness will control the lights and the glows that are happening in the background, in my case the city lights and the tower lights. And the diffuse map which will allows fog, and clouds to play their roll on top or under towers and main buildings creating a more realistic skybox or cityscape. The only problem I got to make the shader was the randomness and the lack of control over the flickering for the lights in the city scape.
Holographic displays.
The team working on the hotel level for "War of the Patriots" consisted of 4 artists and Amir as the level designer. As the story and the art direction were set, the asset list was created and along with it the list of shaders needed for each and everyone. Amir provides each artist with a set of basic and complex shaders which, artist friendly so they can work with and view their work inside of the engine as they model and texture. On the other hand some shaders needed to be made because of the Complexity of the materials and the importance of its need inside of the level. One of these shaders that Amir focused on was the Holographic displays. The mod consisted of 2 different types of holographics displays; static and dynamic. Each artist was provided an artist friendly version of the shader to work with.
There were 2 different type of static displays. Static wall displays; monitoring a single image with another one under it Bump offested either inside or out. Dynamic TV screen; displaying a tv screen that has been shot by a gun, leaving shattered glass, distortion and is now offline announcting a small message with "Investation ongoing in the middle of the screen. The shader for the TV consisted of 3 main sections of Diffuse, distortion and emissive. The most important ability of the shader was to create emissive textures that are ontop or under each other offseted with fake depth. The technology that has helped make this work was Bumpoffset, which will create an illustion of depth onto picrtures allowing them to look 3D. Along with a nice mask for distortion and beautiful gun shot textures the it will push the quality of this 1 polygon mesh screen TV to another level. And of course the bloody hand prints will create story and mood making the viewer to show more intrest of what has happened in the scene.
Scrolling/non scrolling Burn texture
Window, rain drops
The window shader started of as a very comlex translucent, reflection-refraction shader with working fresnal. As we progressed throughout the project the scene became more grand and good looking, and the only single window in the room was this massive glass window viewing the outside scenery of a sci-fi matte painting that I finished doing earlier for the project. The window asset was an important part to tie the whole living room area with the "outside world" and I was trying to think of a way to upgrade the look of the window either modelling wise or texture wise.
The final model and texture ended up to be completly different than what i had in the begining and I got a really good idea from a collegue to put rain drops on the window.
The shader now consist of 2 different normal maps overlaying on top of each other, one scrolling-rain norm map- the other static -the window distortion- working together to create a nice distortion effect for when the water drops or streaks are hitting the window. I started experimenting with Camera vectors and Screen position expressions to create a Fade when near camera function.
The UT3 package itself is a very rich source of amazing materials to disect and look closely at, it has been a great refrence throughout my studies on the engine.
Weather shader
Masking- RGB channels: R= snow G: ice B: water
1 single mask layer through out the whole shader to control and adjust normal/specular/reflectivity/water movement/ reflection, detail texture and detail normal.
The shader has its own separate diffuse, specular and normal map.
