[UDK] Zerg hive environment / shader work
polycounter lvl 8
What's up Polycount? I've been working on this Starcraft inspired environment based on a concept by Mr Jack. My goal was to create as much movement through the use of materials as possible, I was tired of building static environments and wanted to try some new techniques. I've been staring at this so long I'd love some feedback from the PC community. So far on the list of fixes:
1) Tweak the specular highlights on some of the eggs.
2) Make the teeth/mouth orifice move
4) Eyes on the main zerg need fixed.
3) Stretch goal - add a Terran marine trudging through to help establish scale.
What do you think?
Video on Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/71209357
1) Tweak the specular highlights on some of the eggs.
2) Make the teeth/mouth orifice move
4) Eyes on the main zerg need fixed.
3) Stretch goal - add a Terran marine trudging through to help establish scale.
What do you think?
Video on Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/71209357
Replies
BradMyers82 - I re-worked the murky look to the egg "fluid" inside so it shows up better. I also gave the critter inside a bit more movement. Slime I'll have to figure out how to do... Oh, and I'm adding some creep effects to the ground in areas so it looks a bit more alive and wet.
ae. - Totally!
Boyo, oxblood - thanks!
Rhoutermans - As soon as I placed the eggs I wondered what it would be like to pop one
I'll post an update soon. I just found out tonight the free Vimeo account only let's you do one HD movie per week.
New video, moar sound, moar wet, moar pulsing!
http://vimeo.com/71786974
Again, I'd love to seee a breakdown of the scene. Specifically how you did the eggs blending into the terrain, and some material examples!
It's going to either look spooky or like an 80's music video :poly121:
tadpole3159 - I do have some fog rolling into the ground like that pic, a little more subtle though. I didn't want to make it look like Scooby Doo
PogoP - Nothing fancy for blending the eggs and ground. I relied on AO and lighting to blend the transitions. The rest was carefully sculpting in Zbrush. Spotlight? I'm flattered!
Chrisradsby - Thanks!!
My general workflow was to set up the concept art both in Maya and in UDK and match my camera position and FOV to somewhat match the painting. I did some of this type of work back in my film days and it was fun to dust off those skills. Translating the concept art to 3D meant pushing the FOV quite a bit. Then I just placed proxy elements for the walls and eggs and some of the other key elements until everything matched.
Here's a shot of the zbrush sculpt for the main area:
Thankfully I didn't have to go too crazy with detail as I used a couple of detail maps tiled across the mesh and blended them with vertex painting.
The eggs were the main challenge of this piece. I ended up using 3 different base meshes and got all of the variation I needed with a ton of material instancing, scaling and rotating. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to get the different larvae swimming inside. Each egg was UV'd mainly as one big piece with the center of the UV's being the translucent area. This would allow me to easily manipulate the UV's in my materials to get the desired "swimming" movements.
Here's a chunk of the master material for my eggs:
I created a custom material function that does circular UV motion. It ended up being very powerful, I can get anything from figure 8's to slow lazy back and forth movements to circles, all based on the parameters I feed into it.
All of that drove a custom flipbook texture of the larvae themselves. This was a blast to do! I dusted off a lot of old skills that I haven't used in a long time. Each version was quickly sculpted, rigged and animated in Maya. Each one had 64 frames and I rendered them using a zdepth shader, so that parts looked like they were deeper in the fluid of the eggs. I packed three variations into the RGB channels and used some switch parameters to control which one was used:
Finally, the other main key to the eggs was the vertex deformation work. I ended up using a type of squash and stretch movement so the eggs retained volume, mixed in with a little bit of "jiggle". That chunk of the shader looks like this:
If any of that was unclear let me know!