[UDK] Zerg hive environment / shader work

Harbinger

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

BradMyers82

Looks really awesome! I don't understand what's happening in the one really large egg though. It looks sorta like a strange comic book shadow. I think it would be cool if there was a lot of slim and stuff in there too. Dripping stuff and little streams of oozing slime. You could make a lot of movement with that, and make the ground not so dry looking.

ae.

looking awesome dude! one thing about the video once you finish this scene would be nice to get some ambient sounds in there so its not silent would crank up the mood to this scene.

Boyo

Nice atmosphere, i like the softness of your scene!

oxblood

really looking good man

Rhoutermans

love it Maybe put some 'open eggs' in there as well?

Harbinger

Awesome, thanks for the feedback!

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.

RaPtoR_v9600

love it it would be great to see in distance some zerg units

Harbinger

Updated! I'm going to have to call this one done for now and shelve it, I think I need to switch gears and work on something totally different. I'd still love feedback if anybody has it though!

New video, moar sound, moar wet, moar pulsing!

http://vimeo.com/71786974

pixelpatron

Needs vert/volume fog on floor.

Harbinger

Pixelpatron, what do you mean by vert/volume fog? Vert as in vertex?

KartoonHead

I'd LOVE to see a breakdown of how you put this together, the whole thing looks really seamless. Fantastic work! One issue I take is with the fog you have in the tunnel; you can see where the sheets intersect with the walls. You should use a depth-biased alpha node to fade out the fog where it meets solid geo. Great fog resource: http://www.hourences.com/tutorials-ue3-fog/ (DBA is about 3/4 of the way down the page)

Harbinger

Thanks for the kind words KartoonHead! I actually am using depth biased alpha on both the fog cards and on the ground fog (so it doesn't clip into the eggs). I think maybe what you're seeing is the silhouette of the walls looking a bit too stark with fog right behind it? Maybe I can finesse the placement of the fog sheets so they always happen in front of a silhouette change. Is there anything in specific you'd like to see a breakdown of?

PogoP

This looks fantastic, Harbinger. Lovely stylised feel to it! This deserves a spotlight in my opinion.

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!

chrisradsby

Awesome work Really really cool work!

tadpole3159

Harbinger wrote: »

Pixelpatron, what do you mean by vert/volume fog? Vert as in vertex?

I think he means vert as in vertical. he's talking about this effect dry ice type effect
It's going to either look spooky or like an 80's music video :poly121:

Harbinger

Thanks for the feedback guys!

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!

KartoonHead

Harbinger wrote: »

Thanks for the kind words KartoonHead! I actually am using depth biased alpha on both the fog cards and on the ground fog (so it doesn't clip into the eggs). I think maybe what you're seeing is the silhouette of the walls looking a bit too stark with fog right behind it?

You're quite right there! I should have looked harder! I love the effort you went to getting those little critters swimming around inside the eggs, it really paid off. Many would have just been happy with a nice looking egg and some jiggly vertex deformation.