[Utter Newbie] - Looking for help on shaders!
Hey,
I'm a second year university student, and as part of the new group project, been tasked with creating a post-process chain and shader materials to replicate a piece of artwork for a vertical slice of game play.
In short, I need to try and replicate that image, but in 3D, in UDK.
I'm completely new to the technical aspect of both shaders and post processing as a 3D artist, any links/tutorials/documentation anyone could point me towards would be super helpful!
Cheers!
I'm a second year university student, and as part of the new group project, been tasked with creating a post-process chain and shader materials to replicate a piece of artwork for a vertical slice of game play.
In short, I need to try and replicate that image, but in 3D, in UDK.
I'm completely new to the technical aspect of both shaders and post processing as a 3D artist, any links/tutorials/documentation anyone could point me towards would be super helpful!
Cheers!
Replies
What you can see here is that things has outline, the lowest shadow tone is around 0,6, it has a fabric like pattern, and the "textures are really simplified, almost just flat colors.
So...the "flat" look of the textures can come from the textures themselves, just paint in this style
Outlines can be done in 2 ways, one is a post process effect that use sobel edge detection. The another solution would be a duplicated mesh with black color, and inverted faces.
The color/shadow value setup can also come from the materials (adjusted curve of the phong shading), but you can use color corrections too , which is a post process effect.
The fabric pattern can be done with a post process, its the simplest part of the whole thing, you just need a small grayscale tiling texture.
-create a post process to manage the black outline, I'm thinking this over the alternative as some of the meshes we'll be using are fairly dense (beyond my control unfortunately)
- Paint textures flat; would I bother with any high poly bakes? I'm experimented using flat colour with a normal map and it doesn't quite match the style.
- I'm presuming I could control the lowest shadow tone through a post process material?
- I also notice there's practically no lighting information (or shadow casting, rather) - would I just manually disable 'cast shadows' for lights in the scene?
lowest shadow value thing - yes, use a kind of color correction or simply use emissive in the material as an ambient color
no shadows - yes, just disable it
"Paint textures flat; would I bother with any high poly bakes? I'm experimented using flat colour with a normal map and it doesn't quite match the style." - the texturing style can be similar to what borderlands used, you just need to simplify more.
"doesn't quite match the style" the curve of the phong would help to make the shadows have shorter gradient. you need to take a look at custom lighting.
Thanks!
As for lighting, it's difficult to get an idea from the image of how it should work - there's no lighting in the environment in terms of shadowing, but it looks like there is on the main character there.
I suppose that could be done by using a light vector or something similar in certain materials where gradients could be added to suggest shadow.
Certainly not going to be easy, and unfortunately I appear to be alone on my team in the task of looking into it all. Wish me luck!
So here I've just looked at what I might need / things to be aware of.
And here I've tried to add it somewhat to a UDK file.
I'll tidy these up, I'm just trying to see if this can be done fairly quickly as it will inform the whole art production process and other teams have to be notified.
Cheers!