Skylar & Plux - Environment/Technical Art
interpolator
Heya!
I've been itching to share some stuff that I've been working on with you guys!
September 2015 I posted this thread : http://polycount.com/discussion/148781/adventure-on-clover-island-3-5-week-student-project#latest
Since then we've started a studio, people have left, we've negotiated deals with publishers, and now we're nearing completion. ^^ Now we're down to 4 people with me being the lonely artist, hehe.
Every asset you see in these screenshots has been made by me, including shaders, lighting and VFX etc. It's not the highest quality art but considering the game spans 8 different environments, from snowy peaks to hot deserts, I'm happy with what me and the two level designers have accomplished.
This is very much a joint effort by everyone on the team to make the game look as good as we can with the little manpower we've got. Huge shoutouts to Leo, Kevin, Johan, Max and Eric!
These screenshots are from some of the Desert and Tropical areas in the game.
Here are some juicy gifs of the Water and Sand shaders ^^
I've been itching to share some stuff that I've been working on with you guys!
September 2015 I posted this thread : http://polycount.com/discussion/148781/adventure-on-clover-island-3-5-week-student-project#latest
Since then we've started a studio, people have left, we've negotiated deals with publishers, and now we're nearing completion. ^^ Now we're down to 4 people with me being the lonely artist, hehe.
Every asset you see in these screenshots has been made by me, including shaders, lighting and VFX etc. It's not the highest quality art but considering the game spans 8 different environments, from snowy peaks to hot deserts, I'm happy with what me and the two level designers have accomplished.
This is very much a joint effort by everyone on the team to make the game look as good as we can with the little manpower we've got. Huge shoutouts to Leo, Kevin, Johan, Max and Eric!
These screenshots are from some of the Desert and Tropical areas in the game.
Here are some juicy gifs of the Water and Sand shaders ^^
Replies
The year was 2015, I decided that it would be a good idea to have translucent water in Unreal Engine 4.5ish. We wanted to have a cartoony WindWaker/Rime type white rim around the edges of the water. The only way of doing that was either manually (no, thanks) or using DepthFade on a translucent material. Great! But translucent materials in that version of the engine didn't have reflections. Not being able to see the sun reflect on the water is really very jarring, so I had to fake it with maths. Still didn't look great though.
Here's an old breakdown of the OLD water, that's about a year old and looks like shit
[/spoiler]
It was when Epic implemented DistanceFields that I made the switch to opaque water. Using DistanceFields you can get pretty much the same result with the rim around the water as with DepthFade, only it's a bit more complicated to get up and running. Opaque was the way to go since the reflections are perfect, the performance hit is much lower, and more importantly we save ALOT of time. Because now we don't have to set-dress and create assets for underwater things. Win win win win
Alot of heavily stylized games such as WoW, Wildstar, Ratchet and Clank go for more realistic translucent water. Which is necessary because the player can swim. But in our game, much like in Windwaker, you can't actually travel underwater (you play as a cat-like creature after all) so it felt like a good fit!
Now to what you actually asked @Jack M. : I was, and am, a total noob when I did this. But my idea was that UVs are basically nothing but black/white gradients on X and Y? So if you can get a black/white gradient out of something, like, SceneDepth. You can stretch a Texture UV through the scene, right?
So for the water I had this soft lighter blue rim. Out of this I could easily get a black/white gradient around the edges of meshes intersecting the water. Easy peasy. Now just grab a panner and append you gradient into it's texture coordinates and BOOM, you got yourself some kind of shoreline wavey effect.
Hopefully that made atleast some kind of sense. UVs, they're good shit
@chrisradsby : Thanks alot!
@Ged : Thanks! We figured that if we could come even remotely close to something as huge as R&C, with a 4 man team. We'd be really really happy!
@Orb : Thank you man :O
Thanks for sitting through my ramblings, here's another picture from the Mandatory Lava Level
So, if I'm getting this right, you reference scene depth and mask out the red and green channels respectively. You then use those channels to warp the uvs of wave texture and use a panner to animate it? I imagine using distance field gradients would output a similar result then.
Besides the cool tech, your art's great. I'd love to see more!
I came up with it because of a custom fog shader I did, trying to resemble what they did in Firewatch. Having a 1x256 texture with multi-colored gradients and mapping it as I stated above, using SceneDepth as the Y UV.
So that was the theory behind it, sorry for the confusion. It's not the most advanced thing ever, but I'm proud I came up with the solution!
@blankslatejoe : Thanks! I'll do a breakdown of the rock shader soon. I only created a very small amount of rock meshes, about 4. That make up the majority of the playable areas. Trying to be efficient and get as much mileage out of the assets as possible. As much as I love sculpting in Zbrush, I only really got time for it at the start of the project ^^
Here's a shot from one of the snowy areas.
One of the problems we had to solve in the mountain area was separation of foreground and background, especially in a platformer where it's very important to be able to tell the distance of jumps etc. Hence the think blue fog!
Wildstr was a huge inspiration for the grass, holyshit that game is gorgeous!
I really like the art style and the overall atmosphere: as somebody else said already it reminds me of Ratchet and Clank ofc, but it has something from Sonic Boom as well.
I managed to find an E3 video from mid June and I really like the overall environment feeling while playing:
Good luck with it and keep u the good work !
@Sehyron : Thanks alot!
Some stuff from the Space Station!
Super simple shader with basically a mesh that's just a bunch of intersecting planes.
Since then there's been alot of changes to the character animations and I've been spending most of my time on that and VFX stuff. And some lighting polish. But hey, gotta show something!
Most of our later areas has a killbox in the shape of either Water - Lava - that kind of stuff. In one of the levels where wildlife has been destroyed by the evil villain the water is replaced by Oil! So here's a shader for that stuff!
I have some more breakdowns on artstation!: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ny2Be