Simple Stylised Lava Cave Environment
polycounter lvl 7
I've been working on a bunch of assets in the UDK for lava sections of a cave environment for a project me and a bunch of others are working on. Everything you see here is created by me. It's composed of a fluid actor for the lava, particles for the fire and lava bubbles and two rock props for the walls (that have just been repeated a lot). Click image for video.
Replies
Minor crit: I feel like the lava bubbles disappear to quickly/jarringly. They just wink out of existence. Having a little overdone *pop* effect as the last bit of their cycle would help a lot in terms of ambiance, and visual interest.
Also a slow tex panner or rotator, or both could be of benefit to the lava surface to add to the sine undulation.
Thanks for the feedback!
[ame]
I also think it wouldn't stay so still, yet have waves and still cracks. The movement would cause some parts to split and sink and stuff. Though I have no idea how to simulate that.
http://forums.epicgames.com/forumdisplay.php?f=366
'level design and creation' forum is your best bet for this query.
I am not sure if this would work, but here goes: you want to go to coordinates --> texture panner (in the MAT editor) and change the value of either x or y, depending on the direction you want this to move in. Plug that into the UV tab on your diffuse, normal, spec, etc. That should work... it worked for an animated belt texture I have on one of my props.
As far as bloom or glow effect goes - take your texture and multiply it by a constant vector with a value of 5 or higher and plug into your emissive channel in the material editor- it would give you a glow effect. The bright colors will glow, the darker, not so much, which should work good for your lava texture. As an alternative, you can go to world properties and play with DOF (depth of field) - but be warned that that is a post process effect that gets applied to the whole scene. It works well for my level, but you might want to keep some things in focus.
Keep it up,
Gera
To make this look better, you should probably make the gradient more random (but tileable around the ring) and increase the contrast on the mask used for the LERP.
The textures will likely start to look bad all the way at the center, but luckily the center meter or 2 are one wobbly bulgy mass of visual noise, smoke and bloom.
You could probably add a sine on another sine to get fluctuating movement speed, and add another heavily difference clouded layer between the base cracks texture and the gradient to get those shines in the cracks, etc etc all depends on how complex you want to make it.
What I really wanted with the UV jiggery was an effect like the sun behind the Ellusive Man in Mass Effect 2, as seen [ame="
The texture seems to swirls and move. It seems likely to me that this is done by warping the UV coords on a tiling material! But how?
Normal Lava Texture
Adding UV Jiggery!
What I'm trying to do
So take your distortion normal map, mask the Red and Green channels, subtract by .5, then multiply by 2, this will expand the range of your normal map channels from 0 to 1 to -1 and 1. Then add the modified R and G channels to your UV Coordinates... you'll notice that you get a nice distortion. For better effects you can animate your normal distortion map.