Creating iridescent oil

zombie420 · Mar 2018

I'm trying to create an iridescent oil-like material in unreal but haven't found any great documentation on it. It may be as simple as a substance texture but pie in the sky, I'd like it to react to the shape of what it rest on rather than just a simple, static texture.

Anybody familiar with this? Or can point me to a published tutorial? I'm not above purchasing one.

Obscura · Mar 2018

This was on the bottom of the first page of this subsection of the forum

http://polycount.com/discussion/141545/ue4-polarized-colored-reflections#latest

Obscura · Mar 2018

A less fancy but very simple and working way is this:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/jq/k80c2jhptf9h.jpg

Hope this helps.

To enhance the effect without actually affecting the surface normals, you can do something lik this:

Obscura · Mar 2018

Very hacky but I think this should be good enough for the most of purposes:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/z1/h1vurat6hc8x.jpg

The map that I called distribution map/ coordinate is a simple soft radial gradient.

If you want a more physically accurate result, get the shader from the guy in the another thread. You can also look up some references. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_rings
or:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridescence

zombie420 · Apr 2018

Hey @Obscura, wanted to say thanks for all the help. You've been dropping knowledge and pointing me to good references a lot lately. Given me a lot to play with it and I'm pretty happy with most of the results.

Unfortunately, you've been too helpful. So I'm gonna be asking you some more questions at a later time. Sorry you're so good at being technical :P

Creating iridescent oil

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