After The Storm (Environmental Effects)
Lighting and environmental effects to create a "not too long after a storm" feeling, using the Slums environment from Unreal Marketplace. In the hot, humid jungle the bugs come out as soon as the rain subsides, and the light breeze and slight drizzle can't keep them away from the lights! Windblown trash litters the slums as tarps struggle to keep water from seeping through the roof panels, flapping in the wind. The fresh rain wastes no time evaporating into a muggy, thick ground fog in this remote jungle village.
Lighting & all visual effects done by me. Every tarp, piece of cloth, and wire material was edited to include "wind masks" - I essentially added wind to each material and then baked 3 gray scale images into an RMA texture to mask the wind's intensity, so that parts of each asset that are anchored down, or pulled tight, close against other geometry etc. are not flapping around.
Created for Fabio Silva's Fall 2018 CGMA course "Visual Effects for Games" - final project.
Cinematic render of updated project
Rain/water drops; collision kills the drop and spawns a splash. Several variations used in the level to show water dripping off edges and draining out of points.
Light fixture modeled in Maya, textured in Quixel suite, wrapped up in a Blueprint Actor with a light and moths. Moths use a single photo source edited in Photoshop to give a 2x2 flip book for wing, body, and antenna movement.
Options panel for each light.
Is MH switches b/w cool/warm, with a random temperature variation per instance, and a random Z-offset per instance for the bugs particle. Some options effect how others change behavior.
Lamp shade mesh with materials and lamp shade Blueprint Actor (mesh, material instance, light, bugs) in level. Filament is an unlit emissive with nothing more than a blackbody and multiplier so it can be shut off with the light for on/off or flickering.
Lamp shade with Is MH, Has Bugs, Is Flickering, and Light On enabled. If Light On and Is Flickering are both enabled, the light flickers off.
Light with Is MH, Has Bugs, and Light On disabled, with Is Flickering enabled. When Light On is disabled, and Is Flickering is enabled, the light flickers on. Light intensity is still set and determines light intensity when flicked on.
Light with Is Sparking enabled and all other options disabled.
Smaller, more concentrated ground vapor. Utilizes Dynamic Parameter to control distortion and alpha erosion properties along a 2x2 random, non-blended subUV index to give the effect of water vapor rising from the ground and shredding in a wispy manner.
Windblown bags effect in the level, spawn rate increased to show movement.
Wind bags material preview. The if node that switches which bag is used had been replaced with a 0 offset to show both bags on the same preview plane. Textures were Photochopped from environment assets included in Slums level created by Chuang Ma
Wind bags material graph. The if node output from Dynamic Parameter "BagSelector" has been replaced with a constant 0 to show both bags on the preview pane. Dynamic Parameter allows for more variation and dynamic movement within the particle system.
Wind bag mesh with material & offset. This shows how the UV distortion and Simple wind node work together to make the bag feel light, airy, and thin by being sensitive to large and small scale turbulence in the air with swirling movement and ripples.
Windblown leaves from a tree, spawn rate increased to show movement. This increased spawn rate really suggest that the leaves' velocity should be much higher - as more leaves indicate a stronger wind. In this case the original movement is preserved.
Crumpled, windblown newspaper. Simply just a UVed plane repeatedly deformed in Maya in a mesh particle. Niagara would provide a much easier way to make the paper roll in the direction it's travelling for a more believable effect.
Simple crumpled newspaper mesh in editor.
Newspaper material. Crumpled paper normal map lends to any 'crumpling' handled by the mesh itself, subsurface passes more light through the paper than the ink, and constant bias scale can be used with diffuse to make the ink mildly reflective.
Various cloth meshes demonstrating the wind effect I added to all cloths/tarps. The 'wind mask' RMA texture is swapped in each material instance to match whatever mesh that material is applied to so anchored/taught areas are not affected by the wind.
This is essentially all I had to add to the base cloth materials in order to get the windblown effect. I exported assets and used Quixel to bake and paint a couple 'wind masks' that are switched out per material instance to match each mesh.
Before shot of vanilla Slums demonstration map, before I changed the lighting and Skysphere or created any effects. Slums project downloaded from Unreal marketplace and created by Chuang Ma.
Before shot of vanilla Slums demonstration map, before I changed the lighting and Skysphere or created any effects. Slums project downloaded from Unreal marketplace and created by Chuang Ma.
Before shot of vanilla Slums demonstration map, before I changed the lighting and Skysphere or created any effects. Slums project downloaded from Unreal marketplace and created by Chuang Ma.
Before shot of vanilla Slums demonstration map, before I changed the lighting and Skysphere or created any effects. Slums project downloaded from Unreal marketplace and created by Chuang Ma.