To add a little bit of movement to the overall environment I made simple blowing wind FX. It's a alpha texture that scrolls and wiggles through simply wind.
Coral Area worldbuilding
Work In Progress / 20 February 2020
Worldbuilding motifs of the coral area. Edge rock and dark rock blend into the coral in the first areas. Then later the coral has more of a vine spreading feel.
Coral level run through
Work In Progress / 18 February 2020
Run through of the level. Still WIP on worldbuilding and lighting. Added small rocks, material tweaks and got through world building on the Fissure area. Blocked in the Coral area but still figuring out how to worldbuild and vertex paint it.
Rocky Cliff
Fissure
Coral
Top down
Material Breakdown and Fissure Area
Work In Progress / 10 February 2020
Here is a breakdown of how my vertex displacement shader is messed up. This current version is meant to work with more natrual tileable textures. As every layer is worldspace and triplanar projected. I may make a variant in the future where the base layer has local UV space but all others are still worldspace.
Mater material graph.
A little zoom in on one of the channel setups basically all 4 are setup the same way.
Instance parameters for swapping out textures and controls like tiling, height/normal/spec sliders.
Example of painting the shader.
Also did another pass on general atmosphere light and colors. I want a nice contrast between cool blue of the water and fog and of the warmer sands and general gameplay areas.
Onto the worldbuilding end of things started on the Fissure area of the map. Which has a little bit of a different feel and different rock placement style than the opening rocky cliffs. The motif of this area is more jutted out spikey cliff rocks around the player areas and off in the water vista areas.
Rocky Cliff
The Fissure
It sometimes narrows in areas and the rocks are placed in a way to give a more aggressive feeling.
Rocky Cliff WIP
Work In Progress / 23 January 2020
First pass worldbuilding the rocky cliffs of the level. The other areas, the fissure and coral maze will incorporate this base this base look but with either added accent props or different styled worldbuilding. In general I also need to fix some light map errors on the rocks, haven't quite figured out whats causing the small black square/triangle light bake errors.
A little run through of the rocky cliff area.
Some various screenshots of the level so far.
Ground Materials Iteration and Small Foliage
Work In Progress / 21 January 2020
Did iterations and tweaks for the ground material set. These are mostly modified from Substances I made a while back, but weren't really tuned for the scene I had in mind. Just a lot of shape, scale, and height map iterations.
Added small twigs and shrubs for accent around rocks and coastal cliffs. With these done the basic ground kit is pretty much done and ready to propagate throughout the level. After the base look is done I'll start adding in the coral elements.
Ground Vertex Painting Visual Language
Work In Progress / 16 January 2020
Starting to figure out the visual language for the basic ground vertex painting. Basically paths and gameplay spaces has smoothed sand with some low opacity of rough sand variation painted in. On the edges of dark pocked rock and the scalloped rocks are rough sand that gradate out to smoother flat sand.
Next steps are to propagate this to the whole level. Then get back to more assets and materials. Maybe some twig bushes and sparse foliage. Then tackling some of the coral assets that reveal later into the level.
Vertex shader and level design.
Work In Progress / 13 January 2020
Creating a coastal type level with crazy dead coral stuff as juxtaposition. Using the Unreal 4 top down camera layout. Made a simple tile kit. Each tile fitting within a 1000x1000 unreal unit square on the grid. This is so I can quickly iterate and snap things together. The map denotes different zones and themes. With some reference and inspiration images for the creation of future assets.
With the simple kit pieces I grayboxed the level.
From this point on I worked on a vertex paint shader that is triplanar worldspace. This was so for most assets I do not need to worry about UVs or seams. This video shows how it paints 4 different materials while projecting triplanar and worldspace.
With the shader template done I can model without worrying about UVs. And it also means I can build a smaller amount of assets while getting lots of reuse out of it. Because depending on the textures used the forms of the models can change based on the height maps.
Tile Kit.
Rock and cliff kit.
Applying the vertex material and starting on figuring out basic worldbuilding.
With the basic ground kit and materials I'm starting to figure out how I want the materials to work together. Mostly a blend between 2 sand textures at varying wavy frequencies, a smoothed scalloped rock, and a darker pock rock. In general the smooth rocks are on the edges and cliffs, the lower frequency sand will be painted down in "combat" areas to be a bit more restful on the ground. While the higher frequency sand will be painted on the edges of tiles and rocks. Pock rocks will be scattered throughout to break up open spaces.
Exploring how edges will be worldbuilt as well as basic vertex painting usage with these particular textures.
