Tutorial - UDK Dx11 Tessellation/Displacement Icicle Material

Even though I shared pictures of my icicle material, I had quite a few people ask if I could make a tutorial video, so I gave it a shot:

Unity Nature Environment

Here is another project that I did over the past week or so.

This was actually an environment for a game being designed for (and by) children with muscular dystrophy.  The team developing the project wanted a high quality environment that matched their specifications.  The team was using the Unity Game Engine.  They have a blog documenting the development here:   http://79.170.44.128/i-dat.org/rosettalife/ 

A large chunk of the assets were provided for me.  All of the terrain assets (trees, rocks, textures, plant textures, etc) were provided for me.  I was responsible for creating layout out of the path and creating the terrain from scratch using their assets.  There were a handful of assets that did need to be created by me.

As previously mentioned, the project is being developed in the Unity Game Engine, which I'm quite comfortable with.  The company I work for uses the Unity Engine, and I've been working with it professionally for a few years now.

Here is one of the areas that players travel too.  I ended up modifying the waterfall assets fairly heavily, and I did the water at the base from scratch using my own materials.

An overview showing the terrain of the environment.  

A shot showing the path to the waterfall area.

The "fire area"  This is the first stop along the path.  I created the fire and smoke using Unity's Shuriken particle editor.

Part of the path I created.  The right side enters a more desert like section, while the left continues down the trail with a fork in the middle. The desert area is a sharp contrast to the nature design of the environment, so I did my best to create a smooth transition between both.  In this shot I created the sign.

The desert like "gravity area"  The rocks and the diamond were provided for me.  I made the columns and the circular stone pattern in the center.

City/Energy area.  I modeled the metal platform, but unwrapped it to work with provided textures.  Also I modified the shader to include cube mapped reflections.  I also created the cityscape in the background.

These are some of the assets that I needed to create for the environment.  All these assets were completed in a few hours or less.

Environment - Glacier Crash

Think I'm going to go say this one is finished.  

This is the first new environment I've added to my portfolio in over a year, and the beginning of a revamp of my work on there.  I definitely feel like I've improved since then.

This environment is based off a concept by Adam Brockbank.  

I had a lot of fun experimenting with DX11 features with this one, especially with the displaced Icicle deal.  Also made some nice looking displaced footprints in the snow.

I've already been spending the past few weeks thinking about what I want to work on next for a portfolio piece.  I'm going to jump right into another one today after work! 

Main Beauty Shot

Displaced Icicles on the 3 chains and steps in this shot.  Notice how none of the chains have the same icicle pattern.

I was really happy with how I got the snow to glimmer.  Bokeh DOF really pushes those specks as well.

Displaced Footprints.

UV tiling Using Params for Material Instances in UDK

Nothing big here, but a guy on polycount was looking for a way to instance a material in UDK and adjust the TexCoord's U and V scaling independently.  I never really thought about doing that so I had some fun for a few minutes figuring it out.  I came up with a really easy solution, actually:

UV Tiling Using Params for Material Instances

Just figured I would throw this up there in case anybody else was curious about doing something like this.

DX11 Displaced Icicle material

Showing off something that I'm doing with my current environment WIP.

When I started this environment, I was thinking a lot about tessellation and displacement...how its starting to be used more commonly in UDK, and how I think its likely that well see more of this in the next generation of games.  Early into the environment I picked myself up a DX11 card and started toying around with the new features.

Ive seen displacement mostly used to add blobby details to rocks and things like that, so I wanted to try something a little different.  I had the idea in the back of my head from the beginning of the environment...I thought it would be pretty cool to create Icicles with displacement and be able to paint them wherever I wanted with vertex colors.

Here is what I came up with:

Displaced Icicles painted on a chain

Displacement happens in World Space, so the orientation of the object doesn't matter, Icicles always displace downwards towards the ground.  Also, I'm using the Up-Vector to only allow bottom facing geometry to displace, so the top of the object doesn't sink inwards.

Being able to us vertex painting is really nice.  It allows you to break up the repeating patterns that you would otherwise get with several instances of an object in close proximity.  

Here is an example of me painting icicles on the chain in UDK:

Vertex Painting Icicles onto a Mesh

Already had several people ask how I set this up.  Its actually pretty easy.  I painted a height map for the icicles by hand real quick...just made circles that got whiter towards the center.  I set up the min and max displacement using a Lerp node with  height map as the Alpha.  I Lerp between this and having no displacement based on the Up-Vector, then I Lerp between the Icicle Displacement and No Displacement using vertex color.

Here is the snipped from the shader network that deals with the displacement:

Icicle Displacement Material in UDK

I had a lot of fun setting this up.  I haven't seen any other examples of displacement being used to paint details onto objects yet.....so maybe this will be of use to somebody who has a similar idea..or just wants to improve upon the idea.  I'm looking forward to seeing what kinds of things other people do with it.

Sci-Fi Surveillance Camera

Another little sci-fi prop here.

A surveillance camera.  Set up as a skeletal mesh.  First time I did anything with skeletal meshes in UDK..I had a lot of problems figuring out how I could pose this using bones in the editor.

Not certain, but this might be the last prop I do for the indie game for a while...  This gives me a good chance to jump straight into doing some portfolio work.

Sci-Fi surveillance camera.  My finished model on the left, and concept on the right (I did not make the concept)

Icicle Sculpts

Heres a few icicle sculpts I made over the weekend for the environment I'm currently making.  For the clusters of icicles, I gave dynamesh a try.  Definitely quicker to just sculpt the geo than to model it, felt very fluid.

Icicle Sculpts