WIP - Unreal Engine (Update #2)
A quick summary of various things I make in UE5 eg. Shaders, Scenes, Procedural Tools. I try to keep this up to date as I'm working. Nothing here should be considered final work. The current focus of is on a small test diorama integrating a variety of procedurally generated assets using a stylised, brush stroke focused art-style.
Brushstroke grass shader v3 - tis now using multiple meshes per grass blade/brush stroke with a vertex colour mask between them to allow for seamless blending with different directions, paint in and fade out
Update #2 - A moongate garden little scene for using my brushstroke foliage shader
Update #2 - Starting to testing adding some colour, I dont think tis working with the shadows, I'll have to work on this a bit further - probably separate shadow casting meshes
The current state (17 May 23) of my little diorama with procedural terrain, custom foliage, grass, terrain and building shaders and artist painted detail mask support on objects
Procedurally detailed terrain running as a nanite mesh. This is the base of my current test diorama and generated from a heightmap and manually placed cliffs from one of my past games
Wireframe view of the terrain mesh. As this is a stylised diorama im not pushing the detail very far but the procedural tools can go much further for realistic use cases
Close up the terrain with the brush stroke material applied compared to the previous material on the rocks
This shader is meant to convey the movement and texture of grass being painted in with a brush like in traditional paint media. I've tried a lot of different approaches, this particular one is using voronoi noise to blend between wind states
One of the earlier grass prototypes using no camera facing billboards but more geometry instead. While it had a nice volume to it the look didn't really fit with the idea of a traditional painting in 3d - plus it was 6 times the geometry
Testing the mask shader, this is a section from a building using tiled textures and then a 1 to 1 texture mask in the UV1 channel to control 4 different types of detail noises. This is based on the detail masks workflow from Halo: Infinite
Overview of the terrain shader - the shape of the brush strokes is varied using a noise map and vertex normals from the terrain to create the flowing feel of a painting
Overview of a previous version of the grass brushstroke shader
Foliage shader - this one uses camera facing quads and scrolls between different leaf textures, colours and positions as the wind changes
Diorama as of 8 May 2023