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Unreal Materials

Material Exploration: 2

With these next experiments I aimed to create usable materials, these were considered my “Advance Materials” for my university assessment.


Dynamic Liquid

I chose to make a master liquid material which could have multiple uses. With different values, a user could use it to emulate; clear water, murky water, molten metals, viscous liquids, swamps etc.

Users could manipulate, metallic, opacity, roughness, colour, ripple speed/frequency, position offset amount & normal mask intensity.
Playing with these variables I was able to emulate a number of liquids!

Take a look:


Cloud & Sky Material

With this material I wanted to it to be able to be used on cloud objects, in a skybox or as a flat plane roof.

I struggled to satisfy all these requirements, but managed to get a decent material together with limited user control. I used a transparent base and ran a cloud texture into the opacity and tinged the edges with colour to resemble a sky.

Skybox material addition

The variables exposed allowed the user to play with direction the clouds would travel, how much the material would ‘wobble’ (to give a malleable effect) and how intense the cloud colour/shine was with a “light refraction” scalar

The best use case for this material was on a flat face, shown in the video below;

However, made into a skybox still produced decent results!

I added in the ability to change the sky colour which produced some interesting results…

Doom Skies!

This entire foray into materials was extremely interesting and shone a lot of light on the intricacies of material design.
It’s something I definitely want to be diving deeper into.