Game Development Collection

REAL-TIME EFFECTS

CHTHONIC LIGHTNING

For this personal project prompted by the Riot Games Creative Contest, I hoped to achieve a real-time effect that conveyed a snappy aggressive impression. The idea is that chthonic forces are utilized to generate two separate areas, filled with opposing charges. This way, a credible imitation of the way lightning works is replicated and a relatable phenomenon is achieved. The practical purpose of this effect would be to visualize a damaging area of effect ability that has a hybrid theme related to both 'lightning' and 'underworld'. The style is heavily inspired by the works of Alex Redfish.

This project took me approximately a week to get to the current result. It is a testament to all the exercises and research I performed during last summer in context of real-time effects. I am quite happy with the attained timing and the flipbooks that I drew.

The majority of the meshes used for this effect were generated in Houdini to maintain a non-destructive workflow and to speed up the process. Please do check out the break-down of the effect for further information regarding the process, the more technical aspects and components of the effect.

Gabriel (Gabi) "Nibilli" Boileau gave me feedback during the polishing phase. Their feedback helped me to get the polish to the next level. For this I am most certainly grateful to them.

Main Shot (With Projectile)

Main Shot (Process)

The cracks were achieved by combining three components: the main fractured rocks, the cavities in between the rocks and the rims of these broken pieces of earth.

Each phase of the effect requires a different crack texture. These were grey packed into one texture file.

The same counts for the veins. Each phase demanded a different way of modifying the emissiveness of the veins. Each version was also assigned to a channel.

The rim mask's main purpose was to prevent using any real-time lighting calculations. I wanted to challenge myself to be able to create the illusion of the bolts emitting light on the rock's edges without the use of actual light.

Generating the mesh that corresponded with the cracks of the texture was quite crucial. It would support the effect on so many levels. Houdini allowed me to automatically adapt the mesh each time I changed something about my crack texture.

Three different types of lightning were used to convey a different type of motion and/or interaction between elements. Each type has its own flipbook.

Another type of lightning effect flipbook was created for anticipation and blending purposes rather than the more explosive nature of the previous set of lightning flipbooks.

As is custom in real-time effects, dissolve maps play a great role. Here are a few of the ones I used. My main concern with the dissolve maps for this effect was to maintain the snappy and aggressive tempo and shape.

HERA'S LAMENT

For this personal project, I wanted to achieve a soft soothing impression. My initial source of inspiration was the fate that befell upon Argus Panoptes. According to Greek mythology, this many-eyed giant was slain during his service to Hera. The Godess immortilized her loyal servant's eyes in the feathers of the peacock. The main idea behind this effect is that the decal invokes the power of Hera. In context of gameplay, the purpose of this effect is to visualize an area of effect healing ability.

This project took me approximately a week to get to the current result. It is a testament to all the exercises and research I performed during last summer in context of real-time effects. I am quite happy with the achieved colours and the layering.

A while ago, I designed a character concept based on the above-mentioned mythos. Imagining this character in a gaming scenario allowed me to take decisions a lot easier and work in a much more goal oriented fashion.

All the textures were created in Photoshop. The majority of the meshes used for this effect were generated in Houdini to maintain a non-destructive workflow and to speed up the process. Please do check out the break-down of the effect for further information regarding the process, the more technical aspects and components of the effect.

Jason Keyser and Gabriel (Gabi) "Nibilli" Boileau gave me feedback during the process of making this effect. Their feedback helped me to get the effect to the next level. For this I am most certainly grateful to them.

To create the misty suction effect, I manually distorted the UVs of the disc mesh by moving the vertices once the unwrap was defined. Once combined with a proper dissolve map and well timed UV-animation, the perceived suction effect manifests.

There were some key points throughout my effect in which dissolve maps didn't do the job the way I intended to. So eventually flipbooks needed to be created for specific purposes.

By separating the decal into components, I would be able to have much more refined control over the colours and animations.

Pushing the theme of Argus and Hera, I tried to manifest shapes of eyes during the dissolve of the burst of mist at the climax of the effect by means of this dissolve map.

Some of the textures I created and used in this effect.

COZY WATERFALL

The moment I saw the mesmerizing 2D animation of Quentin Cordonnier, I immediately felt the urge to reproduce this as a real-time 3D diorama. Drawing such an animation scene manually can be quite time consuming and requires a certain amount of skill in order to create it efficiently. My main focus during this personal project was to find out how I could enhance the speed of creating a similar scene by making use of the 3D skills I accumulated during the last years in context of game development. The whole process occurred during the little free time I had over the course of a couple of weeks.

All the textures were created in Photoshop and/or Substance Designer. The majority of the meshes used for this effect were generated in Houdini to maintain a non-destructive workflow and to speed up the process. Only the rock mesh was made in Maya due to the importance of the silhouette of this mesh, since it would be reused for all the rock shapes in this small scene. Please do check out the break-down of the assets for further information regarding the process, the more technical aspects and components of the waterfall scene. The effects and the composition of the created assets were realized in Unreal Engine.

Main Shot Stylized Waterfall

Both Photoshop and Substance Designer would be utilized to speed up the phase of iterating the hand-drawn flipbooks. The main shapes (the three flipbooks on the left side of the image) were drawn in Photoshop and exported into three separate image files. Afterwards, these image files were linked into Substance Designer allowing me to apply the desired post-processing automatically. This saved me a lot of time trying to redo all those steps manually within Photoshop whenever a change would be made to the flipbooks. 

The post-processing allowed me to efficiently create gradients within the drawn shapes. These values allow me to create masks within the shaders in Unreal Engine, which can be utilized for colour variations. In the demonstration above, you can see the mask edge being tweaked. While the application in these droplets remained quite simple, one can take this method as far as one wishes in order to generate quick variations within the main hand drawn shapes. Another benefit is the reduction of number of textures utilized. If this method was not exercised, additional textures would've been needed to create those inner shapes.

Mosses are contained in the rock shader and are manifested by means of a texture and a gradient. The gradient is generated through combining the data of the bounding box of the mesh and the subtraction between the absolute world position and the object position. The resulting gradient is then plugged into a smoothstep node with the exposed parameters necessary to create the results in the video above.

The main idea behind the waterfall effect is UV scrolling, similar to a lot of other real-time effects. Textures are moved along the UV of a mesh. The textures containing these waterfall main shapes are created by means of three separate textures that are packed into one file. Just like with the droplet flipbooks, these shapes are first drawn in Photoshop. Afterwards three images are exported and linked into Substance Designer. This allows me to apply post-processing and other modifications to the shapes without slowing myself down when tweaking the source image files. 

3D ASSETS

PROCEDURAL MINARET GENERATOR

This project was one of my first dedicated efforts into creating a procedural asset. The objective was to create a procedural tool within Houdini that would be able to match the received references as closely as possible. I tried to learn as much as possible during the process by implementing a new mechanic into the generator per reference.

Learning Houdini takes quite some time. I learned a lot of the fundamentals of procedural 3D modeling and more during the process of creating this tower generator. The amount of time spent really helped me to cultivate the reflexes necessary to use Houdini in a quick fashion. It really opens your eyes regarding how much faster one can become by implementing non-destructive tools in your workflow. Going through the process of building up such a tool even gave some insights regarding why 3D modeling softwares behave the way they do.

These are some of the towers generated with the procedural tower generator.

Breakdown First Minaret
During my first attempts at generating a tower resembling the first reference, it became clear to me that I needed to have some kind of visualization during the use of boolean operation.

Breakdown Second Minaret
There are probably easier ways to accomplish the same results. However, I still wanted to implement the L-systems because I wanted to learn more about it.

Breakdown Third Minaret
In the end, the goal is to be able to implement Houdini into your existing workflow. So I tried to find a way to insert some of my meshes created in Maya into the tower.

Breakdown Fourth Minaret
Curves were one of the elements I really wanted to understand and utilize in my tower generator.

Breakdown Fifth Minaret
This last reference was basically a combination of almost all the towers before. All the features needed to be utilized in one way or another to achieve the target reference

CORRIDOR 99

Corridor 99 revolves around a passage room in a future mining facility. The majority of crew members suddenly disappeared a short period after an ancient artefact was excavated from the depths of our earth. This corridor is the last room before the lift that carries the user to the mentioned excavation space.

Modular workflow was the main focus of this project. Both meshes and textures needed to be designed in such a fashion that their potential for reusability was maximized. Completing the level with as less components possible while still maintaining a high quality of variation and credibility was the major line of thought held throughout the whole process. My personal approach was to implement a double modular workflow by creating some key-components that most items related to the theme have in common. Afterwards I would assemble these parts into blueprints that I could tweak and instance easily.

All of the trimsheets were made with Substance Designer. It was my first time I used this software and it really opened my eyes regarding the possibilities of non-destructive workflow in context of texture creation.

The main architectural shapes and tendencies were heavily influenced by one of the works of Michael Oberschneider.

Lift

Recording Environment

Main Shot

Main Shot Process

Environment perceived from destination point

Potential interaction element in the environment

While there are three dedicated trimsheets, the other textures have been pushed to their limits by using it the same way trimsheets are used.

Modular Mesh Components

These are examples of some of the blueprints assembled by means of the modular mesh components.

PROCEDURAL MINE GENERATOR

This project revolved around creating a tool that would be able to generate a fully textured mine by means of Houdini and the Houdini Engine plugin. I learned a lot of VEX scripting during the process of creating the tool. It allowed me to utilize the Attribute Wrangle node in which I could efficiently define the 'normal', 'right' and 'up' properties of each point. Another important concept that I learned was the act of instancing in Unreal through the unreal_x property expressions.

Next to Houdini, procedural textures were generated using Substance Designer. The Substance plug-in was installed in Unreal Engine and the procedural sbsar file was imported. Once the textures are created together with the matieral and material instances, the path is copied and pasted as a material attribute within Houdini to speed up the iteration process. This way, you don't need to reassign the material every time to import or respawn the Houdini digital asset.

Demonstration Procedural Mine Generator

Main calculations performed on the points resulting from the resampling of the spline

Some specific groups and attributes native to the Unreal Engine can be determined through the HDA. Light source and intensity is defined as shown in the screenshot above.

Procedural Wood Material (Substance Designer)

Mud Material (Substance Designer)