Shaders I like math :)

Shader Artist Portfolio

Yo this is my entry for the Rookies Awards 2024.

My name is Dario I am 19 years old and I am studying  at  Bigrock School all the boring stuff  that recreate materials in 3D computer graphics.

Portals that actually works

In this project I wanted to recreate the portals  of the famous valve game Portal 2 in Unreal Engine 5.

The first step was to create the shape of the portal and customize every possible shape.

Then I made an Outliner to color the portal and I used a normal map to create a distortion effect to create a moving outliner.

I want that my portal can actually show inside the 3d world  of my scene,  in different positions because I  want to build a shader not only for artistic purposes.

The inside view that I created was made possible by a very usefulc tool named Cubemaps that are often uses in videogames to fake realtime reflections, like in Half-Life: Alyx where  the light reflaction of the bottles are made with cubemaps. 

I recorded my scene with a camera in my level, making a texture for the cubemap and fakind the 3d world.

The shader is ready and I put it in the Niagara system to view how it look

In the end, is time to walk inside of the portal with some Blueprints and here below the code and the final result and some custom portals that I made.

SteelSilk Championship

Steelsilk entry

The game is made with Unreal Engine 5 and it's a cooperative action shooter roguelike, where spiders robot must survive hords of enemies, collect power-ups and accumulate as many points possible.

Here's the trailer made by Simone Turrisi.

I want to show you the made off of 5 shaders that we used in the game. Hope you like them!

Mud

The mud is part of the swamp enviroment and slows the players when they walk on it.

I initially build the mud based on a simple water shader and I made a custom normal map from a Kandisky's draw to have different types of circles and a more "blobby effect".

Crystal

The making of the crystals it was my first approction with the ParallaxOcclusionMapping that I used to create the inside of the crystal.

The properties that I put on the Crystals are ParallaxInterior, Subsurface Scattering and an Iridescence Mask.

Unfortunately is not possible to see the Iridescence Mask in the game, because of the camera view and because of the emissive that we put on the crystals that illuminate the cave enviroment and made the crystal more cartoon.
Here's the material preview with Iridescent Mask and variant.

Some Crystal Variants

Hologram

The Tank spider is one of the two playable characthers , he has two powerful abilities that creates an hologram of himself to bait the enemies in a different position and then explode.

This was pretty simple to made but I very enjoyed the process, I used the Fresnel and the world position to create it and I added a little glitch effect with a cosine and sine nodes.

Below nodes and in game view.

Holographic Cards

Everytime you finish the level and you enter in the elevator you can choose one from 3 cards that is gonna buff you in the next level; a random card buff always the enemies too.

This was the hardest shader to make because of the complexity of a 3D real holo card,  thw swirl effect of the background is made with a little code in HSLS, the deep effect with a Parallax and a lot of masks and textures to have all the effects that we want in different rarity of cards.

Final Result

Material Occlusion Function

This material function was added to mostly all the assets in game and allows to view inside of a model when the players are behind an object.