Sunday 23 December 2012

Long Time No Post

So I know I've not been keeping up with this but unfortunately uni work has been quite full on. But now that it's the holidays I've got a bit of a break from uni work and some time to work on my stuff. 

I've been working on a sort of sci-fi type energy shield. I thought this would be a good way to learn more about shader networks and to utilise some of the ideas that I've been learning about from tutorials. Mostly, trying to get some nice variations using UV distortions, I felt that using UV distortion would be a good way to go with this material to get that it feels like flowing energy. Plus, it's actually quite a powerful technique that I need to learn and understand, especially if I can start to use it with flow maps as well, I think that it would add a great deal of versatility to my fx.


Obviously it's quite hard to tell what's going on with a material in a static screenshot but the screen capture software I have is really bad frame rate so I think it'll be better for me to build a small scene in UDK and then render out a proper video from that, plus I'll be able to use that scene for all my fx in the future.

This is by no means a finished or game ready material but considering I'm just getting started I'm fairly pleased. It's got some nice panning elements and a general aesthetic that you can see from a far that it's obviously some form of sci-fi shield type thing. But I'm not too happy with the line that pans across it, I was trying to go with an element that cycles across to show that it's rendering out like a holographic material to compliment the scanlines but I feel that it's too static. I'd like it to wave or oscillate slightly to get that life into, so to speak. 

But for now I'm going to leave it at this and move onto getting in some material transitions to make it generate out from the edges towards the centre. Once I've got that done I'll build a small little scene and render it out properly.