Meet Mat

The theme I went with is a traffic light. I found a great inspiration for this guy from another creator who choose to make him a walk light. Aged him up a bit, gave him a bit of wear and tear. My idea was that of a New York traffic light in particular. Hence all the stickers and graffiti, along of course with the cigarette and gum ridden sidewalk. 

For tools, most of the materials are pre-builts from substance painter. Rust, yellow paint and metal are the foundations and then it was all about masking and painting. I hand painted a lot of the rust using a black mask and then slapped a generator onto it to make it look dirty and smudged. The stickers and graffiti are just simple fill layers that have been resized to fit where they are intended to go. The main body of the traffic light is three fill layers. One is the darker green background, the next the bright green light, and then finally the pattern that is laid over the light. 

A big problem I ran into was that I was relying way to much are generators to lay out my materials. My solution was the discovery of masking. I began making paint layers and painting over certain parts of the mesh. I then used a mask with a generator to reveal or hide the details I wanted. I also realized I need to find a way to make him appear sun damaged. I achieved this by using a lighter color of paint and blending that with the top portion of his head.

 

Ice Attack

 A ground attack is something I have seen is just about every piece of media that I have ever come into contact with and I really wanted to something like that myself. The biggest challenge was getting icicle meshes to spawn over the character mesh in order to give it an "iced over" look.

  

 The MVP of the stack here is the "Skeletal Mesh Location" node. This allows particles, or in this case meshes, know of the static meshes location data and use it as their spawn data. If the mesh is moving, make sure to have this node in the update section so that the location data is always updating.

The main freezing material wasn't all too bad. Just a simple ice texture with some math to ensure that texture is able to move up the mesh as it "freezes"

The Niagara set up looks like a monster...but its really not. Its simply the same emitter copied over and over again in order to have the icicles come up in a "one after the other" order.

 

 

Meteor Shower

 

A simple attack effect that calls meteors to rain from the sky. Runic circles are "summoned" to bring these projectiles into place. With this effect, I wanted to learn how to spawn and use decals in my effects in order to take them to a higher level. Can't have fire without some scorch marks right? I also wanted to continue doing work that went along with some kind of animation as so much of VFX is intertwined with the animation of a character or object.

 Another huge focus for me with this effect was actually the ribbon of the meteors themselves. Learning how to make not only a custom material that would match the effect I wanted, but also having that material applies to a ribbon was new ground for me. 

 

Laser Beam

 By far the most technical of the effects I had worked on to this point, this required a ton of learning before it was show worthy. 

The core of the effect is really found in the material work rather than the niagara systems. The materials at play are found in both the sphere and cylinder that make up the main body of the laser beam.

The sphere material was rather simple. A simple noise texture panning across the sphere and a fresnel to make the edges glow.

 

The main body of the laser beam however, utilized the sphere material, along with layers of this voroni material. The rest of the effect came together with in system controls that can be found in the image below.

 

Fortunately for me, there was still a ton of fun still to be had in this project...CODING. The disintegration portion of this effect required considerable blueprints in order to be effective. In simple terms, this blueprint takes a user provided static mesh and sets dynamic materials for both the static meshes and the particles that spread over the mesh. It then spawns a new Niagara system that handles the actual "disintegration" of the effect.

 

Electrocution

An intense electrocution scene that features multiple Niagara particle systems working in unison to electrocute this poor solider. These systems in particle use beam renderers that are being effected by a rapid jitter effect in order to simulate the look of electricity.

 The sparks are done using a simple omni-burst set up that fires them from randomly sampled portions of the character mesh. 

All other environmental effects such as the blinking of the lights as well as the changing of their color is done via blueprints that simply control color and intensity.

 

 

 

About Me

 I mean I am the best, what else is there to say

Resources

 Resources go here

Research

 Research stuff goes here

Hell Portal

For this effect, I wanted to attempt to push the limit of what I could make VFX wise. I wasn't satisfied with just making some lightly colored yellow dots and calling it sparks. I mean come on what are we doing here? There are people bowing up buildings, surely I could at least get somewhat close to what it was they were doing. 

This effect uses, what was at the time an experimental feature, of Unreal Engine 5. The feature itself is called Niagara Liquids and it is UE's first steps into handling large volumetric sims "in house". Liquids was quite heavy in terms of performance metrics. As a result I instead opted to place it in a very small staging environment and use per-rendered footage. Almost acting as a cut scene. 

 

 

 

 

Common Art

 Common stuff go here

Tech Art

 Tech art stuff will go here

Animation

 Animation stuff go here

3D Post

 3D stuff will go here

2D Post

 2D Stuff will go here