Project Snow - Master Material Stuff
Thought I'd show some early work on my new environment piece. As I've avoided doing proper organic scenes, I decided to jump in and do something I'd never tried before.
I decided to do a full exterior scene based with a large amount of variety. So far, I've been working on my landscape material, blocking out, master materials, as well as some large mountains I put together using the just released Gaea. The master material has been the most interesting part of the project so far. After seeing the landscape and level kit of Star Wars: Battlefront, I wanted to try create something similiar in Unreal. I wanted to create a versatile kit that minimised on the amount of meshes I had to make to give the scene enough variety. With university studies coming to a close, every bit of time saved with this kit is super valuable.
I've used quixel props here to demonstrate the master material.
Here's some of the functionality of the master material;
The material applies snow to the top of assets through a material layer blend. Also includes vertex painting functionality for any areas you do/don't want snow.
The material also blends the meshes into the landscape. For this effect, there's a mix of a distance field blend (link to the resource at the bottom) which grabs to world position and the distance to the nearest surface and blends the landscape snow where it intersects with another object.
There's also use of a subtle pixel depth offset just to blue the harsh edge between the props and the landscape.
The shader is a little expensive with all the bells and whistles applied, but it really help sells the look I want. I binged a lot of tutorials to put this one together. Here's a nice list of resources if you'd like to put something similiar together for your own projects.
The material also hosts support for all the standard hueshifts, detail mapping, masked albedo textures, optional emissive values, etc.
Anyway, more work on this project to come (possibly in blog form, or not, we'll see).
Resources -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDluA1f5gzw