Unreal Material Experiments
Four materials developed through Unreal's Material Editor System. From top left to bottom right, there is flowing water that flashes with specular reflections, an emissive transparent plane that fades in and out of view with a noise texture and a timeline, mossy rocks that are displaced using normal and height maps, and lava which flares up as the brightest sections intersect.
Lava was the first of the four. Using a combination of panners and the custom rotator allowed me to have two copies of the lava texture flow together. To add more visual interest, the heightmaps were used by adding the two together, with the whitest sections being the driver for a world position offset, simulating bubbling and flareups at the brightest sections.
By far the most simple of the materials, this cobblestone still was used as an opportunity to learn about tessellation. To get a more accurate deformation out of the world displacement, tessellation was used to increase the density of the geometry where it was needed most.
Using Lerps, Blend Overlay, and Depth Fade, the color of this water is not determined by texture but by camera position. The illusion of deep water can be created by going from dark to light as you get further from the camera. This was my first time learning about Fresnel lighting, in this context being used to drive the sparkle of refractions on the water's surface.
Through creative use of a noise texture and contrast, this material fades in and out visibility. I used a timeline to drive the rate at which the percentage of the material is dissolved. A lot of what was learned from this material ended up becoming useful for my later project, the Interactive Unreal Effects, as that makes extensive use of timelines to drive effects.