BIOLUMINESCENT FANTASY CREATURE
UNREAL ENGINE 5
BLENDER
Through this project I explored Unreal Engine's Substrate Slab BSDFs and how these new shaders work in combination with traditional Parallax Occlusion Maps, World Space Operations, UV Animations and Vertex Animations.
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Furthermore, I gauged the Shader's performance at different optimization levels to determine it's viability for real-time applications.
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This creature is based on the following 2D Concept by Dave Melvin:
MATERIAL FEATURES
SUBSTRATE PARALLAXING
For the parallax effect I used parallax occlusion mapping in combination with substrate shaders which allow for using two BSDFs layered by thickness.
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I created two different Normal Maps: Surface and Internal, then parallax mapped the internal layer by a specified substrate thickness to achieve the internal organ look.
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The same technique was also used for the emissive layers.
Surface Normals
Internal Normals
Surface Emissions
Internal Emissions
VERTEX ANIMATION
For the breathing Vertex animation I used a hand-painted mask with a sine wave multiplier and additional time period as well as intensity parameters to achieve a frog-like expanding membrane look.
Breathing Material Function
WORLD SPACE IRIDESCENCE
For Iridescence I used World Space operations to lerp a Hue Shift based on Pixel Normals and Camera Vector with the Base Color, this gave me a subtle Oil-Slick Aesthetic which covers the creature's skin.
EMISSION MODES
PULSE
FLOW
For the multiple internal layers, Besides Parallaxing I added two effects, Pulsing and Flowing. For Pulsing I simply animated the intensity of the Emission Map with a Sine wave. For Flowing I rotated a Tileable Texture over time as a Multiplier for the Emissive Intensity which gave me a smooth flowing effect throughout the internal emissions.
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To parameterize the effects I added a switch to select between the two behaviors or even combine the pulsing with the flowing.
ANIMATED EMISSION LAYERS
The surface layer consists of 3 Kinds of emissive behaviors:
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Static Tail, Ear and Arms Emissive
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Breathing Throat Membrane Emissive
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Micro moving stars-like dots Emissive
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To achieve this these three effects I used different textures with different operations being applied on them, then these operations were added to combine in a material function.
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The static emissive is added last as it is.
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The breathing throat membrane texture is localized to the throat only and is multiplied by the same sine wave as the vertex animation displacement mask.
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The micro dots are painted evenly and then are multiplied by a tiling rotating noise texture to give them the illusion of random generation across the surface.
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