UE Environment

Unreal Engine - Real Time Effects

From Maya to Houdini, after gaining a solid understanding of particle simulations, I embarked on a journey into real-time effects development. Leveraging my experience in Substance Designer and knowledge of particle attributes, I create efficient, stylized effects. :)

Particle Layout

- Core

- Sub

- Black background

- Glow groups

- Spark groups

Radial UV Function & Instance Material Parameters.

Unreal Engine - Real Time Effects

Character Attack Effect & Blueprint

Normal Attack Breakdown

- Effect Blue Print

Example

- Event graph, cutomized event

Example

- Bullet Blueprint (Bezier)

- Gem modeling and bake normal/emission maps in Houdini

- Gem Shader

- Niagara Emitter

-Material and M_Function

Character Blue Print - Event trigger (for testing attack)

Character Blue Print - Play Animation Montage

- Attack 5 - Spline and Event Graph

Material - Technical Journey

This page mainly shows my thoughts and experience when importing materials into Unreal Engine 5, including how to make World UV function, vertex paint, export RAM texture maps, compress the imported textures and create MAT and MIT materials.

Project1 - Unreal Editor 2023_1_2 15_15_05.png

Vertex Paint Example Screenshots & WIP

Picture 1 shows the main material node network, and picture 2 shows the instance one.

For the MAT, I mainly used 'Lerp' to connect two different materials. Also, I exported several parameters like HSL, bump height, Detail Normal and UV so that the artists can edit these data in the sub material more easily.

World UV Function

The world UV function can better improving the efficiency of material node connections when creating open-world without object UVs.

Also I created boolean type to switch the World UV on/off and exported it as parameter in the sub material, so that the artists can edit it easily in the instance material.

Creating RAM map

Firstly, I created one "RGBA merge" node in the substance designer, then connect the R channel to the roughness, G channel to the AO, B channel to the metalic. For the Alpha channel, connect it with white uniform color. Then we can export this node as "RAM" texture map which combines the three texture information(Roughness, AO and Metalic). It can save a lot of space and facilitate file management.

When the textures are imported into Unreal, they can be optimized to further save memory space and restore roughness better by modify the compression, LOD parameters.