Materials and Shaders
Smart Materials
Technical Summary:
With us all working flexibly with each other's chosen area, it became significant that we all followed a similar texturing process on how we should approach this. We originally were just going to create our textures by just using base colour and adding emission and opacity as needed, but were later shown a much better way to enhance the details and colours of our models, we could collapse down into a Substance Painter Smart Material which I could share with my team and they could use for themselves for their own models.
The Smart Material consisted of 4 different layers, each with an specific purpose. The first layer was the Base Colour which was the default colour that the selected model would have, before having the Ambient Occlusion Layer added on top. This layer was a darker colour of the Base Colour, adding a shadow to the model in the divots or attached pieces of a model. Above that, we added a curvature layer which added a lighter colour to the edges of the model to add this nice contrast to the model and make it seem more detailed, before adding a gradient in the same colour as the AO which we could move up and down the model to get a nice contrast from light to dark. AO, Curvature, and the Gradient Layers all used a black mask alongside a generator to achieve the effects we did with the model.
Reflection:
This worked as a great way to help with texture and art style consistency throughout the project, and reduced the time need for us to rework or redesign the textures we'd already created, also helping to achieve the stylised design that we wanted. However, there are some small details that do stick out with the placement of seams causing the curvature to look quite sharp and quite smooth in some areas, and also causing curvature to appear in areas we wouldn't want it. I think we could have looked at more generators and effects to see if we could push the design further, but still keeping that stylised look.
Materials and Shaders
Cel Shader
Technical Summary:
In comparison to other groups and projects we'd worked on, we wanted to have something that really made us stand out in comparison to other art styles. So a little further into Alpha, I looked into creating a material that would take our textures and apply the cel shaded look onto them. Because this was a later addition, we already had several models without the shader, which still looked good, but with the inclusion of the shader, really elevated the designs and added a lot of style to them. The shader was created through a material function, allowing for me to set up a process for the material, then use it as an instance to further edit it. The Function created several bands of light to add a contrast in colours, as well as enabling us to give the materials fake sun positions to help make models stand out better.
The Material Instances were something that I myself hadn't experimented or used before, and really opened my mind up to how useful they can be, allowing for us to essentially parent a material down a chain that we could modify on its own or through the parent. This was especially useful for when a model didn't have the best of lighting when placed into the level, so having the option to add a fake sun and change the position through the instance, saved a great deal of time in a lot of areas and provided solid results.
Similarly, I had never tested with Material Functions, which significantly helped with the style we were going for. The Material Function is a dedicated location for a whole material to be set up through many material nodes and resulting in several outputs to be easily transferred into a regular material, and then onto an instance. This helped us build a chain of information being passed down source to source.
Reflection:
I think the shader really helps to enhance the level significantly more than having models that only use the smart materials. It gives every model a really nice charm, and provide the flexibility to alter and change the style of our textures even further. I think we could mess with the settings further to get some even better results rather than keeping everything at default values, to see how much detail we can really add to our models. Another drawback of this system is the requirement that all models have been smoothed correctly to mask the individual faces of a model. This was something we encountered very early in the creation of the shader, which was easily fixed by making sure all developed models were exported and textured with no smoothing, but we imported the smoothed version to have the material flow correctly. Although this was a small issue, it did come with the benefit of realising when a model had topology issues because of how the faces would flow through the shader.