Posts

A small statement in the lack of ten blog posts.

This is why there is only 6. Within the frontier project, we set out to write a small number of blog posts to go alongside all of the development work that was done for the specialist in Port. At this point, we were not told how many blog posts are needed. I have already completed my specialism report and there is no more development work that has been done. It would have been lovely to be able to split the work that I have done into 10 blog posts and be able to fulfil all of the requirements set but as I had no information on a task that was set I had decided to instead put them into better categories within my blog post the settle to complete 6 evenly structured and well-written blog post rather than 10 blog posts noticeably split from 6 different sections. He has always been my understanding that the teacher or an academic group prefers to see quality over quantity. If I were to add any more blog post, they will be fraudulent and would not have contributed in the slightest to t
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Last Little Volume.

Ray marching in real-time volume rendering Before getting too deep into the technicalities of what this means I first wanted to have a look at what Ray marching really is. Ray marching is an incredibly efficient and accurate way to self-shadow alpha base materials such as smoke and clouds. Often this is done through a normal map for a lot lower cost but the results are not exactly as volumetric as Roma arching. The response from lighting different directions can also be channel packed into texture and this can give nice results from static positions and will also respond to The Subtle changes in lighting of viewing Direction allowing level designers to more quickly and efficiently create dynamic scenes without having to speak to the Artists every single time they want to change the lighting. There are two incredibly important parts to volume very marching that being the opacity (the light absorption) and the colour (the illuminations scattering). If we try and generate the op
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More Volumes!

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A continuation of the volume research I have been doing. So, within the first blog post about volumes, I was able to set out a good structure within which further volume development could be made. By continuing on with this, I intend to use noise parameters as well as other mathematical formula to continue on the journey towards realistic volumes for clouds and most other gaseous meshes.  To do this I will take the work done in the last post and expanded further. This will be through a few different methods but the main one that I will use to author my own pseudo volume texture in a flipbook format will be through using a divisible noise parameter to affect the spherical volume generated in the last blog. On top of this, I hope to accurately demonstrate the colour variation that can be made through importing arbitrary values into the blueprint written for the main volume texture.  So, Let's Begin by creating a blueprint in which the code to create the volume textures n
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Organic Materials

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Organic Matter Simulation, What is it? In this new blog post, I want to go over organic matter simulation. This means the simulation of natural materials within 3D programs. This is especially Hard task for real-time rendering as there is a lot of different factors that come into play while making this kind of material. Within this post, I'd like to go over a few of the main techniques used in industry standard level to simulate natural shading. To make this a little bit easier, I'd like to split this into two sections the surface materials and the subsurface materials. With this I mean to say, that there are two different levels to natural materials. The first level is on the top, the thing that you able to see straight away this includes the colour the texture and any and all things located on the top level of a natural or organic objects surface. The second layer the subsurface layer is anything there is underneath this is a little bit more complicated as it includes
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Testing Volumes

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Volumes? Not as easy as I thought. Volumes are a complicated subject but can deliver outstanding artistic results if used correctly. Volumetric shaders are a relatively new practice in games as we have been unable to pull off any of this within real-time simulations until recently. Especially on consumer-grade hardware. Volume Shaders refer to the generation of volumes through the use of 2D textures and a lot of math. We do this through the use of volume textures. Volume textures store the information about 3D space rather than 2D space like the textures we are used to in modern pipelines.  While graphics APIs have supported volume textures for a while, not all game engines have native support for them yet which is unfortunate as the programming to facilitate a new custom game engine requires far too much work for some simple tests. For this reason, I in my tests, I decided to create and use 'pseudo volume textures' using regular 2D textures that can be used in any e
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Shaders: Confusing or Pretty?

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What am I doing? Moving on into my specialism, I wanted to do a bit of a deep dive into the realms of shaders in games. Now, first things first, let's define what shaders are before we have any chance of actually creating some. This post is strictly research and will not show the development of physical work, just more of an exploratory look into the many different branches and avenues that we can go down when we make VFX. As a technical artist, learning to use shaders properly opens up the amazing power that modern graphics cards hold. This is because graphics cards contain thousands of cores instead of the 4-12 you can find in most CPUs. Though the processing capabilities of these cores are much less powerful, the sheer mass of them can hold the ability to compute many calculations in perfect synchronisation. This kind of programming is a little different to some of the more conventional types but is incredibly valuable for modern AAA titles in the games industry. Almo
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Niagara Particle Morphing

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One Small Step into the new Niagara System. Many of us have taken on the task of creating a formative blog on developing some next-generation video game art to be rendered real-time as a project for both our own development and the development of the skills of the visual effects communities online. I wanted to start this journey into new and exciting systems by looking into the new Niagara System within UE4. This system is Epic Games next step toward artistically driven particle VFX within games. This is a statement directed towards the giants of this sector such as Houdini who have cornered the market with amazing and well-optimised systems for this kind of generation for a long while at this point and is designed to eventually take over from the old Cascade system implemented at the dawn of Unreal Engine 4. Before looking into the new system, let's take a look at some of the differences between this system and the old one. While both Cascade and Niagara can be used to
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