Animation Studio
My aim for this project was to practise and develop my skills in background animation with a focus on bringing the environment to life. To achieve this I focused on lots of smaller forms of animation like wind, water, lighting, weather effects and time changes, in hopes that when combined together would make a believable world.
My first focus was to create a rolling wind effect to be applied to things like grass and leaves, to do this I took an existing material process called “SimpleGrassWind” and started to create a series of black and white textures to use for masking the effects of the “SimpleGrassWind” material function to create this rolling effect.
In this image you can see that only the grass in front of the white areas is moving while the rest of the grass remain relatively still creating the rolling effect that I wanted.
This effect can be easily achieved by using a black and white texture as the value of a white pixel is equal to one where as a black pixel is equal to zero. This means that we can use each pixel of this texture to multiply with any function, for example if we take the “SimpleGrassWind” function and multiply it with a value between zero and one it will give use a different range of movement for the grass. Then all with have to do is pan the black and white texture which gives us the effect you see above.
With the wind function create I then moved onto water, for this I would use a similar method to the grass but this time taking advantage of tessellation to achieve on more distinctive look and use specifically made meshes and tiling textures to create a spline for easy river creation.
Much like the grass I use a panning black and white mask to multiply the a strength of the tessellation on the material. But in this case I used two mask and panned them at slightly different speeds to create a more organic look, then I used the same masks to lerp between two colours for the base texture making the crest of the water turn a light blue giving the effect you see here.
Finally I create a mesh that when the material is applied would tile perfectly and added the mesh to a spline allowing me to create long flowing rivers with ease.
The next big system I worked on was a weather system that could be used to show a change in environment and lighting, the challenge with this system was to create something that would smoothly transition between a dry look to a damp look as well as change lighting, colour temperatures and fog to mach. To achieve this I took advantage of Material Parameters, Timelines and lerp’s.
I decided that the best looking method for controlling how wet things looked was to make two texture variants for each model that I could easily blend between using a material parameter, this would allow me to control where water builds up on a model as well as what parts would remain dry like the under side of the planks. Knowing this early on allowed me to create an efficient pipeline for creating both texture variants and meant that one parameter could control all materials simultaneously.
With the material side of things worked out I moved on to making more distinct visual change between clear weather and rainy weather. Some of the bigger changes are the wind intensity making its strength and speed higher, fog density is increase clouds appear in the sky and lighting is dimmed to better suit the cloud density.
Finally through the use of timelines I could easily blend between the two environment styles by simply calling and event when I wanted it to rain. With the core weather system in place I then decided to expand on it by adding lighting into the weather system, this system would at a random time pick a location in the world and summon an actor that would fade in and out a lighting texture facing the player, whilst also getting the location of a given location and the lighting bolt to set the correct rotation of a directional light to make it look like an real lighting strike.
Another area of focus was the passing of time to add subtle lighting changes as well as the ability to switch between day and night with and event call, in the case of the final render I only showed the day to night time blend as it better showed of the lighting discuses above. Much like the weather switching between night and day blends between lots of different setting to help sell the idea of the sun rising or setting, this includes things like adding a light mist when in the morning, a warmer light to give an orange glow as the sunsets and modifying the sky box horizon colours to further sell the idea of a sun rise and set. This can all be seen in the video below.
Bellow is some screen shots of some of the models I made and the environment that was created for the animation.
