SNOW SHADER AND EFFECT

This week I worked on some of the VFX for Project:ZERO, I worked on both making a snowfall niagara system as well as a snow build up shader.

The snow fall effect was pretty simple, the only interesting thing I did was I got a photograph of an actual snowflake, and I turned it into a grayscale high contrast image and used it as the opacity mask for the particles, so they actually look like snowflakes.

The snow buildup effect is more interesting. So, I started with my basic master material, and my previously made snow shader and combined them using the WorldAlignedBlend node to get the snow to always be on the top of the model, no matter what way it is facing.

Video of VFX:

BUILDING GENERATOR UPDATES

So now that I got the procedural generation of the blockouts, I had to return to the building tool. I scrapped the idea of making a custom building from patterns tool (at least for now, in the future I intend to complete what I started), I did this because of time, I won’t have enough time to properly complete it and everything else, and also, due to time, I reconsidered what the final was going to be, originally my plan was to get the buildings (or at least some of them) to have procedural interiors as well, because the goal was to have the player be able to transverse the whole world both inside and out, but getting the interiors to work as well is just not possible within the amount of time. So, because the building will now only be facades, I just am now planning on altering my modules, so they look good from the outside (basically they won’t have thickness anymore because that's what was causing the problems in the first place.)

So, I spent this week altering the building generator to work with the unreal baked blockout and have the buildings be able to have different patterns (I got this to work but it’s super wonk, but it is what it is.)

So basically the tool looks at all the buildings and groups them and then the user can select each building group and assign patterns to it, it is kind of annoying if you have too many buildings but it works for a smaller city, if I have time I will rejig this to make it work more procedurally but still have customizability but for now this is what it’s going to be. 

Currently I am working on getting the basic modules down and am going to get them wired up to the generator, but IN THEORY the tool works, it’s just not all hooked up yet.