Let’s open the floodgates for Game Art Effects! In this series, you’ll be introduced to the fundamentals of using dynamic materials and particles to bring your environments to life, in this case with water and ocean effects. The first half of this series features a full walkthrough of building elements of an ocean shader both in a stylized and realistic fashion. The second half consists of building the elements of particle material systems and showing how to use dynamic features of particles in Unreal Engine to create an artistic performance with your effects.
By the end of this course, you will have gained an understanding of effects based materials and particles and will know how to build a flexible dynamic system for your own scenes. This fundamental understanding will help open the doors for more opportunities to create and use stunning game art effects in your portfolio.
Experience from Senior Environment Artist
Tyler Smith who will be instructing this course has been working as a senior environment artist in the games industry for over 7 years. Having worked on Sony Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima, Tyler has a great understanding of the importance of dynamic flexible workflows for environment materials and particle systems. You’ll learn through this series how to create a dynamic effects workflow that opens up opportunities for applying your personal artistic style to your environment effects work.
Creating Living Dynamic Materials
The first half of this series will show how to use the basic elements of making materials move, fluctuate, change shape, change color and texture, and many other ways to create a living dynamic material that can then be applied to make your game environments come alive.
Having particles Express themselves
The second half of this series will show how to take particles and apply dynamic factors, to have them showcase an artistic performance in your game environment. You’ll learn to see particle sprites as an opportunity to use elements like lifespan and random seed factors to capture the look of water, while still showing the opportunity to express your personal style on your VFX particle work.
Software Used
Unreal engine 4 (4.25 or higher)
Maya
Zbrush
Photoshop
Files Included
Final UE4 projects that showcase each chapter of the series
All master material and material instances set up in the scenes created for the tutorial series
All particle systems created during the tutorial series
All meshes, ZBrush files, and texture files created for the materials and particle systems used in the tutorial series