The Portal - Personal Project
I developed a portal shader for a commercial project; regrettably, it did not integrate into the final product. However, I obtained authorization to pursue its refinement as a personal initiative. To showcase its capabilities, I constructed this scene. The character animation and Houdini simulation components were executed by two skilled artists under my direction. My responsibilities encompassed:
Environment design and 3D modeling
Technical project planning
Lighting
Rendering
Material look development
Linear editing and color grading
Niagara FX development
Client
Personal Project
Year
01/05/2023
The Portal Shader.
A material solution that allows objects in the scene to be masked out based on the shape of the portal
1. Create virtual 2d plane inside of material with using world coordinate maths.
2. Add panning 3d noise to distort the planes UVS
3. Substract the middle of the mask to create a border
4. Using warped UV coordinates project texture and color information onto portal.
5. Apply opacity mask for final result
Lumen Compatible rigid body simulation.
Choas actors are still visible to lumen - ( Skeletal meshes, chaos physics actors, alembic caches currently are not supported by lumen (at the time of writing in 2023)
Prebaked rigid body sims visible in Lumen scene
Objects are simulated inside of houdini and their transforms are saved as bone transform data. This is imported back into UE as skeletal mesh.
Movable static mesh actors can then parented back onto their corresponding joints
FX
Using a collection of prebaked houdini dust particles, cached Niagara fluid sim and real time lightning particle effect
Lightning effect
Dust Cloud
Houdini Dust cache
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