How to animate the inanimated
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Hi there! This time I would like to share some sludge with you, dear reader. More specifically, how to make it come alive. No black magic needed though, only a shader. To start from the beginning; the idea was that Olivia, the protagonist, was to wade across a dead field that was overflooded with a thick sludge. However, since the setting was a nightmare, the sludge needed some more umph. So I wanted it to move, like it was alive and wanting to clutch tentrils around Olivia and pull her down (not unlike the slimy symbiote in Spiderman 3). So I needed the field to pulsate and in general move irregularly. I got the inspiration from a documentary about Hitchcock’s classic movie ”Psycho” that when something moves without a pattern, or at least a pattern that is hard to follow, it makes the audience uncomfortable. That’s exactly what I wanted to achieve when the player walks across this field of sludge, as if every step forward is a struggle. Visually, I was very inspired by the enemy in Dark Souls 3 called Pus of Man. However, our game has handpainted textures and we don’t use normal maps, so creating a similar look was difficult. I could make it pulsate in a irregular fashion sideways, but it looked strange on the vertical axis. It moved around in a different way than wanted, so I had to make some changes. The end result was that it still moved on the surface as well, but not to the same extent as originally intended. In other words, I had to give up a part of the primary idea in order for the overall look to work! Here is the shader I made for the sludge!
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