Materials – Big Game Project

While the set up for the space levels were almost at an completion, the space itself lacked movement and looked rather flat. The group discussed whether there should be light sources placed on certain celestial bodies or if sprite sheets should be used to animate them. However, since there was only one week away from GGC, creating spritesheets would take up much more time than we could afford and using lights in space would take up much of the processing power. So, the best thing to do was to use materials instead.

Because the shield of the spaceship that the player was navigating took up much space of the frame, we wanted it to look interesting. We had an idea of the shield looking like an electro magnetic field because as a static sprite, it didn’t properly convey that feel.

Here is the material used for the shield

The nodes maked in the grey square are the ones that create a sort of mirage effect on the shield. I used my atmosphere texture to mask it on top of original texture and later making it move around and across with a rotator and panner node. The nodes outside the greysquare make way for the texture to light up when hit by a projectile using code.

Using the same principle as the last material regarding the marked greysquare, I simulated sunstorms on a starlike planet.

Here is the material used for that

The mostly black square with an red arrow pointing to it refers to how the texture really looks like because in the editor it shows up as all green.

I had really fun playing around with materials, testing things out and seeing what works better. Lots of materials were also used for creating lightfunctions on props inside the spaceship itself. I also learned to use material instances to save up memory and reduce the computer’s draw calls.