The FlippedNormals team in collaboration with Tyler Smith, a Senior Environment Artist, has shared a tutorial that covers cutting-edge techniques and fundamentals of using dynamic materials and particles to bring the environments to life.
FlippedNormals has shared the course, mentored by Tyler Smith, a Senior 3D Environment Artist. Tyler has contributed as Environment Artist to Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Tsushima Legends at Sony Sucker Punch Productions, Friday the 13th at Illfonic. The mentor notes that during this course you’ll learn how to create a dynamic effects workflow that opens up opportunities for applying your artistic style to your environment effects work.
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 scenes.
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
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.
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 style on your VFX particle work.
The developers of the course mention that this series is perfect for artists that have a basic understanding of environment art with textures and materials, and are ready to apply more compelling moving dynamic features to their scenes.
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