Jimmy Swanick | Week 5: Invisible Ripple Pancake

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week I finally worked out an appearance for the Xray Portal that feels good. The effect a modified version of the Standard Assets GlassRefractive shader, which is able to produce stained-glass bumpy window effects. Normally the bump is controlled by a normal map in the material properties, and doesn’t move (effectively imitating a window. My version measures the distance from the center of the object (in this case a flat disk that cuts the hole out of the wall behind it) of each pixel, and assigns it a normal value based on that distance and time. The result is an outward ripple from the center of the circle.

Additionally, the outer ring of the disk is highlighted by a particle system emitting from the edge of a circle. It’s very similar to just drawing a ring with a sprite, but the small randomness of the particles produced creates a pleasant plasm-ish wispy effect.

Here’s the effect (Apologies about the quality - try to imagine something that looks just a little bit better):

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Xray Portal Shader (4 hours)
• Weekly Meeting (2 hours)
• Art Meeting (1 hour)

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• I set out to make sure one of my shader experiments finally made it to “done” after feeling uncertain for so long, and here I’ve made it with the xray visual.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• Just one successful visual in the last two weeks isn’t quite as much as I’d like. Considering the work I’m doing for other classes though, I’m beginning to work pretty fast on these things. I’m looking forward to applying my new knowledge with more time next week.
• The levels are starting to come together but they’re still lacking visually, and so far look more sparse than intentionally lowpoly.
• It’s been a little while since we agreed we needed volumetric lights for the screenies and I haven’t been able to spend time on it. Hoping to change that soon!
• I just noticed that Rem doesn’t currently have my wispy-wiggly ghost shader. I’ll be sure to put then and propagate it to all our scenes.

NEXT TASKS

I have a few visual effects in the works, esp. A targeting visual effect for the xray placement! It’s looking like chris needs help UV’ing and texturing, so I’m gonna try to spend some time on that too.

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 7 hours