Created all of the materials except for the skybox
Created all of the VFX
Modeled all of the 3D models except for the grapple point and star rays
Created a spaceship model generator in Houdini
Problem solving
Source control troubleshooting
Polygon Outline Material
To give the city a futuristic look, I created a material that would highlight the polygons of meshes. Placing this material on an object allows meshes seen through the object to appear with its polygons outlined, giving a X-Ray effect. In the game, this is placed on spheres that attract the player's attention to the spaceships and on the signs that the player needs to jump over to let the player realize that the signs are colliders. I had to calculate edges of the meshes by masking in different directions and overlaying in on the original scene. I set up the material so that the faces of the mesh kept the same material so it only highlights the edges. By only having this effect visible through spheres and the signs, it kept the level exciting without causing visual clutter.
Spiral Particle VFX
Using Unreal's niagara system I created a particle effect to highlight the tower and the end of the level. At first I tried to make a spiral fog, but then realized that a more dynamic vfx would fit better in this game. I added a fog to the place at the bottom of the buildings to create the illusion that the buildings are infinitely tall.
Star Material and VFX
To achieve the effect of a shooting star, I added movement to the star texture through HLSL code and created a VFX where little stars shoot out from behind the large star with UE's niagara systems. The HLSL material is placed on the 3D model of a star and depicts a star in a diagonal movement. I manipulate the UV so that it shifts the position of the star and also scales it with a slight change in speed as time goes on. The HLSL code can be found here: https://github.com/raefu22/hlsl_snippetsUE. This will provide the diagonal movement with any image, not just a star.
Cell Shader
I created a cell shader material to place on most 3D objects in the scene. It expedited the modeling and texturing process by removing the need to UV unwrap those objects. The material provides the option to customize the 3 tones of the shader: a dark, mid, and highlight. The cell shader is most obvious on the platforms that the player jumps on.
Spaceship Model Generator
I made a spaceship model generator in Houdini to efficiently create varied spaceship models. It has controls of a seed and whether or not an additional top is added to the spaceship. This game has a lot of spaceships, and with this generator, we can create a multitude of unique spaceships quickly. The seed randomizes the length and width of the spaceship, along with the details on it. It was challenging to get the different parts of the model to line up no matter what the seed was.
For the pieces replicated across the spaceship, I used copy and copy to points and reused base shapes for efficiency.
To get the parts to be positioned properly without manually setting exact locations (because I wanted it to work with different dimensions), I used attribute wrangles to write a line of VEX that would center the position (first example code snippet below). When generating points from a circle to get the pieces on the top of the spaceship, the normals were facing the wrong direction, which would result in the pieces positioned in the wrong rotations. So I used a point wrangle to fix the normals of the points extracted from the circle (second code snippet below).
