Common Art - Week 10 - Initial Block Out - 'D' Stage

 

Tree V2

In this iteration I integrated a Wind System for the trees (it’s the same wind that drives the grass). Compared to the grass setup, the hard part here was reliably writing each quad’s object-space pivot/origin into UV1 and UV2 in Houdini so the material can reconstruct per-card motion in Unreal. There’s little to no official documentation on this path, and Unreal’s mesh import precision/compression plus differences between DCCs in object-space and UV transforms made it mostly a black-box process—I had to validate each step empirically.

Thanks to Chris’s feedback on triangle count, I further reduced the tree mesh without visible quality loss, reaching a better quality balance.

Tree V2

Leaves Wind System

Water V2

For the new water pass I added depth-based color shifts, shoreline edge treatment and shallow-water waves, and a foam layer. I also revisited Unreal’s water documentation and adjusted several shading details to push a more stylized look that fits our game. The improvement over the previous version is obvious in motion.

Water V2

Implementation notes (TA):

• Depth color: Driven by Unreal’s AbsorptionCoefficients combined with water depth to simulate wavelength-dependent attenuation.

• Shoreline effects: Used DistanceToNearestSurface to measure distance from the water body to nearby Static Mesh geometry and gate the near-shore logic.

• Shore waves: After deriving a ShoreRange, I generated ripples via a sine function—this part is mostly math and is cheap.

• Foam: Layered on top of the shore waves using a noise-based dissolve mask to break up repetition.

Water Material V2

Rocks V1

I first built a Houdini procedural rock generator to get quick variety and consistent forms.

Rocks

Then I ported my baseline stylized lighting shader from Unity to Unreal. Small lighting trick for speed: since Unreal doesn’t easily allow multi-light accumulation in Unlit without pipeline changes, I switched to Lit and split the final shading between Emissive and Base Color. By scaling each output with coefficients that sum to 1.0, I can approximate multi-light influence with minimal look drift and keep iteration fast.

Rocks Material

Rocks V1