Courtyard Environment Render for Technical Breakdown.
Video clip of the final scene.
Caustic Light Function Material applied directly into Spotlights rather than using a decal.
Caustic Light Function Material Node set up.
Water Material plane.
Water Master Material Node Set up, not mobile friendly but so so pretty.
Water Material Instance Parameters.
Underwater environment assets (grass and rocks) were applied with the foliage tool.
Koi Fish animations are attached to several Spline paths and then offset.
Koi Fish Blue print spline path set up
Niagara system for rising air bubbles.
Lamp fire material was applied to a stretched sphere.
Lamp Fire Master Material.
Lamp Fire Material Instance Parameters.
A Bubble material Node Set up which never made it into the scene.
Wire Frame mode
Buffer Visualisation Overview
A few years ago I made a VR-level which combined several technical assets to create a memorable central feature. Even in 4.2 it was pretty good and with a few tweaks, it's been updated into 5.3. The core assets are the same but I've remade the particle effects in Niagara. I've replaced the texture on the mesh assets which came from the marketplace as they aren't the focus of this post.
I love making caustic lighting, it can be applied as a decal but also works as a light-function material. It's pretty resource-light with only 3 textures on separate panners using different UV scales. An emissive intensity controls how bright it is in the scene.
The courtyard water texture is pretty heavy and wouldn't be used for mobile VR, but this experience was originally built for tethered devices and therefore not a problem. Using a combination of texture panners, tex coords, Normal blends, depth fade index of refraction and separating the water colour 4 float into separate masks to have a visual control over metallic, specular, roughness and opacity.
The FIre material uses two emissive colours combined in a lerp with an absolute world position and noise node. There is also a very slight refraction fresnel plugged into the index of refraction pin.
Koi Fish Spline paths and Niagara system for rising air bubbles. The Koi Fish animations were set to auto play and the blueprints were attached to several Spline paths. Each Koi has a different spline completion speed to make it look natural and realistic, an offset could then be applied to avoid any collision overlaps.
Water ripples are created with an expanding mesh which loops three times at different speeds and then fades out. A semi-translucent material was applied so that it was just visible on the surface of the water.
The Falling Leaves is a simple Niagara system using a sprite, direction burst, some gravity and curl noise force. 2D planes are cheaper than mesh but won't look as sharp around the edges using a material mask. An event trigger was used that when a player died in the game the Niagara system would activate for a loop. A cool visual representation for a mechanical gameplay component.
Add a nice water babbling brook audio cue, and the scene is complete.
