Dys-Machina

This project was made for a Uni unit with brief of creating and implementing game assets into unreal. Additionally, we were required to integrate physically made assets and work with some level of collaboration.

In this project I focus a lot on the engine integration. Some Examples of this are

• Creating a Bi/Tri planar node  group for texturing buildings. (the reason for this was that I wanted to keep the pixel art textures aligned with 2D sprites and voxel assets position and scale, but Unreal's default Tri planar setup forced trilinear texture filtering on) unfortunately this method required the meshes UVs to manually oriented as otherwise there would be a mismatch between the orientation of the UVs and the projected normal map, causing them to be rendered incorrectly.
• Using GOBOs on area lights to emulate global illumination from emissive materials without using lumen.
• Offsetting the grunge texture UVs on voxel assets based on position so to add visual variation between duplicated instances of the same asset.
• vertex colour based blending to allow for painting in texture variation / wear and tear on buildings.
• giving the character sprite normals so that its lighting matches the scene.

All the textures/materials (bar the player sprite sheet and the background) were made using materials make and physically made grunge textures. To bring out more of the detail from the grunge texture in the pixel art textures I mixed in higher res detail normal maps in unreal. 

The voxel assets I used magical voxel and a blender to UV unwrap them so that I could apply custom materials in unreal.

For the character sprite I used a similar technique to Donkey Kong Country on the SNES, by creating a 3D model and rendering its animation out as sprite sheet. (The animation for the character was sourced from Mixamo) 

The music featured was created by a friend outside of Uni.