FMP: Week 18 Friday

On Thursday I continued with the sound effects, but paired them with this tutorial to create physical material based reactions! I generated different sounds, footprints and dust clouds based on what material the player was running on. The footprints were created following this tutorial.

for the footprints, I simply grabbed the pawpads that were already on the character mesh, baked them onto a plane and masked it in substance painter. I then imported it into UE4 and flipped the normal map channel so that it was indenting into the sand rather than protruding from it.

I set the material to be a deferred decal

For an extra step, I also made another version without the normal map which was shiny and darker, using global parameters to dynamically change the colour of a 'wet' footprint depending on the material the player was running on.

Wet footprint, without a normal map so that it can be used on grass and wood. I can combine it with the normal map version for wet sand prints!

Decal blueprint to be placed at the right orientation and size

I made a linetrace for each foot triggered in the running animation sequence, which returned the physical materials I had created and assigned to textures and then spawned the footprint decal with its correlating properties. It also spawns the audio effect and the assigned dust cloud colour! It checks to see if the character has touched water, and if so assigns the wet footprints and removes the dust clouds and then slowly fades it back to the original dry setting.

Location and rotation

Notifies when each paw hits the ground

Setting the character as 'wet' after touching the water BP

Custom UVs to crop the dust cloud from the alpha map

Material for the dust clouds! I combined different settings into the same map so that I could easily toggle between dust, clouds and mist

Dust instance

Particle emitter for the dust clouds, the particle opacity controls the value step deterioration

Gifs added at a later date:

dry to wet footprints

different colour dust clouds