A bit more development on the look of the wax and the rock materials and the blending/emergence of the wax into the cracks of the rock. The wax and rock are set up as two different Material Functions, masked by vertex color. This vertex color mask is modulated by the two height maps of each material to break up the vertex-like blending. In the future, the mask won't likely be determined by vertex color, since Skeletal Meshes can't make use of vertex color information. Nonetheless, it's great for testing the look and how the materials are working together at the moment.
A quality that I wanted to capture and I think is starting to work here is that the subsurface color bleeding should be less in areas where the wax drip is thicker and more in thinner areas. The best subsurface effect comes from being lit from the inside of the mesh. I plan to include several point lights on the inside of the mesh that are components within the rock's Blueprint. This should make it easy to manage them from one place.
The rock should be looking a bit rockier and rougher than last week. I've redone some of my normal maps that were looking a little ill-defined and made tweaks to my custom painted normal map node (fewer posterized steps for less smooth gradients, and more intense warping to simulate splotchy brush strokes.) Still to come are the painted mesh layers.
A quality that I wanted to capture and I think is starting to work here is that the subsurface color bleeding should be less in areas where the wax drip is thicker and more in thinner areas. The best subsurface effect comes from being lit from the inside of the mesh. I plan to include several point lights on the inside of the mesh that are components within the rock's Blueprint. This should make it easy to manage them from one place.
The rock should be looking a bit rockier and rougher than last week. I've redone some of my normal maps that were looking a little ill-defined and made tweaks to my custom painted normal map node (fewer posterized steps for less smooth gradients, and more intense warping to simulate splotchy brush strokes.) Still to come are the painted mesh layers.
Here's a super rough layout/blockout of a shore area just to get an idea of how everything is going to fit together into a space, with the candle rock mountain as an overhanging cliff. The candle rock will be a beacon, with the wick lit, that the player will have to climb up to. You can see that the boat sequence will be just off of the shore, and won't appear until you've gone up to the top of the mountain. After you come back down from the mountain, if you look back up at the top, the wick will have been replaced with a lighthouse.
I'll be populating the shore and landscape with wax rock assets. Additionally, my next steps with this are to refine the candle rock model and landscape detail, as well as fix scale and proportions that aren't working.
I'll be populating the shore and landscape with wax rock assets. Additionally, my next steps with this are to refine the candle rock model and landscape detail, as well as fix scale and proportions that aren't working.