Modular Materials: Stylized Character
Title Card
The many faces of my Stylized Character Material
More faces of my Stylized Character Material
Even more faces of my stylized material
Another example with the glow effects triggered
Demoing the Dynamic Material Instance controllers in real-time. Each ColorSet can be driven by individual components (with readable names) and connected to external game systems like events or audio reactivity.
Modular break down of the material's structure
Custom ColorSets can be selected from either a Gradient Texture or UV positions. The index derived can then be used to select texture sets from texture arrays.
Custom Stylized Coloring Node: controls the tint coloring of the base and shadows, and allows for boosting the colors for glow effects.
UI Organization of Material Instance Setup with all the custom coloring sets. ColorSet parameters are controlled through BP Components attached to the primary Actor.
Stylized Skin Node: A simple layer that swaps shading models (Skin vs Default Lit) when the color set index matches.
Stylized Eye Shader - a simplified version of UE's refractive eye material
Stylized Eyes Node: Like the skin, it also swaps shading models and has a bunch of customization options for crafting eyes.
Example: Adjusting the color and intensity of the Eye color set
Example: Adjusting the color and intensity of the Hair color set
Example: Adjusting the color and intensity of the different clothing slots
Dissolve Effect for performer spawning into the scene.
Example: Stylized Material reacting to Audio Cue
Modular Materials: Stylized Character
A material framework for dynamic control of a stylized character.
I broke down the material into core components: a PBR base, stylized coloring, performer eyes, performer skin, then effects.
The PBR base is similar to the breakdown i did of my Structured PBR Base example, it takes in the standard PBR textures of your choice.
The enhancement comes from the stylized coloring which sectioned out portions of the model into 10 uniquely controlled areas for custom coloring. You can change the base color and the "shadow" color of each section. Shadow coloring was the inverted masking of the AO channel to add a little boost when the performer was in the dark.
The performer eyes switched the shader model to a subsurface pass and added the ability to tweak the eye parameters like iris size and color.
The performer skin was a simple layer that changes the shader model again, but to pre-integrated skin, and offered a tweak to the SSS color.
The final blocks are additional effects like emissive glows, gradient coloring to tweak coloring, and dissolve.
You can see this material in action in my Live Concert projects at the Wave:
Wave Makers: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/WXxqbE
Black Gryph0n: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/wr1wyL
Calvin Harris: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/X1y8Nl
Teflon Sega: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qJgEV2
