Universal Asset Master Material
This master material was built with the goal of being able to manage the majority of our in-game assets in one place. Essentially, the idea was, "One master to rule them all". It was designed to minimize material slot overhead while providing our artists full control through instanced parameters. It also featrues a Runtime Virtual Texture (RVT) material function for seamless blending with the landscape. Assets read the depth and color data from the landscape at runtime and eliminate harsh edges without the need for manual painting.
Assets textures are packed to efficiently manage base color with opacity in alpha, metallic, roughness and ambient occlusion (MRO), and normal maps. Emissive maps can be toggled when applicable. This structure repeats through each of the master materials I created for Shadows of Dawn at Next Player Games.
Hair Master Material
I created a dedicated hair master material for Shadows of Dawn for both player characters and NPCs. It is built on alpha cards using anioscoptic shading to capture realistic lighting behaviors of highlights, allowing for realtime hair rendering with alpha soprting and per=strand color variation.
Root and tip gradients lerp between root and tip colors independently, and each feature their own saturation and contrast parameters. The tangent map allows for directional highlight behaviors to achieve the realistic visual quality we are striving for at Next Player Games. For ease of use for the artists, the material also mimics the MRO structure of our other master materials. Finally, dithering and pizel depth offset help in the reduction of artifacts in alpha cards.
