The Seasons

In this scene I wanted to show off my shader work. I created landscape, foliage and water Master shaders to talk to each other using parameter collections to create a transition from one season to another. The material editor is something I really like working with.

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Created all my foliage in Speedtree, heightfield in Houdini, and materials in substance designer. Using procedural texturing methods within Unreal Engine. My goal was to make everything from scratch for a reusable kit that is highly customizable.

To create my foliage, in speedtree I colored my clusters so the branches are blue and the leaf texture colors are a mix of red and green. Then in Unreal I would color it by targeting the RGB channels of the cluster texture and used them as masks. I did this for all my foliage for extra customizability within engine. For the grass I also had it so the bottoms were colored by the virtual texture of the landscape to blend in receive its color.

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Something I learned with this project is Unreals Imposter LOD system which are less then 10 polygons for the Trees. Allowing me to scatter tons of trees with virtually no hit to performance. They all cast really nice distance field shadows. For it to work with my seasons I tweaked their master shader to also be affected by the snow and change foliage colors.