Concord || Star Chamber Crystal Material
This is a great shot showing off the diversity of the crystal material. The back wall is lit up with rainbow colors from our thin film, and the central block is showing off fake SSS and diffuse color shifts.
Indirect back lighting throws this crystal structure into the darker range of our crystals response.
Thin film and direct lighting make this crystal wall feel more bright, and brings out some blue and green rainbow hues.
Credit to Mak Malovic for the crystal meshes and diorama setdressing. Showing here how the crystals look with night lighting.
Credit to Mak Malovic for the crystal meshes and diorama setdressing. Showing here how the crystals look with day time lighting.
Original explorations for Star Chamber had the crystals more as Obsidian. I created the following three obsidian materials that then got spun off into our Crystal graphs.
Initial Obsidian material exploration.
Many bits of detail from this specific iteration of Obsidian were maintain and used in our crystal graphs. You can see some details got saved off as masks and were used within the Crystal material in Unreal.
Since these crytals have so many different elements at play, it's best to get a video of them. Note how lighting and camera angle can change the complete look of the crystal depending on where you are.
Here we look at the power of our CPD driven fake SSS. We used this to tune specific SSS looks for moments that we knew the player would run into. I also demo the material instance diffuse color and fake SSS color controls.
Demoing our bump offset layers. Using a packed mask set, we could swap between looks for each layer. I can also control the layer depth and how strongly that layer is showing through. A combination of two layers gave us the depth and diversity we wanted.
Demoing our thin film features. We were able to adjust the thickness of the film, as well as the refraction amount. This was set in our material instance by default, and we then tweaked settings via CPD on specific meshes as needed.
These crystals were a blast to work on. We started out exploring obsidian, as it was referenced in our concept boards as a material inspiration. As I spun up those obsidian materials, we got them into engine to see what the feel was. We quickly realized we needed something with more depth and color, as the black obsidian and grey terrain were not doing the job.
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Collaborating with the whole team was a necessary and major part of this work. Eli as the Level Artist, to address overall look and balance. Mak Malovic as the Principle Palette Artist, to create a functional Crystal Substance graph and material that worked with the kit. Adam Alexander as the Lighting Artist, to check that decals were reading well and allowing for emissive light placements. Catie Savage and Liam Macdonald as Concept Artists, to ensure that the Crystal look was hitting their vision for the map. Evan Liaw as the Materials Lead, to author functional and well performing materials for the team. The materials instances were all controlled and driven by a parent material instance. In this way, I was able to make adjustments to just one material, and see that change propagate throughout the kit.
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We had fake SSS, diffuse color, and subsurface color that was tweaked with CPD (Custom Primitive Data) depending on camera shot. We started to integrate a Thin Film interference effect to add a little bit more coloration to the crystals. We started with ranges that were more real world focused, and tweaked the refraction amount to feel balanced and look good in the majority of use cases. We also included bump offset detailing, to give our crystals depth as the player ran by. All combined, these features with CPD allowed us to get enough diversity on a single material to address visual and gameplay needs.
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Huge shout out to my lead Evan. This was a huge learning opportunity for me, and he constantly pushed me to explore looks and to study up on why certain behaviors were happening.
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Material Lead
https://www.artstation.com/evanliaw
Palette Artists
https://www.artstation.com/makm
Concept Artists
https://www.artstation.com/cati