light-and-shadow-sar

[light-and-shadow-sar]

Light And Shadow

My initial thought was to create something akin to a still image of a setting or city, as there was a specific central focus on the main object to be illuminated by God's rays. However, I decided against that idea and instead wanted to create something new. I brainstormed for a few hours while searching the internet for an answer before finally coming up with an idea.

The plan is to reproduce a scene from the Nickelodeon show "Avatar: The Last Airbender." In that show, a character named Toph—who is blind—uses a sense known as "seismic sense"—a form of echolocation used by bats and dolphins—to locate people and perform earthbending.

My quest to decode this began when I decided to use the Unreal Engine to mimic this phenomenon or effect in 3D environments. I wanted to design an old house where a character could use this "seismic sense" to find something within. I believe that utilizing a blind protagonist attempting to decode some message or locate an object using their "seismic sense" would make a fantastic video game.

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Light And Shadow (Post 2)

After settling on a plan, I needed to figure out how to execute it, so I once again started looking for solutions online. However, my efforts were fruitless. I thought that I would replace the sound effects with a character in order to give them a seismic sense (footsteps). Just need to figure out how to turn the sound into something that changes the character's walking material (still working on this).

and I used material to try to replicate a roughly similar effect in Unreal. I created a wave flowing out from a single point of origin using the sine function and the radial gradient exponential.

[light-and-shadow-sar]

After creating this, I changed the material's details panel setting to translucent in blending mode and surface forwardshadowing in lighting mode, which made the material very expensive. I also added a custom normal map and opacity.

By adjusting the opacity, I was able to give the wave material depth and regulate its transparency.

[light-and-shadow-sar]

Then, in order to have this material bend or refract light, I added Fresnel to the equation and used a constant to control the refraction.

This was the outcome I ultimately obtained. I'm still trying to figure out how to get that specific effect in Unreal.

[light-and-shadow-sar]

Light And Shadow(Post 3)

After creating that material, I was confronted by a huge wall. I attempted many different approaches, but I was unable to solve the equation, so I left it at that and moved on to build the house for this. I used an unreal marketplace asset, relighting it to my needs, and then descended farther down the rabbit hole in order to find a solution.