Custom Material Samples

I like to tinker with materials in Unreal Engine. During Insurgency: Sandstorm's production, I authored some materials to be used in different parts on the interface. Used on the HUD and over the game menu's, these materials provides additional feedback and subtle motion on screens and UI elements. Some of these materials were inspired by the techniques presented on the "Technical Artist Bootcamp: The VFX of Diablo" talk, at GDC (youtu.be/YPy2hytwDLM) I'm not a VFX Artist by any means, but the visual material editor in UE4 isn't not only powerful and intuitive, but also super fun to experiment with.

I wanted something special on the "Find Match" button. It is the button that players use to commit into searching for an online game, so its appearance should be attractive and interesting. I created this animated material to match the title of the game. It is "sandstormy", and it has some nice sub motion of sparkling sand inside the dense clouds.

This heat wave effect adds some motion over the key art, to make it more interesting. The heat wave effect only affects some parts of the image (base on a custom alpha channel)

Animated icon for "Download in progress". The asset is a RGB texture and each channel is one element of the animation. I didn't need to use the A channel on this texture.

This material is used in the HUD, to represent a drum magazine, on your weapon.

Players can customize their team color, so I authored this "tintable" material. It uses a custom range from the Alpha channel as a tint mask, eliminating the need of an additional texture as mask.

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