{"id":158,"date":"2024-02-15T03:18:18","date_gmt":"2024-02-15T03:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abdoubouam.com\/?p=158"},"modified":"2024-02-15T03:31:59","modified_gmt":"2024-02-15T03:31:59","slug":"devlog-dump-weeks-0-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abdoubouam.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/15\/devlog-dump-weeks-0-8\/","title":{"rendered":"DevLog Dump (Weeks 0-8)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hello world! This is my first blog post. I am currently working full-time on a personal game project, and I will be sharing dev logs here. I will share more details about the game when I have something presentable, but for now it’s just a bit of experiments, props and world building.
This is a recap of my devlog for Weeks 0-8. To keep things short, I’ll only post the key points, not in chronological order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first thing I had to do is learn Unreal Engine. It was not as bad as I anticipated, I already know the basics of programming, real-time rendering, technical art stuff, shaders…etc, and it was mostly a matter of knowing terminology and where Unreal keeps the tools. I got some help from Discord (hey XYZ friends!), and also from reading the documentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shaders<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One of the first things I did was creating a master material with all the features I need, which include : Channel-packed (M R AO), masked color adjustment, roughness adjustment, AO-based dirt, emission and tri-planar mapping. I will add features as I go. I also made custom export profiles for Substance Painter, some macros for Affinity Photo, and a Blender node group that can use the packed textures and the compressed DirectX normals (only XY information, no Z).<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"\"\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Master Material instance. Still a WIP, it needs more features and clean-up.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

I also created a screen shader with distortions, color adjustments, scanlines, “blinking”, and RGB pattern. In addition to that, I made a realistic scrolling pattern that emulates the way terminals work, loading a bunch of lines at a time and scrolling randomly<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"\"\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Screen shader with distortion and blinking text<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n
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\"\"\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Scrolling text<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

This was my first serious material in Unreal, a tile shader that can select from up to 16 patterns, set up to 4 different colors, adjust wetness and dirt, roughness, symmetry, and radial symmetry. The pattern selection might not be viable in production, because it doesn’t work with mip-maps and it needs TSR or TAA to work and it’s sometimes too noisy. It was a good learning exercise though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n