Example 1: blinking mask
Back on Enslaved, the environment artists used this method to map a gradient that would reveal some floor lights along a corridor so they would appear to blink sequentially.
This setup is very simple. This is the texture I'm using:
(It's actually vertical but I rotated it for the sake of this post's layout.)
Since there's a lot of black it will repeat less often.
And this is what the unreal material looks like. As you can see, it's nothing different from what I described in the previous post.
Now in the map, I've just put down a few small cubes with that material on and there I have my blinking lights (sort of).
and here's what the map looks like with the material on the ground plane.
It actually took me longer trying to optimize those gifs than it took to make the whole thing in unreal.
This is not the most exciting of all examples but more will come. Stay tuned.
Very cool! I use a nearly identical technique for sci-fi blinky lights in my work. The artists get a real kick out of making customized scrolling masks to get different blink patterns.
ReplyDeleteAn alternative approach would be to have each row of cubes UV mapped to their own section of 0,1 space and they can still all share the same material. However the way you've described it here is much more flexible and is how I would have done it as well.