This is my first bigger Unreal Engine project – a small and modular dungeon made to run on old mobile phones. It was a really fun challenge to model everything and on top of that I got to learn so much about the engine. From importing objects, writing shaders, making custom post-processing to the optimized visual effects and even some little gameplay programming with blueprints.
Here is a little video presenting the assets with default lighting.
I spend some time trying to make nice-looking and stylized flames. I ended up using a very cool technique by Simon Trümpler who worked on the VFX on the game RiME. The technique consists of a mask image and noise texturing offsetting on a different speed and with a different direction. The final result looks very pleasing and once applied to a slightly curved plane it looks awesome.
A variation of the same technique was used for the fog on the ground. I made some custom meshes and scrolled two custom-made noise textures. After that I measured the distance to the closest surface and made it disappear to avoid some clipping. The result looks quite nice and soft.
Some other challenges I found was making a few simple tiling textures feel like a real and lived environment. I ended up using a custom height blend technique I learned from this video.
For the project I wanted to have a thick fog. But the default fog solutions were either based on the camera or too heavy to run on mobile. So I came up with my own custom fog that is based on the player position and renders a fog as a post-processing layer on top in a smooth radius. The shader looks like that:
The rest is the usual workflow. A few hero assets. Some trims and a few tiling textures. All tied together with some custom shaders and post-processing. I made some more detailed break-downs of the statue and the crest.
I guess I ended up glossing over a few things, but that is pretty much the workflow for the project.
The entire project ended up using 2 unique (hero) assets, 2 sets of modular elements with unique unwraps and 5 tiling or trim textures. Additionally there are 5 small textures used for the particle systems and various shaders.
Thank you for watching!