Hello everyone, I wanted to share what I have been working on over the last few weeks.
In a upcoming game project dimensional travel will be a core pillar. I got the chance to develop and experiment how we can visualize this feature.
As a first prototype I used a sphere mask to control the opacity of a object. This Sphere mask could be controlled by using material collection parameters for its inputs. The parameters are set dynamically in a blueprint taking the position and radius from a sphere in the level.
This way i can make a material for objects in one dimension then make a new material with an inversed sphere mask for objects in the other dimension.
Next up was separating the lighting of the two dimensions. I did this by making use of lighting channels. I build the two dimensions in separate lighting channels so the lighting would only affect the objects of the specified light channel.
I also wanted some flexibility in the shape that would mask the different dimensions. I came across the Distance to nearest surface node which would create a mask based on the distance field buffer. This would create a mask based on object intersection. This means I can use all kinds of shapes.
At this point the workflow requires a lot of setup and configuration per object. So i created a simple editor utility widget to do these configurations with a single button. The tool sets the selected mesh or light to the right light channel, disables affect distance field and makes the required material changes to assign the right dimension. The other buttons are to improve workflow between the two dimensions.
From here I will be working on improving the visual effects and implementing it within the game project.
I am excited to hear your opinion or feedback.
Or if there are any questions about the project I would be glad to answer them.