Quick Quick Quick (for Unreal Cascade users, if you use Unity dont lose your time with my useless tasks)

General Discussion
#1

Just some functions/terms in Unreal Cascade i want to you give me a clearly definition:
Lerp: _______________________________________________________
Power (is it the samething of erode?):______________________________
Noise/Noise texutre:____________________________________________
(ok just an update)
panning: Make the texture move around the mesh.
Distortion:____________________________________________________

all these terms are relateds with materials/textures creation, i discovered that the base of any effect is based on materials and textues (based on base, haha that was good). They are XTREMALY important to VFXs, there is no FX without these guys, mr. texture and mr. material. I can say with property that this takes 60% of the effect creation. Nah, maybe 67,37% (refute me). If you know how to create good materials and textures and you know how to manipulate them, then you are 67,37% ready to start creating VFXs and been awesome doing this. Lets talk guys, internet is here to connect people, lets share experiences.

#2

Lerp - Linear interpolate
This takes two values (a,b) and blends between them with an alpha.

The easiest way to think about it: imagine A in a layer in Photoshop, and B is the layer above it. Alpha is the opacity and transparency of that layer.

Put in a white value into alpha and you will get 100% B, black 100% A, and gray - some blend of the two.

The linear part just means there is no ease-in or ease-out of the blend. A value of 0.1 gray in the alpha is 10% B and 90% A.

Power is not the same as erode. Power comes from the math function of the same name (sometimes written as x^y)

Power takes the input and multiplies it by itself an exponent number of times.

If your input is between 0 and 1 this is an easy approximation of contrast, and will make a linear blend have some amount of ease in.

Noise texture - this will be a texture that has some amount of random or chaotic values across it. In VFX usually tiling. This is a cheap way to create the appearance of randomness in a texture. A classic example is the Generate Clouds function in Photoshop.

Distortion - usually relates to distorting a texture with another texture. in unreal for example, if you same one noise texture that is panning across a surface, you can. Take that result and add it to TextureCoordinates to distort another texture.

So usually Panner > Noise Texture > multiply by distortion amount > add TexCoords > Texture Sample 2

Sometimes distortion has other meanings, but in this context usually we are talk about distorting a texture.

(Note it doesn’t need to be a noise texture you use, anything you do that modifies the input uvs of a texture sample is probably distortion, noise is just the most common)

There is a handy thread on this site for dictionary like questions.

https://realtimevfx.com/t/realtime-vfx-dictionary-project

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#3

Not directly related to your question, but your post history, I think this would benefit you:
https://www.google.com/insidesearch/searcheducation/training.html

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#4

Some heroes don’t wear capes. They just walk around the world, looking for heroism to make. No words, just thanks (actually, thanks is a word)

#5

Or you know… just go to the ue4 material compendium where almost all nodes are explained with examples:
Unreal Engine Material Expressions Reference | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation :slight_smile:

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