PARADOX VFX
ROLE
Technical VFX Artist
DESCRIPTION
A short vertical slice proof of concept for a game involving time loops. I focussed on creating the time machine and the effects related to this. I also created the consoles CRT screen effects, end credit effects, flies, moths and bugs.
YEAR
2024
GENRE
Creepy Sci-Fi
PLATFORM
Unreal Engine 5
VFX BREAKDOWN
Time Machine
There are many parts that were involved in creating the overall effect. From the lowering and charging of the cannons, to heating up the coils, and creating the lightning effect. The final materialisation of the time bubble as the main focus was designed to seem liquid like.
CRT / LCD PIXEL DISPLAY
Throughout the time experiment there are several computers and consoles. Each display has a pixel shader attached to give it an authentic retro display effect.
Insects
There are several insects that populate the rundown bunker. Moths fly around lights, Flies hover over food and waste, and Roaches occupy vents and dark areas.
SHADERS, PARTICLES & CODE
CTR /LCD PANEL DISPLAY
To create the LCD display, I made a RGB pixel in Photoshop and used this in a material. This was tiled across the UVs in an 320 by 240 resolution to give a low-fi 1980's feel to the displays. To make the pixels work, I created a white texture and separated the red, green, and blue, this was to get the light to dark balance of each colour that I then combined with its corresponding colour before feeding it all back to the pixel image. this was then combined with either video animation or the ScreenCapture2D that fed live camera feed into the texture. The overlay of pixels made up the image, and depending on each colour's light value, it brightened or darkened the RGB pixel.
To add a bit more realism to the screen I created a sine wave and drove this with a Time node to flicker the brightness of the screen.
OUTLINE SHADER
The outline shader uses a Laplacian of Gaussian technique. The Laplacian is a 2D isotropic measure of the second spatial derivative of an image. A method that checks each pixel on the screen, and depending on the pixel’s surroundings, determines its colour, this becomes brighter as it gets closer to an edge to the point of creating edges that glow. This is achieved by taking the pixel offset and masking out sections of a screen to created a layer that checks the edges and returns a gradient value, the higher the gradient the more emissive it becomes.
ELECRICAL CHARGE
The electrical charge is a material effect that gives the impression that the cannon is charging up with power, this material was attached to a plane, and driven by the time node who give the wiggling lightning effect.
BUBBLE MATERIAL
This material was created to give the impression that the time bubble is made of some kind of energy. Driving the opacity up and down was a choice taken to give the effect that it is fluid.
TIME MACHINE BLUEPRINT
The entire time machine is driven by code, from the deployment of the cannons, to their rotation and location, to the material effects.
