Author Archives: David M

SSS for URP

UE4 Mine project

This project started climbing a mountain in Tenerife in 2015. I spent days going to different places to take photos of interesting rock formations to scan. More details of the process here.

Then I built this scene in UE4. I made a lot of other 3d assets, shaders and blueprints for the vr gameplay.

Baking simulations

I was curious to take a look at Houdini and have tested it by making an impact between asteroids. I then added fx and lighting to finish building the impact.

 

Endling

I was in charge of visual effects for the game Endling. Rain, water splashes, fire, smoke, shorelines and contour waves, swimming trails, digging…

Advanced water rendering

In 2017 I was asked to make a dirt water shader. I put together all the ideas that came to my mind in order to make it realistic. The list of features are:

  1. – Underwater pixels blurred according to depth
  2. – Moss creating volumetric shadows
  3. – Surface lighting using Subsurface scattering
  4. – Optical dispersion (aka chromatic aberration) depending on depth
  5. – Underwater volumetric shadows (used Fog Volume 3 for that)
  6. – Consistency of every effect at variable resolutions, distances and FOV values.
  7. – Surface normals animation using the flow map technique
  8. – Moss patches with variable height. Some percentage of them are on the surface and the other under surface

Rivals

In January 22 I joined Estudio Future as VFX and material artist. I’m in charge of every effect in the game Rivals as well as “weird” shaders and scene polishing.

Italian Village

Never-ending project that I started in 2019. Working on it in spare time when motivation and inspiration comes 🙂

Early Earth

Sometime ago, while watching the BBC documentary ‘The Universe’, I came across a scene that left a strong impression on me. It is a recreation of the earth during the formation stage 4.5 billion years ago.

After seeing this scene, I felt a strong urge to do something similar on my own and here is the result.

 

Subsurface Scattering for Unity

I developed a SSS plugin that is available on the asset store

Blurred transparency (new in 1.7 February 2021)

Eyes (new in 1.6 May 2020):

Human:

Marble Chess

Marble floor:

Organic:

 

Unite 2016: GPU instancing demo

Unity asked me to do a scene to show GPU instancing running on Metal API. I built this scene from scratch, all the models, textures and shaders. The Unity guys did the instancing part of the asteroids.

Captures from my local project:

Sculpts

 

Apple WWDC 2016

Worked for Unity providing all content and the base scripting layout for Apple’s WWDC16 tessellation demo

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Local screen capture

UE4 Beach scene

Demo scene built in UE4 using some of the content I have done for some clients.

Water Drops aka Lens Wetness

I remember when I created this effect in UDK for ‘The Waterfall’. I also remember the problems I had back then. But thanks to Unity and its flexibility, I have had the chance to remake it correctly. I can now defocus the effect properly, it also deals with other transparent FX and DoF. I was pretty happy with the result and found it interesting, so I have released it at the asset store.

Documentation | Web player demo | Forum

Asset Store

Cloth Shader for Unity

Cloth shading is a topic I have revisited over time. In January 2015 I have decided to release it to the Unity community as a Shader Forge graph at the asset store. I would be happy to see it used in your games. As you may see in the screens and video, you will be able to emulate key lighting behaviours of a wide range of fabric surfaces, from rough fabric such as towel or carpet, to silk or velvet.

 

Unite 2014

In 2014 I made two demos for Unity Technologies, both shown at Unite 2014. First one was a car rendering project, for which I have developed a layered shader to model car paint features. It consists of a metallic base, lacquer layer and one more layer on top for dirtiness.

I made this environment and material switcher app to test the shader under many different lighting situations.

Then I was asked to polish my skin rendering system for ADN. This project was also supported by Unity. I spent one month working on it at home. Once it was ready to rock, I went to Paris to meet ADN guys and get the demo done. It was an unforgettable and pleasant experience.

 

video
play-sharp-fill

Joachim-Ante3

Dave

After some years using Lee’s scan, I had the feeling that it was time to switch to another model. It wasn’t easy to find a good one so I decided to start zBrush and see what happened. I’d never tried to model a face before so it was a long process. And finally, Dave was born.