This month was mainly focusing on my final project at university but as shown here I have also been doing work as a Technical Artist on the FOQUES project created by some of last year’s graduates at Norwich University of the Arts. FOQUES was a game created as part of Transfuzer and continues to be developed at the time of writing this.

In the project, the goal is to have a game that has an aesthetic of oil-painted scenery. This will be achieved through self-designed texturing styles, custom post-processes, and unique shaders to make the overall look. As the skillset I have developed encompasses a lot of the technical artist skills required for this project I am part of the development team of the game acting as a technical artist.

I was given the research task of creating paint-like water and so I went ahead to create water that is both readable and stylised.

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The way I created this water was similar to how I have in the past it was created with the single-layer water shading model however I used a unique way of generating procedurally generated water textures by interestingly using noise. Normally when creating a water shader a water normal or texture is used which looks like ripples and that is displayed across the surface however in this case I knew that wouldn’t look bespoke enough or fit the theme. So I had to get creative. The unique part of what is happening here is a noise texture is acting as a random addition to change in time before the water is animated, what this does is effectively randomly blur and stretch the texture that already exists giving it its unique effect. When creating this water I wanted to also make sure it could be edited and changed with lots of parameters so that you can have different effects of water in different areas and so environment artists can change values to see fit. 

Here is a useful link explaining the single layer water shading model:  https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/Materials/MaterialProperties/LightingModels/SingleLayerWater/