Progress on Portfolio Piece Two!

The Research:

How do chameleons change their skin color?

Chameleons have multiple layers of skin cells, each containing different pigments.  The top most layer contains cells that are red and yellow, the lower layer contains cells that are blue or white.  These skin cells either shrink or grow in size based on the color the chameleon intends to be.


For example, if a chameleon wishes to be orange the red and yellow cells would grow to an equal size while the blue cells would shrink.  However if the chameleon wanted to appear blue the blue cells would increase in size while all the other cells would shrink.

Lastly chameleons have a chemical called melanin which allow them to darken there current overall coloring.

This technique can easily be expanded to a shader.  Textures have multiple channels similar to the different layers making up the skin of a chameleon.  I plan to edit the influence of these channels as to better match an intended color palette.

The Shader:


The goal is to create a shader that can change the color pallet of the current textures on a mesh to match that of another user specified texture or the current environment the mesh is in.

Currently I only have the average color of the environment effecting the final diffuse.  My hope is to make a more sophisticated algorithm by sampling areas of the texture or environment that have dramatic color shifts and editing the areas with similar color shifts in the diffuse (and color spec) accordingly.

So what am I going to use to show off my final shader!!

A happy chameleon! :D

Progress:
The Sculpt:

The Model:

References: 

For the texture I'm going to go with a super colorful palette since it will show off the shader's capabilities best.  

This fella is a great example:

Portfolio Piece Two!

Portfolio Piece
#2:
HLSL Shader!!!

on a ...
Chameleon model!


Not super complex but clean and intended to show off a shader!!
I mostly want to focus on learning more about shaders.

HLSL Shader -

start by changing the ambient color based on the average of the background

Ultimately I would like to change channels in the diffuse map to blend with the background (with some slight variation) on a pixel level.   In other words I don't want to turn the model invisible instead I would like to create a camouflage effect that can still maintain some details from the initial textures.

Portfolio Piece 1

Ink Particle Effects:

The goal of this project was to create a collect of ink based particle effects for when the family members die in Penned.


The original inspiration for these particles came from videos taken of ink splattering. These videos were edited in Adobe After Effects and individual frames were extracted to create sprite sheets



Sprite:





Sprite:

Family member Deaths:
The following particles were all made using RealFlow.  The process for these consist of:
1. creating the simulation in real flow by using different meshes from maya for collision and impact
2. meshing the simulation to resemble a thick ink consistency and importing those meshes into maya.
3.  applying a unique CGFX shader* to the mesh in Maya


*ink shader

4. using Maya's hardware render to render the sequence
5. importing frames into layers in photoshop, editing frames as needed and creating a sprite sheet from them

Final Product:




Due to some current bugs with spawning particles in the VForge scene after a plug in update the family member deaths are not yet in the game. 

There are four deaths.
1. breaking death from the corrosive sword:
uses the breaking tool to break the family member in combination with ink pop and the word dissolution

Ink pop sprite:



2. diminutive death
uses the ink drop particle when the player kills the diminutive enemies

Ink drop sprite:



3. standard death variety 01
A particle that plays after the family member hits the ground of their body splashing into ink

sprite sheet:

4. standard death variety 02
A combination of a  particle and rigging technique where the particle starts playing about half way through the death animation

I still need to get this animation with particle effect working properly in the engine.

Morph:


Particle sprite: