Seasons

About this project.

I was inspirerad to do this effect after I saw the season system in the game Ashes of Creation. This project was really educational since it connects different parts of Unreal like Blueprints, shaders, Niagara and audio effects. This also gave me the opportunity to try and learn Unreals new PCG system to place the forest.

Assets were gathered from FAB by Quixel and Mythra Tech.

To change the colors of the leaves and grass I use curves controlled by collection parameters.

The main part that drives this effect in the game state is a timeline node that sets the values of a bunch of collection parameters that are placed inside shaders and blueprints to change masks, colors and VFX.

The landscape material was set up with multiple settings for controlling tiling, contrast between masks and color tints.

I created a material function for the snow since I might want it in different materials and not have to rewrite the shader.

Snow and moss on the rocks use the same mask that compares the transformed vector to the default (0,0,1) vector.

The butterflies are plains that are animated through the vertex shader and are controlled using dynamic parameters and a range of colors are set using particle color. 

Wind

The wind function was made very simply by rotating the meshes in the world's Z axis forth and back slightly. If this is done over the entire leaf part the result will make the viewer feel drunk, so I create a gradient from the bottom to the top to mask off where the effect should take place on the mesh. When the wind shader is this rudimentary the trick is to make it very subtle.

If I had more time.

I wish I had more time to create a better wind effect for the trees & grass. And make sure the wind parameters would change depending on mesh instance instead of material instance. I would also like to add some displacement to the snow to get a more realistic snow look.