Arizona — UE5 Tech Art

Arizona — UE5 Tech Art

I chose to do this project as it was a great opportunity to learn the intricacies of Post-Process Materials in UE5.

The whole project is built on PPM's, of which there's 6! Many of the PPM's are driven by masks made in Photoshop and Quixel textures. Although not cheap, the projects runs fully in real-time.

Map-Mask 1-Mask 2- Albedo- Unlit- Lit

A great challenge I faced during the project was understand what pieces of the work to replicate and which to approach exactly with a more flexible method, a great part of that was understanding what simply can be and can not be done in real-time in UE5.

Understanding how to troubleshoot an engine and trace back steps as well as which compromises to take for which effects played a quintessential part in this.

The different PPM's each cover a separate, crucial part of the final image.

1. Base paper texture

2. Animated paper fibers

3. Surrounding Black and White mask

4. Painterly grass shader

5. Brown stains mask

6. Normal based lighting edit

Above is the painterly grass shader. It is based on the principles of stretching the grass based on an input image, followed by a mix of the grass' diffuse pass as well as it's stretched PPM pass.

The animated paper fibers PPM is a close up of some paper that is blended with the scene pass based on another paper texture that is zoomed into and run through a flipbook system. All is screen alligned.

The normal based lighting edit allows for a much softer look to the cactus. First, the cactus is isolated based on it's depth and the image is turned into a binary mask. The PPM and Diffuse passes are then lerped together based on the normals of the cactus. All is then lerped back into the original PPM pass based off of the binary mask.

Thanks to @real_brooke_jones on ig for supplying the original painting!