Hey, I'm Simon and I'm making a game!! :)
Support me: Wishlist & Play Demo on Steam

This is a talk I gave on the Unreal Fest Europe 2018 about three stylized effects in RIME. It’s based on the one I gave 2017 but extended about the water materials of RiME.

I didn’t embed the video directly to avoid any tracking from Google and complications with the DSGVO.

Thanks to Tequila Works for letting me speak about the effects and all the nice people I had the opportunity to speak to at the event. It was awesome!

Unreal Material
To get the material working on your Unreal Version (tested with 4.13 and 4.19.1):

  1. Download Material Package
  2. Extract directly to your content folder (not in a subfolder!)
  3. Start Unreal and open the main material:
    \Content\BaseMaterials\SeaShaders\Shaders\OceanMaster_M
    Or the material instance which contains all the settings for the water in Rime Level 1:
    \Content\BaseMaterials\SeaShaders\Settings\Settings_SeaStage1

Useful Links

You can find many creations of the RiME-Fire and -Water below the “old” RiME VFX article from 2017!
https://simonschreibt.de/gat/stylized-vfx-in-rime/#update1

The Talk from 2017 with more Information about the Fire & Smoke
https://simonschreibt.de/gat/stylized-vfx-in-rime/

Julian Love – “Technical Artist Bootcamp: The VFX of Diablo”
https://archive.org/details/GDC2013Love

Tutorial: Ocean Shader with Gerstner Waves
https://80.lv/articles/tutorial-ocean-shader-with-gerstner-waves/

Fortnite Sky Optimisation
https://youtu.be/1xiwJukvb60?t=41m46s

Chromatic Aberration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration
https://simonschreibt.de/gat/teleglitch-rgb-flickering/

Unreal Custom UVs
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Rendering/Materials/CustomizedUVs

Update 1
Ninjin42 just mentioned, that the Custom UVs workflow is NOT necessary anymore to move the processing from the Pixel Shader to the Vertex Shader. Since 4.16 there is a new node called “Vertex Interpolator”. You can find more information in the Patch Log by searching for “Vertex Interpolator”.

Here is the part from the Patch Log:

Update 2
I just added a little analysis of these dust-particles since they look similar what we achieved in RiME. You can find the update with more explanations here.

15 thoughts on “Stylized VFX in RIME – Water Edition

  1. Daniele

    I think I’ve solved the crash problem…
    The issue seems to be related to the SeaDiscmesh_Cylinder003 mesh.
    Looking at the saved snapshot, its default material seems to be the instance of OceanMaster_M (i see a light blue mesh, about the same colors of the instance).
    While on 4.19.3 opening the material goes fine, in an older engine version like 4.15 opening the master material seems to trigger something on referenced assets too (so the mesh): and that makes the engine crash.
    I’ve tried to open directly the mesh asset on 4.19 (where the material is ok) and the engine crashes as well: maybe in this version no strange behaviour on referenced assets happens.
    If you delete the mesh and try again to open the material, no more crashes even in 4.15 ;)

    I’ve tried deleting the mesh because my log file stated:

    [2018.05.01-21.34.56:564][409]LogWindows:Error: === Critical error: ===
    [2018.05.01-21.34.56:564][409]LogWindows:Error:
    [2018.05.01-21.34.56:564][409]LogWindows:Error: Fatal error: [File:D:\Build\++UE4+Release-4.15+Compile\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\CoreUObject\Private\UObject\LinkerLoad.cpp] [Line: 3498]
    [2018.05.01-21.34.56:564][409]LogWindows:Error: StaticMesh /Game/BaseMaterials/SeaShaders/Mesh/Mergedversion/SeaDiscmesh_Cylinder003.SeaDiscmesh_Cylinder003: Serial size mismatch: Got 6301, Expected 6317

    And pointed me to that specific asset.
    Hope this helps… (if a proper solution)
    Now we should understand what’s the problem of the mesh is :)

    Reply
      1. Eti

        Thanks a lot I had the same crash!
        Also excellent talk! As always very useful informations!
        luv u bye

        Reply
  2. Eduardo

    Hey Simon! let me tell you that your videos and techniques are blowin’ my mind :D really nice of resources.. however am trying to replicate some of your stuff for study porpouses.. but the mayor problem that am having is about material behavior,for example; if i create a foam material for a mesh behaves the same for all my meshes and particle meshes (i know, it natural)
    my question: is there any way to say “hey material am a different object! do something different!” am thinking on panners velocity and stuff like that.
    Your articles about zelda wind waker are interesting as hell too :D
    thank you for sharing all your work!

    Reply
    1. Simon Post author

      Hi Eduardo, please notice that the majority of the work presented on this blog was NOT done by me, I’m just talking about it. But the amazing ideas for the things come from other people.

      Regarding your question: You can use “StaticSwitchParameter” to have different behaviors in your material. When you use the material in a material-instance, you can change the state of this switch depending on what behavior you need. I hope this helped :)
      https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Rendering/Materials/ExpressionReference/Parameters

      Reply
      1. Eduardo

        Thank you very much for answer me! it was very useful :D
        about the content, i was aware about the fact that some work wasnt made by you, but doenst matter, you rock :D
        there is just a few websites dedicated to this kind of stuff.
        thank you simon! kind regards :D

        Reply
  3. Dan

    I’m on 4.19.2 (Mac), and when I open the material all of the functions from the functions folder (pixel2distance, ocean_gerstner, exp2, etc etc) are listed as “Unspecified Function” in the OceanMaster material and some of the nodes are disconnected. Anybody else have this problem?

    Downloading 4.13.2 now to try it there and will try it on Windows when I am able in a few days.

    Reply
    1. Dan

      I’m a fool!! I had the wrong folder structure. I placed the unrealContentRimeWater folder in content, rather than just placing the BaseMaterials folder in there. My mistake!

      Reply
  4. Nathan

    Hi Simon, great talk!

    I’m a bit confused, in the OceanMaster material, there are normals going into the Normal slot on the master output node.

    I thought you couldn’t do that with unlit material? What are the normals in that slot affecting? Is it just for the refraction?

    Reply
  5. Ben

    Does anyone have the material files still by any chance? I watched this 2 years too late and the Dropbox link is dead now sadly. :(

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Simon Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *