Substrate Material

The focus of the project was to find ways to utilize substrate material inside Unreal 5.5, converting my old master shader using in VR projects and layering them where required.

I used cinecamera to render out the project using path tracer, and while experimenting with blur. Since, using cinecamera is not that optimal once you have positioned it in a way you like, I switched to post process material to get the DOF. It uses HLSL and lets you set two mask, one coming from the far side of the scene and one starting from the camera to only focus on what you want. The project uses metahuman rig and groom, the rest, including cloth, head, shader are custom made. The custom head was fed into Metahuman using MeshToMetahuman and then the shader swapped out in the blueprint.

As for the skin, its a simple shader, layered with another BSDF shader for the makeup, the glitter is a simple procedural noise driven by a mask. I have disabled the occlusion for the eye that comes with metahuman instead using a custom shader that bakes the fake shadow into the basecolor and specular. The plastic on the mecha hand is simple blend of two colors using fresnel to produce the pearlescent effect.

This project comes after a long time, since I have mostly been doing technical art these days. I would like to thank Yogev Levy and Roger Magrini da Silva, for their feedback.

Overall a fun experiment with the new engine version and the new substrate materials.