This project was a venture into technical art - with my goal being to create a stylised lava shader that fits into a game environment.
Here's a breakdown of the final shader and its parameters. I wanted it to be both visually effective whilst remaining user-friendly and optimised.
I felt that I could present my work most effectively by contextualising it within an environment - so I took some rocky assets I had previously made and laid them out into a composition.
The original inspiration came from wanting to create an alien planet with unnaturally coloured lava - so I was determined to include this as a feature! I found that my favourite method for doing so was using gradient mapping.
In addition to the main shader, I created a simplified version with some additional VFX for the areas where lava falls vertically.
And for some final polish, I added extra VFX and some supplementary materials.
A final look at all three colours.
This was a project I did alongside my course at Falmouth University, and it was my first real venture into working with shaders. I wanted to use this as an opportunity to learn more about technical art and familiarise myself with UE4's shader graph. The original inspiration for this came from a game I worked on last year, which took place on a volcanic planet full of purple lava - that got me determined to make a shader with funky colour changing effects. Whilst this is still relatively new territory for me, I found that I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project and I can't wait to explore this avenue further!
