USC AGP · Technical Artist

Rephrased

AGP · Work in Progress

What I did

Developing stylized water and sky materials for a USC AGP project.
Building a controllable day–night sky with gradients and sun glow.
Integrating material controls with Blueprint logic.

Unreal Engine · Materials · Blueprint · VFX

01 / MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT

Stylized water

A modular SingleLayerWater material built for art direction. Moving highlight masks, blended normals, and wave displacement create a lively surface, while exposed material parameters support quick color and shoreline adjustments.

Edited viewport demonstration: moving surface detail and live color adjustments. Development test scene.

Surface motion

Two panning noise layers shape the highlight masks. Panning normal maps are combined with BlendAngleCorrectedNormals, while a time-driven sine function feeds World Position Offset.

Art direction controls

The material instance exposes water color, highlight controls, murkiness, and shoreline settings. The master material connects scattering and absorption inputs through SingleLayerWater.

Procedural water noise · Substance 3D Designer

Created water noise textures in Substance 3D Designer. Separate noise branches use Levels, Transform 2D, and Directional Warp to shape different patterns, then combine through RGBA Merge into a channel-packed texture. This graph documents the texture authoring behind the water material.

Substance 3D Designer water noise graph and RGBA texture preview — Water noise authoring: procedural graph and packed texture preview. Open the image to inspect the nodes.

Explore the material graphs

Open any image to inspect the nodes at full resolution.

Water highlight and normal material function — Highlight masks & blended normals

Sine-based wave displacement graph — Time-driven wave displacement

Master water material connections — Master material integration

SingleLayerWater scattering and absorption inputs — Scattering & absorption controls

Water material instance parameters — Exposed material instance parameters

Work-in-progress shoreline mask graph with error markers — Shoreline mask · Work in progress

The shoreline function screenshot contains error markers. It documents the node structure in progress; the viewport recording shows the current visual result.