Material Mayhem!

The focus of this workshop will not be on how to achieve photo-realistic PBR materials so much as ways to use shaders and materials to achieve interesting effects. Participants will spend the first portion of the session getting familiar with the node-based material editors inside Unity and Unreal. This will cover normal-direction-based effects such as matcaps and snow. We’ll then take a very high-level peek at writing shader code in Unity to give attendees context into their inner-workings by inflating some objects and going over simple cel-shading. Then, we’ll dive into more complicated shader/vfx setups, reviewing examples of render-texture-based effects, geometry shaders, and compute shaders.

For intermediate/advanced 3D artists that are hitting a wall with how to control the look of their in-game assets as well as anyone who is interested in getting into shaders!