Shaders and Early Textures

I've experimenting a lot with Shader Forge recently. I worked through a few tutorials online to get myself more familiarised with it. Learning this Unity plugin is key to my success with this environment, its an incredibly powerful tool and will help to seamlessly blend the world together. But first, I went back to basics. Unfortunately, during my previous project I didn't get much assistance from my lecturers with the usages of Shader Forge, so by following online tutorials I quickly got the hang of it. Some of these shaders may not seem particularly associated with environment, they can easily be edited to suit any needs. I should also note that many of the textures are taken from CGTextures, its a great site for placeholder texture maps whilst I work on my own.

Using gradients you can create some wacky shaders by manipulating the UVs. It creates some fascinating animated objects. By inputting a noise texture in the form of clouds from Photoshop, I was able to make a shader that could "dissolve" a texture, adding a colour ramp gave the illusion of fire, though I have yet to figure out how to animate this.

 

Continuing my experimenting I create a shader that would use heightmap generated from the texture to place an animated glow between the gaps in stone bricks for example.

For what I wanted to do, I needed a more accurate heightmap. I plan on using vertex painting to blend two textures together, for example grass growing up and between stone brick. I created a couple variants, one simply used vertex painting to dictate how far the grass will grow between the bricks, and another which combined the vertex painted grass with an amount of noise generated grass. The latter would be used for structures I want to appear old, as if grass has began growing over it, this variant I prefer at this moment. The former I've had more trouble with, I may need to revise it once again to get the desired effect correctly. 

My final topic of this post is about some initial texture work. I wanted a way of quickly texturing many object quickly and with minimal texture maps. Using ZBrush I created the brick diffuse and normal map seen on the stone fence above. I hope to reuse this on many brick structures. The next bit of texture work was to create a single diffuse and normal map for a magnitude of unique objects, a put together a quick example below. From here I will finish the two maps and continue experimenting with workflows. Learning the texturing process for large, diverse environments is much more strenuous than I'd thought, there seems to be little to nothing online. Most of my information has be taken from studying the games I play, Dark Souls 3 in particular has influenced me a lot as of late.