Final Major Project - Spider Webs

 Spider Webs 

Plane made in 3Ds Max

    Although the environment in my project is one that's being used on daily basics, I wanted to suggest that it's very old nevertheless, and not often cleaned and tidied. One of the ways in which I wanted to portray that is the overall mess - scattered books and sheets of paper that pile one of top of another, furniture that's been shoved in the corners and untouched ever since.. and spider webs. 

    In order to make the spider webs. I made a plane in 3Ds Max, unwrapped it very basically and exported it in order to import it in Photoshop. I decided that it's going to take me a lot less time to just do it in Photoshop instead of making a material in Substance Designer. 

    Making an alpha map in Photoshop is very easy, all you need to do is make sure that your sheet is only in black and white and then create a new channel. The reason it needs to be in black and white is because when it comes to alphas, everything that's black is going to be what's invisible and everything that's white is going to be what's visible. In this case, we want only the lines to be visible because webs are almost transparent, except for the thin lines. You can very easily adjust the black and the white in Photoshop by using Levels in the adjustments section.

    In addition to that.. this is the royalty-free website that I used in order to find some images of spider webs and edit one like that. 

Example

    The next thing that I did was export the texture map from Photoshop and import it in Unreal Engine, then turn it into a material. Alphas are only going to work if the Blend Mode in the material properties is set to Masked, because that way Opacity Mask is enabled and what I do is connect the texture map to both Base Colour and Opacity Mask.

    I decided to animate the spider webs and make them move ever so slightly. The reason for that is because outside of my environment, I imagined the night to be very cold and windy, therefore some of that wind would surely pass through the window frames and the doors that would open and close.

    In order to do that, I used a SimpleGrassWind in Unreal Engine and I created a Wind Intensity, a Wind Weight, a Wind Speed, and an additional node for it. Then, I created a material instance and adjusted each of these in order to make the webs move. Not too rapidly but slightly, just to indicate that there's some air and wind swirling through the air. 

Graph 

Material Instance

Result

    Now that I've made the spider webs, I would like to spend some time spacing them around the edges and corners of every room because I quite like the vibe that they add to everything else. It makes the space look a little bit more alive.. not necessarily in a very pleasant way though, which is intentional.