“Aberration” is a real-time 3D environment made in Unity HDRP. It has a mixture of different shader techniques, lighting effects, post-processing methods, and plenty of PBR workflows for sculpted and modelled assets.
Every asset within the project was created by me, this includes models, textures, materials, shaders, etc.
This project was born out of the necessity to learn another engine and reach a point of visual fidelity I believe is consistent with my progress in other engines. This goal turned out to be fraught with difficulty, adaption, and overcoming obstacles, which is the key to all learning processes despite being frustrating at times!
At the start of the project, I had no concepts in mind nor did I have a folder of references to inspire my ideation process. I simply wanted to see where the project would take me. Due to this, there have been many different iterations of this environment and a lot of trial and error.
Despite the many changes the project has gone through and the considerable lacking direction, I have felt my learning and understanding of the many aspects of Unity have greatly increased despite the project being unfinished.
Coming from Unreal Engine, I was used to the wonderful auto-generated LOD meshes that would be created. To my understanding, this is not a feature currently available in Unity, so it was time to go into Maya and start creating my own LOD meshes.
Shaders with parameters | Created in ShaderGraph
I used tiling-based texturing with multiple layers of materials blended via a position-based mask. This meant that any parts of the mesh that were facing upward in the Y axis would be utilising a set of texture slots within the shader.
I found ways to work with vertex displacement to create a wave effect, layering of tiling and panning normal map textures to create the overall look of the water and depth-based nodes to help create that murky look.