I’m trying to distill some info about the visual style used in Gigantic… The studio has release mostly nothing but I thought I’d pose the question to the TAO community… I do know they are using UE3+ from one of the only screenshots from their editor
So I’m pretty sure they are building custom shaders from the ground up… anyhow. thoughts?
I really like the visual style, and I was wondering of they are doing all the FX, so knowing more about the shaders would be awesome.
They look really 2D
most of the visual fx seem to use the “erosion” or “elevation” technique, where you sample a gradient over time with a different cut-off value to get smooth animated organic growth patterns out of a single texture.
Seeing their effects, such a technique does make sense. Though I wonder about their workflow for making them; they look very well animated and timed, which makes it hard to believe an animator timed it by painting the gradient directly.
I usually start by creating 5 to 10 shapes as individual layers, then create a series of progressive blurs, and stack them up.
by balancing the opacity of the layers you can control the timing.