Procedural Sun Shader Update

Hello out there,
I wanted to share a small update of the procedural sun shader.

In the initial version of the shader I used a simple plane for the corona and let it always look towards the camera. That did the job in my project, but it looked a bit weird and flat in the webplayer presentation. I decided to use a few different planes instead, to get rid of rotation thing at all. Each of the planes is facing a different angle, so you can always see the corona without a need to rotate any plane. With multiple overlapping planes instead of a single lonely plane, I also had to do some minor changes on the shader itself. to make sure all planes blend together nicely :)

Furthermore I added a skybox texture and made a few ui tweakes in the presentation scene. I hope you like the changes and as last time feel free to play around with the values in the updated webplayer showcase. Hf creating your own suns!

As always, I'm open to feedback and would appreciate comments and suggestions.

Thanks for reading.

Fire Extinguisher

Hello out there,
I have a bit more stuff from my current study project to show, I started to texture a few of my models and played around with the new standard shaders in unity 5 and so far, I really like them :P

Quite some difference between Unity 4 and 5, if you just use the standard shaders ;)

Webplayer Presentation

As always, I'm open to feedback and would appreciate comments and suggestions.

That's all for now.

Procedural Sun Shader

Hello out there,
I have a bit new stuff that's worth sharing.

During my current study project I went a bit deeper into shader creation inside Unity 4 & 5.
And I have to say, that I always thought it would be harder to create some nice shaders :D

There are certainly still quite a few things, that I could optimize a bit more, but I am happy with the results for now.

The shader is fully procedural, based on some generated noise maps that you can adjust to your liking in the editor, or in this little webplayer showcase.
Feel free to play around a bit with it ;)
 

As always, I'm open to feedback and would appreciate comments and suggestions.

That's all for now.

Time for an update :)

Hello,
the end of the year is coming closer and I finally found the time to post some new stuff here.
I just couldn't find the time to write long blog posts about interesting things ;)

But I have uploaded a few things on deviant art from time to time, for the case you missed it

http://swatty007.deviantart.com/

I have also updated my portfolio recently with some of the work I made during my second study year and with this highpoly model I created to deepen my knowledge about hard surface modeling and to learn a bit more about the PBR workflow and Substance Designer. 

 

For more details, take a look at my portfolio.

 While we are talking about Substance, I have worked on a small script for Maya to have a interface for the Substance batch tools. The script allows you to quickly batch bake maps for your models with the Substance batch baker, without leaving Maya. It's a quicker and more intuitive way to bake large amounts of models.  

 Currently I am still working on some more functions.  For example if you want to create a couple of models which are using the same Substance, just with different input maps like a normal´s or AO´s. You can use it to quickly generate a new Substance for each model, with the associated baked maps and export your final textures.
 
 
Beside that I have also worked on a few other tools during the last year, to improve my workflow in Maya. 

They are allowing me to reduce the time I need for some repetitive tasks like exporting my models to the correct paths in different projects, but I will talk a bit more in depth about this in a separate blog posts, if I am at a point where I think, that the tools are ready for a release.

 
As always, I'm open to feedback and would appreciate comments and suggestions.

Best wishes for a wonderful holiday and a Happy New Year!

New Portfolio site, some drawings and Happy Holidays

Hello,
to the end of the year I finally found the time to create a new portfolio website.
You can check it out under: http://martin-niehoff.de/
Together with my new Portfolio website I also adjusted some minor things on the layout of this blog.

Beside that I also want to show you some concepts, that I have made last quarter for school.

As always, I'm open to feedback and would appreciate comments and suggestions.
That's all for now.

Best wishes for a wonderful holiday and a Happy New Year