Gelatinous cube material tips

Development Rendering
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1

Hey all I’m attempting to make a slime looking material I made the base texture in substance and am editing it in ue4.

Trying to give it a good depth fade so you can see through it so it looks like there is volume. Not a shell of material with nothing inside.

I am also attempting to make it so the material has a nice slow movement as well. The color is using a world pos. and then the uvs and texture has a panner.

My problem is every side of the cube pans a different direction. And fresnel/depth-fade doesn’t seem to work on a flat surface. The seams are very obvious as well, but that isn’t a huge issue since it’s a cube I knew it would have some seams.

It’s just a simple skeleton mesh rigged up in blender and once I figure out the physics it shouldn’t be super visible with a correct panning as well.

I’m just looking for any tips or advice on how to make this material look better. Thanks!

322617-cube.jpg
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The arrows here show which way the panner is going, it goes a separate direction for each side.

Edit: Alright with the help of some good tutorials I improved my material a lot but I still got two major issues.

  1. Depth-fade/fresnel doesn’t work on perfectly flat surfaces.
  2. Panner node still goes a different direction for every side. Solved

Any help or info or tuts on those issues would be much appreciated.

Edit2: I managed to fix the panner node by tips from a nice dude. painted arrow texture on mesh and rotated uv islands accordingly in blender.

So I guess I’m just hoping to have a decent way to depth-fade/fresnel the surface of the mesh to make it look like there is depth to my material. This seems to be one of the harder things form m y looking at tutorials and such, there doesn’t seem to be a simple solution and depth-fade/fresnel doens’t play nice with perfectly flat surfaces.

Still any help appreciated, thanks.

2

322619-cubemat.png
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This is my material setup.

An idea of what I want would be something [like the gelatinous cubes on google][2] or even what minecraft slimes look like where the edges have a different color and the center has that nice volume depth.

3

Thanks man appreciate it. I’ll give these a look right now.

4

Parallax Occlusion Mapping might be interesting to add effects to the cube. There’s a way to select certain faces of a mesh to apply a material, but I don’t remember how or where I found it. I’ll try looking for it. It would involve making an instance of the material, changing the panning direction, and then selecting the mesh face to apply it to so the whole mesh has the texture(s) panning in the same or user-set directions by using material instances for each different pan direction of the animation.

Here’s a list of material tutorials on youtube I have, and I moved a bunch of potentially applicable ones to the top for your gelatinous cube:

5

Yeah I ended up fixing the panning by way of painting arrows on the texture and physically watching which way they went on the mesh in-game. Then just went back into blender and rotated the islands.

Now I’m just stuck on actually having a depth fade on flat surfaces it doesn’t seem to like cubes for whatever reason.

6

Take a look into displacement & tessellation.

7

Alright I’ll find out what I can, thanks!