Material 1:

Pulsing Flesh

Table of Contents

Idea Summary

Idea Summary

For this project we were required to create a material with distortion and/or panning+wpo. I wanted to experiment with flowmaps, and decided to make pulsing veins.

Distortion

I started by drawing the lines of the veins, and applied it to the flesh material which I downloaded here. I needed to get the angles for how the veins should dilate/shrink- Substance Designer's bevel node has a normal output, which I used the R and G channels for just that.

Textures can only be from 0-1, so in a normal map the middle/flat angle is at 0.5. For calculations I needed to make flat be 0, so I added -0.5 in Unreal before multiplying it with an even smaller number to weaken the distortion strength. For areas close to the veins however, I multiplied that with a higher number again to strengthen it.

Flowmap

As this is for UVs, the blue channel of the normal map is unnecessary (b= z axis) and I could put another mask there.

2. Pulsing

With the distortion made, I needed to mask the effect so it actually pulsed. I wanted the pulse to follow the veins as well, so I created a gradient mask- white the beginning of the pulse, and black the end. A range of this mask would be my "frames".

As I was iterating I tried two node setups:

A. Snap Pulse

Using frac'ed time and Pulse Size, I chose a range from 0-1 in the gradient mask to sample from, and used smoothstep to remap the values in that "frame" for the Pulse Mask. Since smoothstep will include values above your max as 1, I multiplied the output with another smoothstep but inverted.

I didn't account for under 0 and over 1 areas in this version, so the effect snaps- Then I started making version B because I felt there was a neater way to fix it. I kept this version behind a switch param anyways because truthfully, I kind of liked the "twitch".

B. Smooth Pulse

Instead of getting a specific range, this version calculates the distance between the time and gradient mask. To make sure it looped properly, I also get the distance between the time -1 and +1, and use the smallest distance of all three.

With the Pulse Mask created, I used it to mask distortion and sent those UVs to base color, orh, and normals. I also used it to lerp base color between flesh and flowing blood.

Pulse mask

A. Snap Pulse

B. Smooth Pulse

3. Extras

The rest of the material. I added the Pulse Mask to world position offset for a lil' extra pizzazz.

Note:

Outside the material preview, wpo was causing the shadows to look wrong. Disabling virtual shadow maps quickly fixed it.

Parameters Video

2026-01-16 08-25-31.mp4

Future Improvements

The pulse mask was quickly made by hand and edited with Designer- in hindsight, since I made the veins on a vector layer in Clip Studio Paint, I probably could have manipulated opacity with much more precision with that.

I'd also like to adjust the time frac so the beginning is much faster- to get a smoother snap of movement- ideally within a parameter. Curve atlas?

The "front" and "back" of the pulse is the same size. Might be able to use same solution for above for this.

Resources

Flesh Texture: https://www.texturecan.com/details/137/

Report abuse