Screaming Sands

Materials and FX to bring a desert survival horror game to life

Materials

The stone and sand materials were made using Adobe Sample, and the water material was made from scratch in Adobe Photoshop with modifications in the Unreal Engine materials graph. The water material roughness was also reused by a teammate to make a surrounding dust cloud effect. All materials used in the game were meant to be widespread and optimized, the water uses a single texture modified to work as roughness, metallic, and base color, is animated with a panner node, and colored with a vector parameter for the convenience of the level designer

Paranormal FX

As the player begins to hallucinate running into invisible "paranormal traps" they need cues to understand the area is dangerous. Whisper effects from Zapsplat would play, and the ground would start bleeding with a Niagara effect.

Originally, I was tasked with transparent spheres (which you can see in the progress video), but when all variations felt out of place, I came up with this effect myself.

The effect uses the particle collision to spawn blood decals of random orientation and size. The blood material was modified from the Adobe Stock photo to the right.

Sound

The ambient noise in the test video is a combination of Zapsplat's burning flesh acid and cold blizzard snow storm sound effects, combined to make a grainier sandstorm sound. I used Adobe Audition to combine them and make them loop.

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