Armor Material

Context and purpose:

Elven Warmaiden is a top down auto battler game in which player have to make strategic decision. In order to do that i need to convey all information in the screen in a non-clutter way. 

One mechanic of the game is armor and special type of enemies can break them causing player’s characters receiving more damage.

The UI already has Damage number floating, HP Bar and buff/debuff icon floating up. So i decided to display the armor damage on player character outfit.

How-to: Make the outfit material Dynamic. Then the Armor percentage is updated by character blueprint each time the armor is damaged with the node “Set Scalar Parameter value”. 

The parameter is used to control the mask in material.

The grayscale mask is made in Substance Painter. 

Cloth parts are painted with a gradient blend to make it disappear gradually.

Metal part like the arm-guard and shoulder-guard are filled with a single value to make it break together.

The result:

For dead enemy i need to disappear,  i do it the same way, but to save time i use the same mask for all enemies and plug it through a triplanar to bypass the UV difference.

And results:

The floor tiles: Context: The floor of the bridge is layered with some similar tiles, so to break the repetition i mask out 2 part of the brick. The outer parts are the same, inner parts are tiling texture with uv coordinate add to Local Position node so all tiles are different. The tiles are laid out from one single blueprint as Instanced static mesh so their local position are different. If hand-place in the level i would use World Position instead of Local Position.

The Result: