Hello!
Thanks for checking out my work. I decided to make this yakitori piece for a couple of reasons!
My reel lacked a lot of environmental/loopable effects
I wanted to brush up on stylized texture painting in 3DCoat and Substance Painter.
I also wanted to challenge myself and try to implement a fake lighting effect for an unlit material using vertex color to drive it!
Create a chicken material where you can adjust the cook state.
Lastly, I was inspired by Monster Hunter and Breath of the Wild for their effects that they use for cooking food!
Here are all of my textures and maps that I used for the props and FX:
This is the material I created for the Charcoal prop. It’s the base texture but added with some flickering from a map I made in photoshop by crushing the values and inverting them, so that the cracks would be isolated. This acted as a map I can use to create the flickering effect with a smoothstep and multiply so that the map would grow slightly in size
This is the material I created for the chicken skewer. I painted two different textures for the cook state thinking I can simply lerp between the two to achieve the effect. I didn’t really like the result from lerping them because it uniformly faded from one state to the other. I then remembered that you can store vertex color data in R G and B channels, so I used a spare channel to store the painted erosion map. It also made it very easy to feather out the values of the map rather than calling on another texture that can possibly show strange artifacts the more you crank the values.
Here’s a simple material I used for the grill texture. I had a small portion of the grill that I painted on a 256x256 photoshop canvas, then I multiplied the texture coordinates so that the user can adjust how many rows and columns they want for the grill. I also made a spherical mask to multiply some glow to emulate a backlight.
The grill material is similar to the chicken material in that it uses vertex color to drive the lighting effect. The initial flickering looked a little too uniform, so I panned some noise over it to add some more granular variation.
The smoke material I used that pans across the mesh that hugs onto the chicken skewer. I made sure that the UV’s of the mesh were straightforward so they can simply pan upwards and follow the form of the chicken
That’s it! This was a fun little project that allowed me to refresh myself on prop modeling and texturing while also exploring tech art functionality in a couple of the materials. The next couple of projects I’m working on with my game development friends involve food, so perhaps this is a little bit of practice for when it’s time to create work for it!