Some months ago I was working on Genpop’s Slimecore and made this shield that I really liked the mechanics of so I thought to write a post about it. The game has been quickly evolving since then so you won’t be able to see it as I’m presenting it in the game anymore and I’m no longer involved with the project.

First I made the mesh with 3 different UV sets:

The first UV set is used for the UV deformation applied to the main color which uses the 3rd uv set. This is to create a sense of the energy is moving in a connected pattern while allowing each hex to feel individual rather than a plastered texture in one united shield.

The second UV set is used for the WPO.
Each hex’s UV is tiny and ordered in rows but with some random offsets so they don’t move all together but rather a bit more organically as it constructs and deconstructs itself. This is also connected to the opacity.

Then to that construction/deconstruction WPO I add some noise (top left part of the graph of this next screenshot) so occasionally they lift themselves a bit before going back to their original spot.

All of this WPO movement is connected to the emissiveness as well to highlight the movement and helping the organic feel of it.

And thanks to the Vertex Interpolator (moving the instructions from the pixel to the vertex shader) helps keep it quite optimized! With only 182 instructions per pixel and 305 per vertex.

Now the only thing I have to control is the WPO_Stripe value in a BP to construct/deconstruct.