Rose Quartz Copper Wire Bonsai

Months ago I wanted to take a look into how Unreal's shader/material systems are evolving as it transitions from Physically Based Rendering/Image Based Lighting (PBR/IBL) over into Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function (BSDF) style setups. The learning curve is a little bit different (a little high actually if you have never messed with shaders) but with the help of the Content Examples' shader library its easy to get back into familiar territory and be amazed at how wild game engine level surface shaders will be able to look in the future. Here I have quickly taken a some Megascans small rocks set and transformed them into a wire tree Sakura (cherry blossom) sculpture adorned with my attempt at recreating a rose quartz surface shader entwined with BP spline based wire materials which are also a world position offset displacement style height map tessellated traditional BPR based copper shader. This is in 5.2 so actual surface material tessellation displacement still does not re-exist like it did in the past Unreal Engine 4.0+ or in the current 5.3 releases of Unreal but I still made the tessellation work around a splined tube mesh to give the appearance of many wrapped wires and help make the asset look a bit more like the real life objects its intended to look like. Later I have taken my first chance to study Procedural Content Generation or PCG to cover the base of the pot with these quarts pebbles as the fill in coupled with a simple spline duplicator to wrap the wire rings as if each individual flower petal intended pebble was actually threaded onto the wire like in power-stone jewelry making. (Did not edit the Megascans pebbles to actually have holes in them as that level of detail was not an aim of the exercise.

To top off the display I also quickly modeled an antique lacquer table which is also coated ina BSDF style material making use of the thin coat properties to give the area which is intended to look like iridescent mother of pearl seem more true to life. This is my first attempt at creating 螺鈿 (らでん Raden) or pearl inlay lacquer furniture materials in Unreal. I have experience creating such shaders in Ubisoft's proprietary game engine Snowdrop which uses older tech to achieve the illusion but now that Unreal's Substrates support basically multilayered surfaces its relatively easy to create two or more multiple sub-surface normal maps that can simply be masked in order to emulate materials that naturally have a transparent upper surface with its own indentations while having more opaque sub-surfaces with their own internal indentations as well. I really look forward to how far this shader tech will develop as Unreal continues to evolve.