Slimer
Hello! It's been awhile. Using this personal project as a way to refresh some old skills and try out some new ones. In hindsight a lot of the details on the shader might not be noticeable on such a small creature in a real time environment. However, it was still fun and could be easily transferrable to something much larger. Every step of the process from modeling to getting it into Unity was done by me. Here's some links I found useful for setting up some of the Unity side content.
Volumetric Ice Shader
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-5bhff4f-M&t=928s
Jiggle Physics Scripts
https://github.com/naelstrof/UnityJigglePhysics
Boo!
Many different looks of the famous green blob over the years, pulled from many different ideas along with some outside ones as well. The goal for this project was really to test out some shader crafting to see if I can replicate that melty jello look.
Zbrush for creating the sculpt and low poly cage. Tried something new (to me) with polygroups to see if it would speed up workflows. Ended up with mixed results, still needed a lot of manual work around areas of deformation.
Was not sure how much influence the shader would have over the textures at this point, so the standard maps are simple. The masks were to define areas of influence for the shader or to cut out from certain parts, and the bubbles were for faking depth.
With Slimer being a ghost, transparency was going to be important. After some research, I came across settings in the URP that allowed for transparency on objects, but still respect their own definition/shape. Result allowed for a more thick appearance.
For one of the first parts of the shader, I wanted to have drool running from the mouth cavity. This applies the mask from earlier and with carefully layed out UV's to allow the drips to flow cleanly down the body. VFX graph used for the drip.
The bubble textures were used here to help simulate chunkier innards. see how they move differently based on the view direction. Ben Cloward on Youtube has a fantastic tutorial on this that I followed for this section of the graph.
Since jello has some crazy refractions, wanted to replicate that with this, and added a bit of a wobble on the output, was kept very subtle as too much would make it appear watery.
And last but not least, what jello mold isn't complete without some bounciness! Setup certain bones to have jiggle physics applied and would adjust their parameters at run time.