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Procedural wall with dynamic text

The goal of this project was to create a procedural wall with looping cinematic shots of it moving, and when an event happened on a twitch channel to have it display a large view of the wall with the blocks lighting up to make up the text. -------------------------------------------------

For the wall part I used niagara, in which I made a custom module to be able to spawn the cubes in a grid pattern and assign a custom value for the movement of them so that they are all randomized in niagara. I then created a shader with textures found online (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GXOy8N), using particle ID to randomize the placement of the texture so as to not be able to perceive the repeating patterns.
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For the text part, the big challenge was to be able to get the username and display it cube by cube, as string to texture is not an easy thing to achieve. To achieve this result I created 3D text component, that would display the message I wished to display on the wall, I recorded it with a scene capture component that I sent to a texture, the scene capture component would have the same resolution as the number of cube the wall was made of, as such, when I used the mask of the map in a decal put over the wall, the cube would light up on a per cube basis since the mask had as many pixel as there was cube!

A short video demonstrating the different loops of the wall, to note, the dof being mostly on the left side was the wanted effect, the streamer that wanted to use this project always had his head on the left side of the stream when just chatting.

Example of the close-up loop, quick photo in case the video eventually go down.

Example of the close-up loop, quick photo in case the video eventually go down.

A video of the text system in action.

This is the niagara particle system, it is heavily inspired of Bleak the Mechanic series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftIlR_G1HIk) and modified to accomodate additional features I needed such as movement. It has around 7 custom modules.

This is the niagara particle system, it is heavily inspired of Bleak the Mechanic series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftIlR_G1HIk) and modified to accomodate additional features I needed such as movement. It has around 7 custom modules.

Shader of the letter system. Using the render target of the 3D text as a mask plus another mask of 10 pixels by 10 pixel to make the apparition effect.

Shader of the letter system. Using the render target of the 3D text as a mask plus another mask of 10 pixels by 10 pixel to make the apparition effect.