Shells Master Material

This Material development was inspired by Ryse Moss Tutorials and Shadow of Colossus. I tried to create a Shells Master Material that can be used for variety of situations for Unreal Engine 4 and here are some breakdowns

2 examples of using Shells Material to create the fuzzy, soft look

Here is the close up of shells, the moss uses 5 shells, and fur uses 10 shells

Main feature is the Fuzzy on BaseColor

Able to control with typical Fuzziness function like Fuzzy Power and Core Darkness

Red Vertex channel is used to gradually make the BaseColor darker towards the bottom and also controlling the amount of the Opacity Mask

The highest shell will have the highest value (1) and the higher the value, the brighter the BaseColor and more Opacity was masked. These 2 features are needed to nail the Fuzziness feel

Green Vertex channel is used to control the overall shell offset, also have controls over the edges masked using Vertex Alpha, offsetting in general or fan out the edges

Same with Red Vertex channel, the Green Vertex channel is painted in a gradually manner, but can be modified if needed

Blue Vertex channel is used for color variation

Color variation is a typical setup with full range of color available

Alpha Vertex channel is used to further masked out certain area or edges, useful for blending with other assets

Detail Normal can be add to give further unevenness of the surface, or switch with Grayscale Height Map

Animation is a typical panner with time and some noise for the secondary animation

Here is an example of using the Shells Material for the moss on top of unique asset, using Megascans

I think it can hold up pretty well for 3rd person game

Lastly, to make vertex assignment easier, I whipped out some scripts using python