Medusa VR Week 12

•  This week I really started to focus on the post processing effect that I wanted to trigger when the player looks at Medusa. To do this I utilized this tutorial to get me started, and mended it to fit my needs. 
• I also worked on a HUD display to slowly appear with the post processing effect by linking both of their alpha values together
• With the effect, I want to add an SFX that sounds like rocks cracking, but during my testing, I realized the way I triggered it made the fx play every tick that the player was looking at Medusa, so the fx played about 5 times a second, and sounded incredibly bass boosted. So, I'll need to continue looking into that next week.

Within the blueprints of the HUD Widget, we get Medusa from her blueprint and set her alpha value to the widget value, 'A'

Create a bind within the widget menu, and link the value, 'A' to the alpha channel

Now within our Medusa blueprints, if 'Should Glow' is true, it triggers a timeline to gradually increase the alpha value to 1, making the post processing effect visible

To link up Medusa's eyes with her animations, set the parent socket to a joint. Braden helped set me up for this by preparing joints located at her eyes.

To create distortion, I used a normal for a stone texture and plugged it into the WorldAlignedTexture node, which spreads it along all surfaces. 

This offsets the normals to add variations in the texture. Afterwards are parameters to control the brightness and desaturation of the effect. Adding the marble node from the previous section just adds a bit more variation.

This controls the color of the effect, and gradually changes based on the distance away from the player.

These nodes control how the effect affects the original colors in the scene. The first time it's added into the effect it blends the colors into it. Then the top nodes helps give us a way to transition the effect from the original scene's colors - when alpha is 0 - to the effect turning on - when alpha is 1. Finally, a desaturation node is used to make the scene monochrome, to make it appear as if everything around you is turning to stone.

This is the overlay I'm using in the HUD, that appears with the post processing effect. I will do another pass on the image to add more details, this is currently being used as a placeholder.

My work logged into Perforce