Hologram effect

[biggest kid]

Hey guys ive recently been trying to achieve a hologram effect in the UDK, and after a weeked of trying, decided to come and ask you guys for some help.

So ive created a very basic model of a mountain range, uvw unwrapped it, created a diffuse texture for it, created a gradient texture, and imported all this into the UDK. Ive then setup my material like shown below...


Ive set it up so that the material is 50% transparent, and so it has a gradient panning across it. The only problem is that the gradient pan doesnt work, and i have no idea why. Here is how it looks in the editor...


Any idea why the gradient isnt panning across? Any idea how i can make this look more like a convincing hologram?

Thanks,
big

[Hitpawz]

It actually is panning but you can't see it because BumpOffset will be too subtle given the texture that you've used. I would personally pan a noisy line texture added to the diffuse texture. Also you can try to multply by a cameravector to add an almost oil set of colors at off angles. Camera vector will give you some relatively full colors like red, green, blue, pink...etc. You may be able to restrict those colors to a particular tone. Though I haven't personally found a good material setup to restrict those colors. Maybe a desturate followed by a multiply?

Another thing you probably want to do is add an emmissive to this, also to the panner. That will make it glow more and be more visible.

[danimal']

Search the forums (either WIP or Released), someone did a really wonderful job of making a hologram system ala Mass Effect 2.

[Gillies]

im a newb when it comes to the material editor, but do you need to hook the time input upto something on the panner?

[Hitpawz]

Well panner itself comes with a speed, so you don't need time. However, you can hook time up to it by putting sin or cos in front of it and that will wave the motion back and forth. There's probably other math operations you can plug in front of it, but those are the ones that work for sure.

[awakeningfromobliv]

http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=719829
this might help.

[biggest kid]

Yes but he doesnt seem to explain how he has done that awakening, so it doesnt really help me.

Ok so ive created the actual mesh im going to use for this hologram, the one in the previous post is just a quick example mesh.
Heres how it looks so far(and yes i did get the bump offset to work):


For some reason though, the diffuse is really getting messed up and random colours are being stretched over random parts of the model(as you can see towards the bottom of the pic), and i have no idea why. It is for this same reason that the opacity looks bad, so i decided to turn off the opacity for this screenshot. Does anyone know why this is happening? Im using the same material setup as above.

Thanks

[tyrone70]

you really don't need bump offset for that IMO.

[biggest kid]

You misunderstand tyrone, bump offset just gives it a visible panning line effect(doesnt it?) to make it seem as if the hologram is constantly refreshing itself to simulate a changing battlefield.

EDIT
Figured out that by changing the BumpOffset node's "Reference Plane" value(in the material editor) from .5 to 0 it fixed the diffuse problem and im no longer getting random colours stretched all over my model.

Now what i need to know is how i can colorize the material to be an orange hue? Is it possible to do this in the material editor? Or can i only do this in photoshop?

[tyrone70]

oh, ok. i get ya now.
it's possible to change the color a few ways. there's an example on this page:

http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3mated3.htm

[biggest kid]

Yeah i have decided to give Natural[auses holographic effect a try, though i cant figure out what is what on his material setup.

Can anyone help?
thanks

[Builder_Anthony]

Bump...........