MK1 - Footprints

This is a good representation of the level of interaction I ended up with

The footprints could work with the variety of masking setups we have for our floors, most notably vertex colors.

A closer look at the removal of other decal types when walking over them. The fraction of removal is small so there is never an immediate erasure.

Generating footprint alphas using PDGs in Houdini

The variety of footprint alphas that I ended up from Houdini. This list was easy to regenerate and could easily add more characters to. Ultimately only 3 of these were used for the sake of efficiency

MK1 - Footprints

Footprints! The content you didn't know you needed. Now I may be one of few who hold this opinion but lack of footprints in games is SO distracting for me. I made it a goal of mine to integrate a footprint decal into our proprietary decal setup.

Of all the things I have done for MK1, this one involved the most departments including ENV, FX, Tech Art, Character, Sound and engineering.

The prints are persistent along with the rest of the decals, giving a literal representation of where a character has been. They interact with the other decal types by slowly erasing them, and can be added to materials as impressions affecting a variety of channels but most importantly normals.

Once I had that setup, I thought to myself "How can I over-engineer this". My next goal, that I ultimately decided was a little too much, was to procedurally generate footprint decals per-character-per-skin. Thanks to the help of PDGs in Houdini this was pretty easy to setup. It actually ending up serving two purposes, giving me cool bespoke decals for each character, and making me realize that footprints actually end up in two categories, heels and no heels (well three including lizard feet courtesy of Reptile). So I picked my two favorites and just used those instead. It was a fun experiment though!