The Holographic Material

Inspiration
As well as the concept art from Deus Ex: Human Revolution I was also looking at my favourite sci-fi universe from the Mass Effect series as a source of inspiration. The art style in the game is truly impressive and I've spent countless hours lost in it.

One of the key pieces in the concept piece was the number of different screens there is throughout the environment; a main tv, a computer screen, a tablet, security monitors and so on. I knew that these would be one of the most eye catching features in my environment and I wanted to make sure they were worthy of that.

I set about planning on how I could go about doing this and settled on the idea of having the screens be holographic interfaces. These interfaces would be projected onto a glass-like material and then pop-out to become touch-screen enabled.

Creation
I began testing a holographic material inside UDK using a simple logo to test out what it would eventually look like and once I was happy with that I went into 3DS Max and began creating a preliminary design for my holographic screen - it is still in use in the current build of my environment as I want to get more important aspects completed before I go back to it. I then went into Photoshop and began creating my own interface. It took about half an hour and uses I am use white for everything that I want to show up and black for the background; this will make UDK show everything in white but make all the black invisible.

The preliminary diffuse texture for my holographic screen.

You may have noticed there are some empty boxes within the texture. To have any animated parts of your texture you need to ensure they are separated from the base texture - otherwise the animation you put on it will move the entire thing! I used the RGB channels in a separate texture and used these to hold: an email icon, this will be flashing in the left portion of the circle; an amount of text, this will scroll in the box at the bottom; and a mask for the text box, this will ensure that the scrolling text does not appear outside the box.

The alpha mask used in my holographic material.

It looks like a bit of a colourful jumble from this image but when it is in the material editor I will use the R, G and B channels individually to select the bits of information and they will come out as white, ready for a new colour to be assigned.

With my texture ready I set about creating my material inside UDK which took around 20 minutes. After it was created I had a look around Polycount and other websites to see if anyone has any useful tips on things like this for improving their visual effect - the main addition being a small gradient that follows the camera which gives the illusion of light reflecting off the glass material underneath the hologram.

The current material in all it's glory.

With the material created I then imported the static mesh of my place holder screen and applied it to see how it looked.

The place holder holographic screen in my current environment build.

As I previously mentioned there is a lot more I want to do with the holographic screens; 
creating new materials and models for it to add variation but also to refine this even more. I will come back to it soon but first I want to get more added to my environment to ensure that I keep on top of the work load.

Thanks for reading!