UDK: Force field material Thread

I'm looking for advice and hints on how to create a good looking force-field material in UDK.
I've seen the 3-part video tutorial on youtube already but I think it sucks: the video quality is really low and it looks like the force field has some really ugly seams - so I want something better than that.

I want it to be animated ofc, random clouds morphing and shaping themselves in a say... psychedelic feel. I suspect that it's rather complicated though so I'll be happy with just a standard type Star Wars -kinda force field with transparency and a lot of animated noise.

Anyone got advice on this?

Blend lots of panning or rotating noise maps together.

You can also create an 'edge' effect where the forcefield meets world geometry by adding a 'one-minus' connected to a 'depthbiasalpha' node and hooking that up to your opacity channel. Set the Depthbias node alpha input to 1.f and the bias on the depthalpha node to however thick you want the forcefield edge to be.

Edited by: AJ_Quick

ambershee wrote: Blend lots of panning or rotating noise maps together.

Yea that's what I've been doing so far and it all looks like crap.
I connect my pans to cosine and sine nodes (with time -inputs) and I'm not even getting close to a good looking effect. I also find rotate rather useless since it rotates the entire surface of the mesh around a central point (looks rather ugly)
I've also been trying to find a lava tutorial (thought I would tweak lava and make it blue and semi-transparent) but there is no helpful information anywhere on the net. I'm actually surprised by the low amount of material tutorials.

I've spent several hours on this so far and it's getting really frustrating. I'm fairly decent with the material editor (not a beginner, not a pro) - it's just that I don't know what components (nodes) I should use in combination in order to get a good looking effect.

I have another question as well:
How do I make a surface/mesh respond like a fluid? I want to have a ripple effect on the force field anytime I throw a phys object onto it.

Edited by: Nightshade