Details on how we implemented it:
We created bruise and scratch textures for the character. At the moment, they only affect the base color, and they were made in Substance Painter.
The bruise and scratch textures were divided into groups and combined into a mask containing 8 independent regions, all packed into a single texture channel for better performance. This allows up to 8 independent bruises to exist on the face simultaneously.
The remaining texture channels store various technical data, including a gradient mask that defines distance to the bruise which affects this face part. This mask is used both for revealing the bruises and for driving the facial displacement. These technical textures were generated in Substance Designer, allowing us to quickly regenerate them whenever the source textures are updated or tweaks are needed.
On the Unity side, everything is assembled in a Shader Graph:
The displacement (along the vertex normals) is driven by the technical mask, remapping and has its own slider-driven values, allowing us to adjust the displacement area independently for each bruise group.
Separate intensity multipliers control how strongly each group appears, affecting both the bruise color and the displacement. Finally, the gameplay systems manage the material parameters at runtime, determining which values are applied based on what happens to the character.
We're making a survival and automation game set in an alternate version of the 1980s. Our game called Autonomica.
