Making Predator Invisibility Armor in Blender | Prey 2022

The newest movie of the Predator franchise, PREY has impressed a lot of people. I watched it too. And during that, I immediately got the idea to add the Predator’s invisible armor suit-up effect to my Ultimate Suit Up pack.

There are a few different methods you can use to create that effect. Some are very easy, some are only possible in Cycles.

To hide anything using shaders, the easiest method is tweaking the alpha value. Plug a black-white texture (like a noise map) into the alpha socket, and you can have the effect.

Also, instead of tweaking the alpha, you can change the IOR(Index of Refraction) to get a similar effect when dealing with glass shaders.

Set the IOR value to 1 to make your glass, completely transparent.

Or

You can use lights path node to hide an object (invisibility cloak-like). But that's only available in Cycles.

Well, you can also use holdout shader, but that's going to hide literally everything.

So, we can't really use the last two methods. The first two methods are okay but you will see why I ditched those after taking a good look at the Predator suit effect.

Breaking Down the Predator (Prey 2022) Invisible armour effect.

Look at the following picture, it is easy to show than say.

Because of the 2-layer method, we can't really use the first two options.

Yes, if you don't really care about that, that much you can use the first method but here I am trying to create something very similar to the effect in the movie.

If you have seen my previous suit-up videos you definitely know how to turn polygons into hexagons.

Here I created something similar to it and also use the same old distance calculation method to get an impact effect.

Refer the finished blend file, it is very much self-explanatory.

So we have a model with two layers outer one will be our armor and the inner one will be our character (Predator). The outer one has a material which is basically a glass shader (transmission=1). Here I set the IOR to close to 1.

Both of the materials have a noise texture, which is linked to each other using drivers. We can use it as alpha to reveal the Predator. Black values in the noise texture hide the armour in the outer layer. And black values inverted (white) will reveal the bottom layer.

Check the file.

This is the basics of the Predator suit.

Refer to the file if you are interested in the final effect. If you got any questions comment below or direct message me.

This is the first prototype of this effect. Still, there are a few things to add.

I hope to release the final effect with the next update of the Ultimate Suit Up pack. I will also be hoping to make a video tutorial on this.

So, check it out below. You can grab the Ultimate Suit Up Pack now on Gumroad.

Thank you.