Various Smaller Shader Projects

This post features a few smaller shader projects I’ve created. I figured these could be nice to show as well but I grouped them together as this one post as they are not that grand on their own.

I wanted to play around with creating a prototype for a space shooter game interface shader since my students were working on their space shooter game projects. This shader is driven through a single float health variable.

I looked into how to implement a simple flow map shader since this could be useful for my students real-time strategy game projects.

This video shows a procedurally created twister effect using ShaderFX for Maya. Quite simple principles when it dawns on you. The core parts are a atan2, length and sinus operation. Loads of fun to work with.

This video shows a fire effect shader which blends between using different shaders based on a blend-map. There’s also a few fire effects added as well to mimic a blazing area, glowing ember and emitted light from the blazing effect. The animation is controlled by a single float value.

This video shows a terrain blending shader with alpha modulated blending. I created this shader for a lecture where I wanted to showcase the possibilities of using an extra alpha channel to get a more interesting blending for terrain.

This video shows a the outcome of a crazy idea I had on bus on my way home on a Friday night. This is a animated shader driven entirely by one source image (the fruity rainbow colored image). The red channel controls the horizontal sweep, the green channel controls the vertical sweep and the blue channel is used as a flag to tell a pixel to stay lit or fade out.

This video shows another animated effect. This time I was playing around with transparency in Maya’s viewport. It depicts a “sci-fi scanner” which is used to scan for foreign elements within a humanoid. Foreign hostile red helixes are terminated on sight!

This video shows a faked translucency shading. I got inspired by the Frostbyte 2 lecture on how they faked translucency using a depth map generated through baking AO on your mesh with reversed normals and wanted to try this out for myself.

This video shows a simple wrinkle map test. It’s basically another layer of normal map which  is blended based on blend shape states.

This video shows an experimental shader I did after getting some clever advice that I could animate pupil dilation through a grey scale texture.

This video is a example I made for a shading class lecture on making animated shader effects. This is a single tiling hexa grid with animated gradients.