#shaderlab

Using ShaderLab to enhance the look of Wilderness Games Wilderness Games uses low poly meshes so that it can simulate an expansive open world full of animals (and puzzles). To enhance the imagery of this virtual art medium, I wrote a shader for the game using ShaderLab. The result is a cartoon effect that uses it’s own built-in vertex color lighting system. The lighting effect on each shader is controlled by an external script I wrote in C# that manages the entire dynamic sky and weather system for the game.

It grows hungry. [Tonight's update doesn't make a lot of sense. What kind of glass would ripple and distort like this!? Why was I talking about a shader like it's a living, breathing thing!? We may never know... but it was fun to play around with.]

New version of my frosty glass shader! This one forgoes depth-based blur in favor of a much wider, and considerably more efficient stochastic sampling method, inspired by this very helpful “Monte Carlo” blur shader. I’m currently using Playdead Games’ temporal AA solution to smooth out the sampling across multiple frames. It’s awesome! I finally understand why devs are so keen on TXAA these days... I also added support for emissive colours/textures in HDR, so that parts of the glass can light up and feed into the camera bloom effect - because, hey, why not?

I’ve been meaning to do a frosted glass shader for a while, and the nice-lookin’ glass in the new Deus Ex (pictured below) inspired me to finally get around to it! The one I’ve come up with is a little different in that the blur is depth-based, so objects that are further behind the glass are blurred more than those which are close - it’s a bit more realistic, though it comes at a noticeable cost to performance. Their blur gets a bit wider, too... I still need to do some tests to see whether I can replicate that without costing too much more in performance. I’ve implemented this with the Unity 5 standard shader, with the ‘smoothness’ value dictating clarity at different points on the surface. In all other regards it works more or less like any other transparent version of the standard shader, including the ability to colourise it, add a diffuse map, fade opacity, etc. I should probably sleep now.

Playing around with displacement as a test for what might one day be a water shader. I particularly like the third line from the bottom, which launches a little blob into the air and then catches it...

Someone asked about my process, and I thought I’d be nice and share.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/879q457fs3m5dtm/AACVSTvDaVJQcmDwnXfzLA5Ha?dl=0