snowflake growth demo

Hello, I hope you had fun Christmas.
This is a small demo showing real-time snowflake growth using an animated alpha map. The animation frames are stored in a single image, 255 frames in a single color channel.

screenshots:
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/6096/flakers.jpg

blend:
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/1425

controls:

buttons 1 and 2 enables post-process effects (vignetting, noise, edge-blur, and a new and awesome lens distortion filter, made by Francois Tarlier, and slightly modified by me).

Up/Down - shrink/grow the snowflake
mouse wheel up/down - chromatic dispersion amount

numpad:
7/4 - lens distortion coefficient
8/5 - cubic distortion amount
9/6 - image scaling amount

Edit: Maybe this thread should be in Game Demos section?

that is really cool. where did you learn glsl? i bet a lot o’ people’d like ta know.

Hmm… mostly collecting GLSL shaders and dissecting them. Also Mike Pan and Dalai Felinto taught me quite a lot.

Great :D, as always.

your chromatic aberration is much better than mine !

also do you know why I do have the tool bar render in the texture ?

awesome work as usual !

Because Rendered Texture doesnt end at the edges of the game screen. It continues till it gets to the size of power-of-two (64*64,1024*1024, 4098*4098, etc.), and it includes all Blenders UI. That is the reason I use canvas coordinates over the texture coords to get the center of the game window.

oh man this is fantastic shader

Stunning work once again.
I think the most valuable thing from this is the cubic lens distortion shader, thats something Ive been looking for for a while, and this one is so customizable its just beyond perfect. :no:

Your .blend runs fine for me Martinsh, but Im having trouble getting the shaders to work in my own game, I have the lens distortion one running ok with the get_window script as well, but I keep getting this increased brightness effect. The underlying effect is there, its just this flickering brightness which happens at certain times or angles. It must be something im not setting up right in my .blend, cause your demo doesnt have any of these issues and im using inbuilt 2D shaders as well anyway.

Any advice would be appreciated, I have a thread for the issue here so this thread remains ontopic.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with next! :cool:

Holly shit, amazing.

Download link is broken. Screenshots look great though!

gorgeous indeed, I 2nd it about the broken link. I so want to learn more about lens distortion on GLSL

someone have this file to upload for me?

Here is it http://www.mediafire.com/?e43du1y8cg3n8o5.

thanks a lot, I want the chromatic aberration filter that is on this file!
Thanks a lot, and thanks to martins too

thanks HG1, and thanks martinsh.
edit:
this don’t works in 2.58a :[

Here I changed it to Blender 2.5x.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/9av6m5c4i7yg0i3/snowflake_growth%2025x.blend