Hey guys. I am relatively new blender user, and today I decided I wanted to make a shockwave, like the one’s in anime and video games. Sorta like this stock image I found.
I don’t know where to start, and I cannot find any real tutorials online. I know I probably have to make a plane and use the shader editor to make a circle appear on the plane (which I can’t do and spent 20 minutes trying to figure out) And then I probably need to expand it across and off the plane and make everything but the shockwave transparent. and for the life of me I can’t figure out how to do that. Idk anything about nodes and don’t know where to learn. I would appreciate ya’lls help because I cannot find anything on this on YouTube or other platforms. and then I would have to use values to animate it, right?
Pay attention to the values and settings here- you need to turn the blend mode to Alpha Blend, for example, and it won’t scale correctly unless the first mapping node has the location at -.5, -.5. The Voronoi settings you can and should experiment with freely, and you can even try different texture types there, but leave the math stuff alone
P.S. The four math nodes in the center- Separate XYZ, Power, Power, and Add- are how you make a circle in shader nodes. It’s worth making into a group, which I usually use, but I wanted you to be able to see how that worked. Don’t worry about the math behind it
If you do not know this there is the awesome forum search function (top right -icon). Of course the first hit for Shockwave ( blender does not have to be included ) will be this thread .
And… there are other search engines… (better include blender then)
This approach has a drawback : there can be no motion blur in animated materials. So you would have to do the blurring either in post or directly in the shader by drawing a gradient. Another approach would be using geometry nodes to create the waves themselves, and keep the material simple with an emission shader. Finally you could draw it using grease pencil.
-icon). Of course the first hit for 
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