Howdy guys. When I get inundated with programming and design work, I like to spend a little while playing with blenders node shaders to unleash my creative side. In this thread I’ll post images and blends of what I come up with.
These very often do not look realistic, and are more artistic. I make no claims for good performance.
Latest Images:
THE FIRST ONE:
Energy Tentacles (animated):
They are an animated flat plane, so probably best for sidescrollers. I can’t think of a good way to get this effect in 3D.
Based on this analysis.
Blend: Energy Tentacles.blend (695 KB)
Starts off as a small bright explosion and grows to a pillar of black smoke before fading out. Uses a novel method of changing colors using a lookup in a texture.
Uses UV scrolling to create a nice flow effect as it grows.
Only looks good from below the level of the torus.
Also based off a post off the same link as the first post (he does lots of nice stuff).
Blend: AnimatedColorRampExample.blend (745 KB)
It’s a combination of edge-detect and thresholding. Originally I designed the system to convey information in 1 bit of information per pixel, but I decided to re-add the colour to add more variation. FilterTest.blend (982 KB)
Technicolour mist. Done by rendering the depth-buffer to a texture and putting it in a node shader. Yes, this could be done in a 2D filter. Mist.blend (564 KB)
Deteriorating painted concrete walls.
These use no object-specific maps. The level of deterioration is controlled by the vertex colour. It is combined with a texture to give higher resolution edges to the chips.
Uses ImageMirror to do the reflections, and a node texture to map it to the plane with distortion. The plane copies the ‘players’ position, so the water moves with you - so with some tricks should appear infinite.
Volumetric Mist:
Brute force volumetric mist using lots of transparent planes. I suspect the only reason I can run it is the GTX970 pushing it all along.
I’d be interested to get some performance feedback. Mist.blend (1.04 MB)
Don’t feel bad the hewllet packard desktop i use gets 10 for framerate.And what is strange about it is
the hewllet packard laptop gets waymore.Like five times more.
The water is great!
Another way to get a UV scroll is to use a object color as a vector, but there the trade off is you need an extra material for capturing object color.
BTW:
Capsize works fine on my computer (with blender 2.77)
And a little trick I learned the other day is that if you use “normal” as in input rather than “color” you don’t need the corrective vector:
@kitebitz:
The water’s resolution is currently just floating. I think by default it is 512x512? Not too sure really.
@Smoking_mirror:
Thanks for that node trick. Makes a lot of sense now I think about it.
I’ll update my blender and see if that fixes capsize (I’m on 2.77, but I’m sure there is a newer one somewhere)
On a side note: I figured out that you can pass however much information you like into a node shader by manually addressing pixels. For instance if you create the vector (0,0) and pass it into the mapping of a texture, you extract the pixel value at (0,0). You can set that pixel value in python.