Shaders & Visual Effects

Making things juicy and pretty

Jan 28, 2023

Introduction

Here are some highlights from my visual effects and shader work.

Unreal Engine 4 Explosion

Videos of a real life hand grenade explosions were used as reference. Staying faithful to the references lead me to add the shrapnel dust, which is rarely seen in games, but I think really adds to the power of the explosion.

Beyond the particle effect itself, I also created the dust particle textures and the ground material using Substance Designer.

Water Shader

I wrote this shader in GLSL, the node graph in the video is only used for inputs to the shader. I also created the height and normal textures using Substance Designer.

I’m really happy with the motion of the waves, despite not using fast Fourier transform (FFT). I think it conveys the seemingly endless depth of an ocean quite well too.

I used this shader as a base for the water in the student project Claiming Ymir.

Physically Based Rendering (PBR) Shader

When we experience any non-abstract art, we inevitably compare it to the world that we live in. This makes the real world a very important starting point for any art.

I wrote this HLSL shader to learn how we approximate the properties of light in video games.

Four spheres with different materials rendered with my PBR shader — The shader in action.

Read more about this shader in the PBR Shader blog post.