Shaders & Visual Effects

Making things juicy and pretty

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.