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