Hello everybody! You might have noticed that I've been absent for the last 2 months and paused the patreon in that time. I'm sorry I haven't been as active as I'd like to be with new content and help on the discord.
I've had a bunch of non work related things on my plate, but I'm hoping that is mostly behind me now and I can start focusing on shaders and art and game development again. Thanks for sticking around, and I hope I can continue to create things that you find interesting and useful.
Going forward I really want to be sensible with expectations. So here are some
changes and clarifications:
- I've ended the $10 tier. If you're still on the $10 tier, please drop down to the $5 tier now if you still want to stay on the patreon. There's no way for me to make you drop down, so please do this before the end of the month.
- I'm usually on discord and I'm always happy to help anybody, but it's important to know that I cannot guarantee support, especially for older shaders and effects. For example, I intend to port the older effects over to the new scriptable rendering pipelines, but there is currently no ETA on that, and it might not happen for a while. So if you absolutely need these effects to work with the URP, or ported over to Shadergraph, or work in Unreal, then this is probably the wrong Patreon for you. I'm sorry. I'll be here to try to point you in the right direction while you port it, but it's not something I'm able to do right now.
- In order to get more content done, I'm going to be focusing on smaller, more practical effects and shaders - things that more people can use and take advantage of - rather than attempting big, unique effects. Big things take ages, break more often, and aren't as flexible. Big things are probably already available as assets on the Asset Store, with better support anway. Small things are good for slotting into your game wherever you need some fire, or a waterfall, or a tornado etc. Stuff like that.
I think these changes will make the patreon better for everybody. Please let me know your thoughts on this though, I'm still trying to find the best way to balance everything.
Anyway, no point just having text and no goodies:
RGB_split.psd
You'll often want to store information in all 4 channels of a texture (RGBA), so I've made a handy photoshop file which already has the layers set up with the correct Channel Mixers and Screen blending modes. All you need to do is paint white into the layers labelled "RED CHANNEL" "GREEN CHANNEL" and "BLUE CHANNEL" and it'll keep every separate for you. If you want to also paint in the alpha channel, you'll have to create on in the Channels window in photoshop - I don't know a neat way to keep that in the same place as the rest of them.
You can of course already paint directly in the Channels window channels to separate RGB on a single layer, but this approach lets you keep the power of layers and I've found it to be much more flexible.
AnimatedStripes.shader
Here's a quick shader base I threw together to help out with a cool addition to the Black Ice family of neon goodness. It steps between a varying number of stripes, and you can also vary the colour of alternating stripes.
I feel like with some interesting UV mapping on the mesh and a texture mask, you could do some funky animated things with this idea.