Hey guys. Spent a few hours on Shader Forge with lots of experimentation and excitement. Finally achieved something close to what I wanted to make.
It's a fully 3D nuke explosion mushroom cloud with lots of adjustable sliders for stuff like speed, flame intensity, parallax depth, smoke transmission, alpha, seperate cloud layers and flame layers. There are some issues with the alpha masks right now but they are easily fixable with changing the mesh.
It only uses a single static mesh for the mushroom cloud and the animated texture offset is done inside SF using Time node. The gif is way too fast but you can try the exe to get the full effect. You can orbit around the nuke with the mouse.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/v2pe7zd6r73i5it/NUKE+FULL.rar
Replies
hey thanks !
here you go
Now added soft edge blend so it creates a smooth transition where it touches other meshes instead of hard edged clipping.
Zieg_Reborn
I'm planning to put this shader along with some other prefabs to assetstore so I shouldn't really release the contents of it. But it all boils down to using the parallax blending with the alpha.
Would you mind taking a screen of your node setup? Want to show my college )
sltrOlsson
Here you go
skyline5gtr
It's actually not a bad idea to replicate that scene.
I actually tried that but it gives some funny results. The mesh isn't dense enough so it creates spikes or jaggy edges at some points.
sltrOlsson
you're welcome !
Yeah I'll try that soon.
Here's how the sparky trail particles are done. I made a shader that simulates sparks with trails using one RGBA texture for the lines that the sparks follow, and a distortion map for the smokes lines to wiggle.
http://youtu.be/faG3dxc_BFM?t=9m22s
Nice suggestion. They look more convincing now instead of spreading from irrelevant places.
@Bruno Afonseca
Well, the shader uses the alpha map to mask the lines based on the black and white gradient, and a slider tells where to cut the lines so when you give an animation to the slider it looks like the sparks are leaving a linear trail behind them.
The sparks appear to be modeled on white phosphorous - it's really the only common substance that explodes quite like that. If so, the orange tips don't belong, and the smoke should be thicker & whiter.
Thanks. I didn't really give much attention to the light, I just threw something there. I'll adjust it right away when the sparks are complete.
@DWalker
Nice suggestion ! I gave it a shot by bending the meshes like palm tree leaves. I'll make a smoother mesh to get rid of the sharp turns. Although I can't think of a way to make the smokes get thicker as they dissolve in time like that picture.
I added the gravity element and an afterglow effect, so the sparks look like they're lighting up the smoke trails a little.
*edit*
It's usually the smoke trails that get that crooked look because the wind and turublence breaks it up, the glowy bits themselves rarely have that much movement since their weight gives them more of an arc.
best, pascal