Hi all. So I’ve been on the hunt on how to improve the smoke in my project and came across this thread on twitter with what I think would be perfect or something close to it, but is way over my head apparently. I’ve copied what I’m realizing is a small part of the full graph and even that doesn’t seem to work right (red spheremask preview). Being as unfamiliar with more complex materials as I am thats as far as I have made it.
Any help to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated, can’t seem to make any progress googling stuff unfortunately. Below are some pics and the twitter thread if you wanna have a look
My version with the red SphereMask and what it should look like so far, and some pics of the finished material.
all thats going on here is there is a panner connected to the uvs of a normal map (any noisy map will do that tiles) then you component mask the RG channels, then multiply by a small number (this will be distortion intensity) and add this to a texcoord which will go into your smoke texture. after this, the mesh distorting from the camera is simply just taking a gradient from the bottom to top of object (probably a second uv channel, component mask the y for the gradient) which is multiplied over the camera vector * offset amount
probably to better answer your question with what is wrong, check that your sphere mask radius is something low like .5 and hardness to 75 (just a guess)
Hey, thanks for the help ElegantSquid. So I understood a little bit of that but not much lol.
Lost on the “go into your smoke texture”, that leaves my smoke static from what I can tell. And unfortunately don’t understand any of the gradient stuff.
As for the sphere mask part, doing as you said did indeed make it look like the pics above however it’s still red for whatever reason, and I’m not quite sure what to plug the spheremask into.
Edit: a little closer. Switched the material to masked and put the spheremask into the opacity mask input. That sound right? Also really pixelated for some reason but guessing that’ll be sorted when its done correctly.
The red is just a preview for a float value (r component) since its just a scalar value. you should be able to plug that into emissive or basecolour and itll be white, if not just append it to itself twice to make a float3 and youll be set
