How did they achieve the tear effect in Bioshock infinite

Development Rendering
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Hi everyone! This is my first post here so I appologize if I’m doing this wrong.

I have a rather rudementary understanding about programming, I’m more familiar with 3d art than development. But I was rather interested in how the tears in Bioshock Infinite work. Since I’m interested in seeing if I could recreate the effect in Blender without compositing. (I know Blender and Unreal are two very different beasts, but any type of knowlegde could be helpful)


(sorry for the wonky footage, I’m not that good at FPS games on PC and only played up to this point to get this footage)

I thought I’d ask here since I’m pretty sure the game was made in Unreal 3. Based on my understanding of 3d art, I’m assuming there’s a second map that’s being masked in with a spherical mask or something in that direction. Is that assesment correct? I’m also curious about how the grainy desaturated effect works. Is that a third map or just a material overlay?

Hopefully I’m getting my question across clearly. Thank you in advance.

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i reckon it’s using a stencil trick combined with a depth test to create all the fx. it’s like portal++. with geometry.

not sure how you should transfer this into blender in one shot. emptys and geonodes and some shader magic could do this, i’d guess. just a guess tho. you gotta try things. blend. :slight_smile: