Im trying to have a material “expand” outward. Sort of like the panner node, but from the center outward in all directions. I can’t seem to find any tutorials. I could just UV map the mesh, but I’d like to use rotators too.
I suspect I can get the effect by just using a multiply on texture coordinates, but thats not going to get me a seamless loop.
Is this even possible?
Just to understand, you want something, say if it were a small ringin the middle of the texture, to be such that over time that ring expands outwards towards the edge of the mesh; akin to ‘zooming’ into the texture?
Does this loop over time? Is the intent to get something pixelated at the end, or what?
If you want to zoom-in, you can try scale-uvs-by-center, otherwise if you want something unpixelated, you want a flipbook, a volume texture to animate through, or something with multiple slices of data you can trip through over time.
Yeah, the place I normally use something like this is the standard mesh “splash” effect on a waterfall. Basically, where a texture radiates outward or inward. It would be a loop. Flipbook wouldnt be great for this I dont think. Appreciate the response though. I’ll take a look at the other suggestions
If it needs to go towards/away from a mesh, you can look at mesh-distance fields. They can create a true-to-form gradient (alpha) you can then exploit.
I was actually looking at old bookmarks; serendipitous: Distance Field Flow Map
EDIT, if you are also using UE5 w/lumen, distance fields are already being used, so why not leverage the expense. You can do a lot of nifty, ‘reactive’ type of material effects w/them.
ref - Lumen Technical Details | Unreal Engine Documentation
" Software Ray Tracing
Lumen uses Software Ray Tracing against Signed Distance Fields by default. This tracing representation is supported on any hardware supporting Shader Model 5 (SM5), and only requires Generate Mesh Distance Fields to be enabled in the project settings."