Hello folks,
I have a very basic understanding of materials and post process effects, but the process of creating my own effects from scratch has me bewildered, so I need a some guidance.
I want to make a noisy TV static effect, like you’d see on old style televisions when there was no signal. Example clip: Tv Static Noise HD 720p - YouTube
I’m also trying to create a VCR style screen warping effect, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll leave that as another question for another time. What steps would I need to take to create this effect?
For the static, the easiest solution is to make a large black and white noise texture (at least 512x512 with 1 value per pixel), and then place those two textures inside of a material, both using a Panner as the UVs. You will want to set the panner speed to be really fast, so fast that you can’t tell which direction it is panning. And try and choose different axis for the panning directions, and keep them from being cardinal (ie, just X or Y) so that you never see them line up.
Then you either blend (lerp node using const 0.5 as alpha) or multiply them together, or some hand-tweaked combination of blend modes. There are even some photoshop style blend mode material functions you could play with.
You could optionally add some scan lines too using a texture with some white horizontal lines, and use a few variants of it panning at different speeds with the results all added together.
You could also try distorting the UVs of the scan lines and or noise using sine waves (and then mask the effects of the distortion using yet another sine wave to make the distortion come and go). Lots of things you can try to get a unique effect.
RyanB is there any chance you could make a simple material that does this and share it here? I am looking for a similar tv static noise effect, but I am trying to learn so many other basic things in Unreal and everything you suggested is way beyond me at the moment. I am sure many people would find this useful.
its actually rather simple to make. below youll see a picture based on what he was talking about. you will just need to come up with your own noise texture and modify the values of the panner nodes to suit your needs.
also you realize this post is four years old right.
