Month: August 2021

For this shader I wanted to write something that used textured stone walls, as I hadn’t really tried writing that effect before. The cell scene Silence of the Lambs movie seemed to lend itself as inspiration, as it would also allow me to add some cool reflections from the cell glass.

The stone pattern was made using a voronoi pattern with a couple of layers of noise on the material to add roughness. All the walls are completely flat, but when applying the material I tweak the normal vector to add dynamic highlights and shadows as the camera moves.

I’m quite pleased with the outcome, although it would have been good to add some pencil-drawn artwork onto the cell walls. Technically doable, but the scene was making my GPU groan, and I like to keep the frame rate reasonable for the majority of people.

The GLSL shader source can be found here, and a 360° VR view here.

The challenge for this shader was to a) pay tribute to an awesome movie, and b) to add some animated content. I actually got quite attached to the little Fly – It was fun working out how to make a dot move like a fly, and go through the ‘transporting’ process with a bit of character.

The textures are based on FBM noise – In the case of the wood, once axis is squashed much more than the other. Even the plain walls have some subtle noise added to them, making them look a but more realistic than they would if perfectly flat.

I cheated with the vertical drain pipe – It is actually infinitely long to keep the code simple. It definitely looked strange when the scene was viewed in VR, so I had to add some distance fog when looking up.

The GLSL shader source can be found here, and a 360° VR view here.