Old school effects with shaders
What are these?
While at FITC San Francisco I attended the session of Iñigo Quilez who is a demoscene veteran, currently working at Pixar. He showed us lots of interesting stuff he created with GLSL. He also showed examples of some more basic stuff like those above. These are very old school effects known to the demoscene artists since the dawn of civilization (that is the ’90s). On Iñigo’s site you can find a simple tutorial on how to create those effects, and it’s not very difficult to port it to Unity3D using Cg. The cool thing is that all this different effects run on the same exact code, changing just a few settings.
Update Sept 17th 2010 Inigo also created a tool called ShaderToy, which allows you to play with the formulas in your browser (it must support WebGL).
As for the plasma effect, I initially saw it on mrdoob’s blog and found this short tutorial which explains how to do it. Simple, and it looks nice!
TIP: Although they run pretty smoothly in the browser, the demos perform even smoother in fullscreen mode.
UPDATE It seems that the shaders do not work on OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in Safari 5 and Chrome, but do work on Firefox. Some shaders might not work on certain GPUs, but in this case it’s the same system, with the same graphic card and the only difference is the browser. This means that there might be a bug in the web player. If I have more news, I’ll post an update, but you also can follow the discussion on the forum here.
In the meantime, if on OSX 10.6 please use Firefox (sorry).
Yo mate
I see nothing but blue screen now :)
Cheers!
It seems pretty amazing, but I just see a blue screen too :(
@kszyniu @marco the effect is automatically disabled if the system does not support image effects and/or the specific shaders – one of those things happens on your machines…
Updated Can you do a simple test: http://www.everyday3d.com/unity3d/effects/debug/ – do you see a red screen or blue screen? Also does the info there say that the shader is supported (last line).
I see the effects, they look very nice and smooth, but i get like .5 FPS in my FireFox on XP.
blue screen too.
and blurred cube in your test)
@Jeff so it runs smoothly for you on another browser, right?
@grig_m thanks, that’s good to know!
everyone: if you can’t run the demos, can you also paste in your machine specs here? thanks
Blue Screen for me, but I’m running on a VM
Nice but same here – BSOD ;-) Using Mac, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M on OSX 10.6, Safari 5, most recent Unity plugin.
Think this is something that could be done using a PixelBender shader in Flash?
@Og2t Whoa!! It runs fine on the same setup for me, except I have 10.5.8. Shaders are strange for sure… UPDATE: Try in FF, it should be ok. Meanwhile I will install Safari 5 and see what’s wrong ;) (was using 4 so far and it runs fine)
@Phil Yes, it could be done, and it has been done. Check here: http://www.unitzeroone.com/blog/2009/04/06/more-play-with-alchemy-lookup-table-effects/ (and there’s more on other blogs)
I see a nice blurred cube.
marco
Woops, forgot my specs: iMAc 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, OSX 10.6.4
Wow bro, trippy!
Brings back the good old memories. Now time for gelatin cubes with half of the polys in white and other half in translucent blue :)
…and some 4-channel sampler music.
The Plasma effect is beautiful! Only works in fullscreen mode for me, otherwise blue screen. OS X, Chrome.
Also, you can find many of the formulas here, and play online and change the code and see it all life on your browser. Shadertoy: http://www.iquilezles.org/apps/shadertoy
@Inigo Thanks a lot for the link! I added it to the post too.
[...] site Everyday3D dont j’ai déjà vanté les mérites a mis en ligne des expérimentations hérités de la [...]
[...] These are very old school effects known to the demoscene artists since the dawn of civilization (that is the ’90s). Amiga rulez 4ever check this: http://www.everyday3d.com/blog/index.php/2010/09/02/old-school-effects/ [...]
Hi, I wonder whether you would mind releasing the Unity source as demo/examples for others to start from. These are very nice effects (even if old school). Thanx.
I can’t port to unity3D these scripts. Please releasing the source as example, pleasee!!! :)
From Argentina
Jesús — info.jess@yahoo.com.ar
Sweet, nice work, any chance you could release the unity scripts and demo/tutorials?