Been a while since I promised a breakdown for this shot (no sims, all done with vertex offset). I finally got around to it, I'll be updating this thread shortly! #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #UE4 We'll need our mesh to have positions of it's individual fragments saved somehow. I do this by baking pivot data into UVs. I bake XY pos to UV1 and Z to UV2. This data is easily accessible in the shader, see below.

Here's a sample mesh for anyone to use:
klemenlozar.com/@klemen_lozar_…

Dynamic lights are expensive, using sprites with a modulate blend material you can multiply screen colors behind the sprite and use depth masking to fake a light radius, cheap and can work surprisingly well. #screenshotsaturday #UE4 #gamedev #indiedev Using modulate blending, make sure you clamp the result in a range above 1 for this to work right. Modulate blending without depth testing is also great for various glow effects. #screenshotsaturday #UE4 #gamedev #indiedev

Punch it Chewie! Captured straight from the material editor preview. Next couple of breakdowns will focus on some of the fun you can have using loops with custom hlsl code. #screenshotsaturday #UE4 #gamedev #indiedev Texture sample is repeated, UVs moved using cam direction vector more and more every step, makes for a cool holographic like effect. #screenshotsaturday #UE4 #gamedev

Next breakdown will focus on this little scene I made. Almost has a simulated quality to it but you might be surprised to learn how simple it is. #UE4 #gamedev #indiedev First component, the stream, is a torus I deform and rotate. I use a world space radial gradient to gradually increase deformation away from the nozzle. Large part of the torus is just hidden behind geo, you could also collapse those verts to a point to remove them. #ue4 #gamedev

You can use animated textures and some material tricks to create believable swarms of creatures out of simple sprites, a more detailed breakdown is on the way! #ue4 #gamedev #indiedev #screenshotsaturday I use a diffuse + normal animated texture to mimic 3D and add vertex animation to break up the motion. Each particle has randomized speed, period and frequency. Vertex offset is camera aligned so it looks interesting from any angle. #ue4 #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiedev

Raindrop shader. Three layers, two dynamic, one static. Packed tiling textures with normals and opacity mask. More detailed breakdown on the way, look for replies to this thread! #UE4 #gamedev #indiedev Streaks on top, a tiling tex, distortion is animated so you can see the influence of the distortion tex on the left. Drops on the bottom, I use a very small but uncompressed tex that holds different UV values per pixel, this is used to distribute another tex around. #UE4 #gamedev

Calcifer shader! Single noise texture used, everything is procedural including the eyes and mouth. I'll follow up to this thread with a breakdown for this type of procedural fire. #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #UE4 First part of the setup I like to use. On the left it's a UV distortion texture, I add this to the UVs of the noise texture on the right. For efficiency you could pack the noise texture into the blue channel of the dist texture, save a texture call. #UE4 #gamedev #indiedev