Hi, I made this explosion last week and I wanted to share here as well. It was inspired by @quentincordonn1 (Twitter) explosions for Runeterra cinematic trailer (https://twitter.com/quentincordonn1/status/1352672382612332544?s=20).
When I saw his post I wanted to try to achieve something similar using meshes. A while ago I was working on Puzzle/Adventure Game Prototype and I was playing around with cel shaded art style. Those shaders gave me an idea for this explosion.
I really like how this works because you can add, multiply, mask your texture and then it projects on the mesh. Reminds me of Substance Designer where plug your graph in Cartesian to Polar and you can tweak your texture however you want and see the result in Polar coordinates in real time.
Breakdown video: https://youtu.be/MLhFrffkrI4
Base shader:
My final shader:
My twitter: https://twitter.com/gasperznoj/media
And another cool thing to try out would be to take camera vector as the light direction with a bit of a custom offset to top left. That way the explosion would look the same from every direction you would look at it.
Also I have a question that I’ve been trying to figure out for a while - How to blend vertex normals of multiple overlapping meshes based on a distance mask? Is it possible with a material graph or would it have to be HLSL?