How to do a fake crack effect Tutorial + Shader in Unity

Hellooooo artists, some people ask me how i did it this fake crack.

So, i wil try to explain it in the easily way. The main nodes of this effect are the Parallax Oclusion Mapping and the view direction. Why? I’ll explain a little later, now let’s move on to texture.

imagepacked

my texture is divided into three parts, each one belonging to the channel.

R- Glow
G- Alpha
B- Height

here you have the images separately.


alpha

Now let’s go to the shader, I have played with the three textures and the smoothstep to give it the opening animation that later I will control by the custom vertex stream or if you are from unreal by the dynamic parameters.

and now the secret of the depth, since I didn’t want to use stencils for a single space texture I placed the view direction in tangent and I put them to the UVs and this is the result, pretty cool ;D

and that’s all, I leave a picture of the complete shader if you want me to pass it to you comment me here and I’ll leave it here ^^

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The texture used ^^

imagepacked

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Thank you Denie! This helps a ton

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glad to hear it ^^ if you have any question you can contact me without problem

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Hello there ! I didn’t understand the name of this article I think 'cause I wanted to knowhow to do It for beginners (when I mean beginner, I mean, I haven’t touched VFX tools yet) so… if you have the time :grin:

Hello, I would recommend that if you don’t know the main tools and the basic logic behind the shaders, you should start with that first. This even being a quick tutorial is a bit advanced and is not intended for people who are just starting out. Sorry.

But if you really want to know how to do it, I can give you a more extended explanation.

Thank you for the breakdown! If I may ask, what’s the use on having the cracks and the mask separated, when at the end you only use them multiplied togheter?

It was just to have one more texture in case I needed it, I have multiplied it but I could have easily used the smoothstep and the texture of the crack to make the mask.

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Yes please ! I’d love that !