Ifurkend's VFX Sketchbook

Just opening a personal sketchbook thread to throw whatever I feel like to publish…

This is a shameless inspiration by Hi-Fi Rush’s dot effect.

Hi-Fi Rush is very pleasingly stylish that it incorporates the Ben-Day/halftone dot pattern for the comic shading effect. It’s not really transforming the whole screen into CYMK print, that would be too noisy. Rather the dot pattern is employed sparingly where they are actually effective like the comical striking particles and onomatopoeia, but one particularly interesting place which uses the dot pattern is its bloom PP. I made some poor attempt to recreate it but did not have too much success. This is what I ended up with at the moment, only translucency is given the halftone treatment.

The halftone pattern is very simple, just frac the Viewport UV and get the vector length of each grid, then step(grid pattern, PP input). PP input 1 under Before Tonemapping gives you separated translucency so it doesn’t affect the opaque objects. Unfortunately, the PP still gets the ghosting artifact when the pixel is rendered before the opaque object.

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An experiment of Dither Temporal AA to cheese a rather grainy scene blur effect with refraction in a translucent surface material, because Scene Color ignores translucency no matter what, and I don’t know how to edit the UE source code to achieve that. Still in order for the translucent objects to be affected by refraction, their translucency pass has to be changed to Before DOF, which means tiny translucent particles will leave a very visible ghostly trail under TSR.

This is kinda inspired by Alex (Ninja1Zombie1Master)'s tutorial about using dither noise to reduce texture samples for blending, but I am not using Alex’s animated blue noise technique here, because unfortunately the gaps may show up if I stretch the blur distance too long. The built-in dither noise doesn’t have this problem.

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Jellyfishes (basically ribbons) and fake fish-boids (I have no obstacle to worry about and I want direct control of the traveling path). Both done in Niagara.

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