Need some advice on how to create a specific effect in Unity using shader graph

Technical & Engine Help Unity Help
1

Hello good people, this is my first post here, hope I can be as clear as possible!

I saw this pic on pinterest a while ago and thought it would be fun to recreate inside Unity using shader graph and the CPU particle system (the old one for reference, not VFX Graph).

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I already got the effects on the hands pretty well using particles and some trails, but now I’m trying to create the hand itself.
I modeled a very basic hand in blender, rigged it for animations and imported in Unity, this is how it looks currently

The shader for the hand is literally just a fresnel node that goes in a step node and then multiplied by a color, nothing too fancy, but as you can see the cutoff point of the hand is pretty evident.
Now my problem is that I would like to fade the hand in a similar fashion as the one from the image but I have no idea how to achieve this effect. My idea was to unwrap the UVs of the hand in such a way that the base of the hand would be around the 0 coordinate on the X and then map a gradient to it so the base of the arm does “something”.

I would love to know how would you approach this problem and if you could give me some advice. I’m by no means an expert VFX artist so consider me a complete noob!

Thank you!

2

Hi. From what I see, the hand doesn’t look faded on the left part, it looks more shiny, which gives it the proper blood-like look. But you are right, how it is uv unwrapped would determine how one could use a gradient to determine what happens from the hand going up to the arm.

Haven said that, I have never done something like this but if I were to do it, I would play with the UVs, use a texture coordinate node and a component mask to determine how something like the roughness or even opacity would be controlled on the hand from top to bottom.

Maybe someone who has done something similar would chime in and give a better explanation. Or you could come to the realtimevfx discord and ask in the ‘how-would-you-do-this’ channel if you don’t get an answer here. RealTimeVFX

3

Hey, I did work on this a bit today and got to this result. I’m not entirely satisfied, but at least the hand now doesn’t just cut off mid air…

This is my gradient graph for anyone interested.

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Still not completely satisfied as I said so I’m definitely looking to improve on this