I was working on a sun shader for a vfx scene and it turned out great so i decided i would share that with you guys,
My main goal with this one was to create something stylised yet detailed, this is highly inspired by Valorant art style but i tried to make the flow and movement of the effect as realistic as possible.
I made a step by step video that you can watch just here!
https://youtu.be/-BFS1HCEXxo
Now this is mainly targeted to intermediate artists like me, as it would be quite tricky to pack so much information in a short video, i thought it would be much simpler to just write the details here.
So let’s start with the textures !
The sun consists of 3 textures :
- The first one is your basic organic noise which is made inverting a lot of sphere in photoshop / substance designer.
- The second one is made inside substance designer, using the cell node with a lot of slope blur and directional warp (and because i use directional warp, the effect won’t be seamless anymore so i also use the “make it tile” node at the end)
- The third and last texture is made using the same technique as Pierre Fleau in his Substance Designer Rock Height Tip
Note that any noise texture would work just fine, but i think it look best when combining one rough and large texture with a more chaotic and liquid one.
Now that we have our textures let’s go into detail about the shader, for this i used Amplfiy Shader.
To get the realistic movement and details i wanted i decided to use a parallax effect, that way it look more 3D and have more depth. (you can also see the fresnel used)
To have this wavy effect that come and go i decided to multiply different variant of the effect, one with a lower power, the other with a smoothstep node, this is similar to using simple UV distortion, but instead of just deforming, it sometimes reform and feels like the disortion is layered.
I then used a fresnel with smoothstep to even further increase this impression of layer of plasma moving under the surface, as plasma appear brighter the denser it is.
And voila! Thanks for reading, i hope i explained everything correctly, if not feel free to ask any questions