Overview The NebulaDrift is the new kid on the block. It's a cloud-style effect (e.g., fog, smoke, haze). It was inspired by the effects of spell casts in old-school cRPGs. The image above is from Baldur's Gate 2, which predates the implementation of programmable shaders…
Overview nyx.vfx is a real-time 2D VFX engine that creates particle systems for midi events. It's a work-in-progress, but that shouldn't take away from making cool designs and exporting them for use in post-processing and video-editing tools. Tweaker's Dream The nyx.vfx plugin…
Density Field PreShader Accumulation, Decay, and Blob Stamps Remember from Series 01 (PreShader Pipeline Architecture) that a PreShader gathers one piece of information about the texture after the Mesh stage. A PreShader is an immutable adjunct texture that Shaders can choose to utilize. The first PreShader I built for nyx.…
Overview: From Overlay Hack to Real Temporal Feedback The original "Feedback Shader" in nyx.vfx didn't actually use a shader. It used an overlay technique: draw a full-screen rectangle every frame, then blend the current input on top. It worked, but it wasn't real…
What are PreShaders? How are they useful? We'll explore this topic and how we integrated PreShaders into the existing architecture.…