Alright folks, let’s dive into this “infinite prismatic emblem” thing I messed around with. It was a bit of a journey, not gonna lie.
Started with the Spark! It all kicked off when I stumbled upon some cool shader tutorials online. I was like, “Hey, that looks neat, let’s try and make something shiny.” I wasn’t aiming for anything specific at first, just wanted to play around with colors and reflections.
The Initial Mess: I fired up Unity, created a new material, and dove headfirst into Shader Graph. I gotta say, at first, it was a total mess. Wires going everywhere, nodes all over the place, and I had no clue what half of them did. I basically just started throwing stuff together, connecting random inputs to outputs, and hoping for the best. Shockingly, that didn’t work right away.
Prismatics Emerged: Eventually, I started playing with the “Normal Vector” and some “Fresnel Effect” nodes. That’s when I started seeing some cool color shifts based on the viewing angle. It wasn’t quite the “prismatic” look I was after, but it was a start. Think subtle rainbow sheen on a soap bubble.
Infinite? More like Infuriating: The “infinite” part was tricky. I wanted the emblem to feel like it had depth and complexity, like you could look into it forever. So, I started experimenting with multiple layers of noise and distortion, layering them on top of each other with different scales and speeds. I used a panning noise texture to give the illusion of movement and depth.
Bump Mapping is the Key! This is where things got a bit more interesting. I messed around with normal maps quite a bit. I took a simple black and white noise texture, cranked up the contrast, and used it to offset the normals on my emblem’s surface. This made it look like it had tiny, intricate details, even though it was just a flat plane.
Color Crazy Time: For the colors, I went wild with gradient maps. I created a few different gradients with vibrant, contrasting colors – reds, blues, greens, purples – you name it. Then, I used different noise functions to sample these gradients, creating a shifting, shimmering color palette.
Polishing the Gem: After a lot of tweaking and adjusting, I finally got something that I was somewhat happy with. It wasn’t perfect, but it had that prismatic, infinite-depth kinda vibe I was going for. I added some bloom and post-processing effects in Unity to make it really pop.
The Lesson Learned: This whole “infinite prismatic emblem” experiment was a good reminder that shaders can be super powerful, but also super confusing. It takes a lot of trial and error, and a willingness to just mess around and see what happens. Don’t be afraid to break things, experiment with different techniques, and most importantly, have fun with it!
Final Thoughts: Could it be better? Absolutely! But for a quick, fun project, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. Plus, I learned a ton about shaders in the process. Now, onto the next shiny thing!
