Shader in unity for iphone

Unity Engine
1

Hi!
I’m interested in creating a stylistic water shader. Very toonstyle. So I wouldn’t need any transparency or anything like that for now. What i would like is though to have the look of the monkey island. I want it to be able to transform itself into different patterns, though it could be just a flat plane. Would I need to create an animated texture for this or could it be done procedurally or by using two planes with animated uv-offsets?
I’ve been testing to modify unity’s simple water shader, but didn’t get the result I was looking for.

Also I’m curious if there’s a way to get a shader to react to intersecting meshes like you could in maya or is it to computationally slow?
Like the right side nurbs meshes(don’t mind ther’e nurbs, just wonder if it might be possible in realtime)
http://www.creativecrash.com/system/screenshots/299393/original/CloseToTheEdge.jpg?1253131012

This is the style I want to achieve.

Thanks in advance for any reply!
Looking forward to them :slight_smile:

2

the watersurface and alike is rather easy …
but to have the mesh aspect you need a rather dense and vertex filled mesh to transform in vertex shaders and that could pose some problems depending on what else goes on.

Keep in mind, every single vertex, every single pixel on the screen is shader driven (OpenGL ES 2.0 means all shader or no shader at all), so you can hit some bottlenecks.
At least ES 2.0 devices have no distinct shader units for pixel and vertex, they are all unified, so you are limited on a global scale not a “per type”, so you might be very well capable of balancing it out :slight_smile:

3

Thank you!
Ok, so let’s skip the interaction then. how would I go about setting up the initial shader with this sort of pattern evolving and forming new shapes?

4

You would first define the mathematical function that creates this look.
for waves its normally a blend of more than one function, often layers of sinus - cos for example.

http://www.davidcornette.com/glsl/noise.html might be a starting point to get an idea given you want to work in GLSL, if you want to work with Surface Shaders then take the explanation there as an idea and search for cg based examples though and read up on the functions cg offers and that GLSL offers on OpenGL ES 2.0 so you can perform it performantly

5

Thank you
I found out about the perlin noise and it seems to be somewhat what I’m looking for. But is there a way to modify the algorithm(would you think?) to avoid getting spots show up between the shapes like so?

http://www.cnjianqing.com/view.php?video=M72n1ZxAJRs&feature=youtube_gdata_player&title=4D+Perlin+noise+function

I guess I have a long way to go though =/

6

perlin is meant to have spots :slight_smile:
what you can do afterwards is smooth it or modulate it with a sinus generated second layer for example and use the perlin as noise to make that sinus wave “not as clean and straight” as it would be otherwise

7

Thanks for all input and explanations, but you know what. I think I’m gonna give up on this…for the moment. =)