pucklovesgames

Render Texture Feedback - FILES

Added 2020-11-16 13:16:48 +0000 UTC

Ever since seeing the cool explosions in Remedy's Control, when you pop the "Hiss" off a possessed enemy, I've been wanting to play with adding more feedback build-up into my shaders.

Here is the my initial playing around with implementing a basic feedback loop that I put together a while ago, but never got around to completing. It's very bare bones, simply a second "feedback camera" that is rendering anything on the feedback layer to a literal quad in front of the main camera, which is rendered on both the main camera and also the feedback camera again (creating the feedback build up).

I'm sure there are cleverer(er?) ways of settings this up, with ping ponging Graphics.Blit between two render textures, but you can't beat a quick and easy setup to test out an idea.

You can get some pretty trippy effects with only a few particles adding to the feedback.

Make sure anything you want to contribute to the feedback is on the same layer as what you set in the "Feedback Layer" LayerMask, on the FeedbackFX.cs script that lives on the Main Camera. You can control how fast the feedback dissipates in the Material properties of the RT Quad. This also works best in Linear Color mode, although I'm sure with some tweaking it can be forced through Gamma as well.

Improvement Ideas: I'd like to use shader replacement or a depth comparison to properly mask the feedback source objects when they're occluded. Also it would be good to find a way to modulate the feedback contribution based on depth (just a simple fog might do on the feedback camera?) - and I haven't yet figured out why I can't get values greater than 1 on the render texture, even using HDR formats.

Please let me know if anybody has any ideas on how to extend this further or use this in interesting ways!