Blurry Blob Variations (forward + deferred) - FILES

Here are a few variations on the blobby polygon compositing shader I've been playing with. In the original version of this effect, I blurred the normals and then injected that back into the render stack, which only works in deferred rendering.

In these versions I'm instead writing out the blurred pass to a render texture, setting that as a global texture, and then using that directly in the particle shaders. This means they now work in both forward and deferred mode, and it allows a bit more control over how the passes are used. It also makes it easier to soften the edges of the smoke so that not just the interior detail is blurred.

The first variation is more smoke, this time with subsurface scattering. This version doesn't just blur the normals, but the entire final render of the smoke camera. It means the smoke will always be soft and can't contain any unblurred elements, but for smoke it seems to work pretty well. (Polygonal Thick Smoke 2.unity)

The second variation is an oily liquid blob. This one just blurs the normals, so that the reflection can be nice and crisp if you want (if you use a sharp cubemap). I've pulled in the edge softness to create a hard cutoff on the blobs, so it looks like they join and blend together when the particles are near each other. (Polygonal Oil Blob.unity)

This last variation is a simple fire particle effect that blurs the particles together to make it look more like a single mass of fire, whilst still having the benefits of a dynamic particle system (unlike a shader based billboard fire). (Polygonal Fire.unity)

It's important to note that these effects are not production ready, at all, they're just ideas I've been playing with, and they're quite limited in how they can be used. For example, because the blur doesn't fall off with distance, if you're too far away from the particles they will unnaturally blur together. I do have a version that blends between blur levels based on distance, but it needs some work still. You also can't currently mix effects very easily, unless they share similar softness levels, or unless you split them up into separate command buffers and render textures. But regardless, I think they're pretty neat! I hope you find it useful and it gives people some ideas on how you could use these to create other effects.

Thanks for the support everybody. I hope you're all going well and staying safe in these difficult times. Let me know on discord or in the comments if there's anything that's not working for you, or you need any help with setting this up.