[Unity] Lava Flowing Shader

Old Stuff, Unity3D

 

Done with blending 3 textures:

1. Rock with some outline glow, transparent background (RGBA)
2. Distortion map made with the above texture, but blurred (A)
3. Lava, where the scrolling UV takes place (RGB)

20150312_01

The shader is just 1 draw call [that little poor man doesn’t count xD its just for fun] so I can’t add more texcoords to it to create more layers with different scrolling speeds

The distortion effect is just what so called “water refraction” shader, which is modified from the code: http://unitycoder.com/blog/2012/02/26/water-splash-screen-effect-shader/

The scene works in my i9000 phone with 4x-5x fps but the scrolling stops working after one UV cycle.  Newer devices runs smoothly without any problem.

 

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I further added vertex displacement animation to the lava by using the script in : https://stevencraeynest.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/easy-volumetric-explosion-in-unity3d/

20150312_02

Also tested in my i9000 phone, the scrolling problem still exists, but the displacement animation works fine.

Published

15 thoughts on “[Unity] Lava Flowing Shader”

  1. Cool! Looks terrific.
    I always love lava in games. The most brilliant game with lava in it I think is From Dust. I thought that was a very inspiring game. Also the water in that game really formed sand delta’s as it flowed down mountains.

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      1. No thanks! Yeah also the sounds of the volcano are real sounds recorded from a real volcano. It really sounded impressive. I’m still waiting for more From Dust kinda games:( Btw the much older game black & white 2 also has great volcano,lava effects.

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    2. good reference also!
      I didn’t play lots of games….I really should see more >0< so anyway, thx again xD

      this lava shader idea actually came from the guild wars2 mega destroyer scene. I saw the lava flows with some distortion between layers

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      1. That’s ok:) I should play more games myself but i don’t have the money for it nowadays. Being an artist made me a poor bastard:/. Good luck with the lava Dexint. I’ll keep an eye on your blog and I will upload some of my programming work in the coming days. Cheers!

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  2. Terrific! Is it possible to make the rocks and the lava go in different direction, up and down. Been trying this but I can’t find the solution. Cheers!

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  3. Hello, thanks for this lava, it works great. I’m wondering how would I be able to make lava shader be fadeable (fade from texture color to completely transparent). Any thoughts would be appreciated!

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      1. Thanks for replying! To clarify, what I’m looking for is a scrolling material/shader that I can also fade out in runtime. I know very little about writing shaders but took a look at the docs and I shyly added back in the color to your Diffuse/Distort shader and added an alpha:fade property to #pragma. That didn’t seem to work and I don’t have any other ideas. Any other hints would be appreciated. Thanks again, Ming.

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      2. Also change these:
        Tags {“Queue”=”Transparent” “RenderType”=”Transparent” }

        ZWrite Off Blend SrcAlpha OneMinusSrcAlpha

        Also, make sure the render queue on your material is 3000(transparent) (you should see the render queue field on the material)

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  4. Hey i applied the material to a plane and it doesn’t move like in the video! what am i doing wrong? (i know little to nothing about shaders so, sorry for the newbie question)

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  5. How to fix this error?
    Material ‘mtl_lava_diffuse’ with Shader ‘Lava Flowing Shader/Unlit/Distort’ doesn’t have a texture property ‘__LavaTex’

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