Vertex alpha driven outlines that allow having a visible border even on flat parts of force fields. This persistent opacity is controlled with alpha channel of vertex color, where 1 is no forced color and 0 is fully forced color.
Animation for mesh based (for now) parts with custom textures. The ‘r’ channel of texture is used to calculate visibility of force field parts over time (there’s a sliding window of currently ‘visible’ range of values). The alpha channel controls how visible the texture pattern is.
The material has been in production for a while now even though we didn’t make any public announcements because we wanted to gather more information on use cases and possible enhancements internally. After careful examination of all the feedback it was clear that we need to make some adjustments to bring the best experience and cover most of the use cases. There’s two main differences with what was initially released and some of you might have played with. The first one is about persistent opacity - it used to be controlled by the red channel of vertex color and value of 0 meant no persistent opacity and 1 meant fully opaque vertex. This is now controlled by vertex alpha and value of 1 means no persistent opacity and 0 means fully opaque vertex. This allows to use existing meshes as is without the need to draw custom vertex color. The other big change - ‘rgb’ channels of vertex color are now used to tint the forcefield just as in other base materials. This would mean that existing mesh based forcefields might look broken but we strongly believe that those changes were necessary to bring the best experience.
I’ve been seeing a few bits about those texture ‘hacks’, nice to know it’s official. This is lowkey amazing and I’m already coming up with tons of weird and fun effects I could do with it. Thanks for the update regarding those features
Will we get the ability to change the animation speed or the way it tweens between values? (i.e. 0-1 and then wrap around to 0 and go 0-1 again, instead of ping-ponging between 0 and 1)
Why not add the animation for textures on parts by themselves rather than meshes? It isn’t really possible to get exact touch/hits with meshes as the dimension isn’t the same.
it doesn’t work exactly like this. there’s some pseudorandom smooth change of values with pretty big period and since currently there’s no good way to customize material we figured this is the best way. we’re thinking how we can enhance this, stay tuned!
Glad to see this is finally released! The ability to make cool animations with this material is amazing. However, changing the speed of the tween and way it wraps back around would be nice.
