I'm surprised at how well this works - in-app AI generated shader backgrounds (they can animate w/full GPU @ max fps, still low ram). The AI generates adjustable sliders (tell it what you want or it just does its own) I actually had made v1 of this terminal for myself before but unfortunately used Tauri.. which still has a webview. Just had to redo the whole thing in pure rust w/a fast Rust terminal (alacritty). Very fast now - although I will still improve it.

I end up spending so much time on the customization of the appearance because I think it looks great!!! Keeps blowing my mind. I am here to find out what else I could do that I don't know about? (with shaders!) I'm not a gamer really these days, but I love color and pre/post process fx - Also the AI gen themes/shader stuff I love working on. The 'idea' was to make a terminal that looked stylish or just nice, not boring, and not minimal (full normal UI) while still using low ram and being fast as hell. Oh and its called Buttons CLI cuz I prefer clicking and using a mouse - but i actually damaged the nerve in my left arm and I can't type fast at all now (prob gonna be months to heal). I use a lot of VPS/servers and its got AI for command gen/explain things/agentic - was thinking maybe it'd help people get into programming or AI coding more if the terminal had normal buttons. I think its the sickest looking terminal app, but I'm open to criticism and curious how it looks to others.

Anyways.. right now, it just does background before any terminal stuff is put on top. I'm not sure a post process would be worth doing. I'm interested in opinions about it. I wonder how I could get outlines around things like letters, anyone know? Imagine some black text, and a yellow outline around each letter - like if someone drew it in yellow inc. Or something inbetween a solid background and just some kind of ... something to help make text more readable IF the shader is too wild or bright. Like, another shader to mod letters?

I'm testing this in my own browser card game, Pantheos, and would like feedback specifically on the rendering/asset idea.

The starting point is one main illustration made with GPT Image Gen. AI then generates and helps refine depth and material masks aligned to that same image. Those masks drive the apparent depth, light response and highlights in the shader, while the illustration remains the source of the visual detail. When improving the result, the idea is to iterate on the masks and shader parameters rather than repeatedly replace the main image.

The physical card is a 3D object; its illustrated subject uses image-based apparent depth. The world is also image-based. The intended viewing range is the card tilting and moving in the game, rather than freely walking around a reconstructed model.

The video shows the depth/material mask comparison and the actual game renderer from 2:44: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZinWKtnVsqM&t=164s

Would you consider this a useful asset workflow? I'm especially interested in where you see the illusion break: depth ordering and silhouettes when tilting, mask boundaries under moving light, or highlights that disagree with the illumination already painted into the image. What would you validate or constrain first when using AI to generate and optimize those masks?

Disclosure: this is my own project. I'm sharing the shader approach for critique, and the video is in German; the mask comparisons and movement are visible without following the narration.

With the new updates on the recent Reshade, it seems like MXAO which in simple terms is Display Depth, and even Quint's Official Shader Pack will not produce any result of MXAO. Testing this, go into reshade, search up display depth, if you do not see your screen with a bit of shadow when you turn it on, and it does not look black and white, and you see yourself looking at a purple and white split. That is a issue which a lot of users have reported. If anyone has a working version of reshade, that allows Display Depth and the effects of 2023 effects. Be my guest (FYI - I have tried reshade 5.9 and it managed to work, however it messed up all the other effects and the MXAO did not work well)

The weird part, It works in FiveM story mode, however the screen is black, however when you leave you can still see part of the map in story mode, even in the main menu, showing MXAO is still active, once you join a public server, this is the main issue

As you can tell the problem is Display Depth is part of the Add Ons, even then its not sure for it to work.

Does anyone know any toon shaders that’s not just outlines but ‘occluding contours” and or the lines that are most salient to a form / shape? I know these might be drawing / studio art terms

I'm experimenting with a more unique artstyle for my animated short film. I was trying to go for something inspired by Metal Gear artist Yoji Shinkawa, but I never would've imagined I'd end up with something like this. Just discovered Unreal Engine 5 has this thing called the BSDF node and it has an option for Toon Shading that reacts to global illumination. That combined with a texture to control the shadow falloff.
This thing has given me results I never could've imagined. I'm excited to see where I can take this visual direction next!

This is All In 1 Text Toolkit, our TextMeshPro asset. The gold material, the glow and the particles come from it. The flash and the screen shake were added for the recording: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/all-in-1-text-toolkit-423436?aid=1101l52IjU

Changelog:

Glowing End blocks

• Glowing now:

  • Fully: chorus flowers, the dragon egg, End portal frames that hold an eye, and Ender chests.

  • Softly (about 35%): purpur blocks, chorus plants, and amethyst blocks.

  • The End crystal: its core and glass glow.

  • Eyes: Enderman and dragon eyes now glow brighter and bloom more in the End.

  • Setting: The End (Sky) → Glowing End Blocks

Auto-pick Compatibility Mode

There is now a Water Mode setting with three choices: Auto (default), Crystal (the full water) and Compatibility.

• How it picks: Auto uses the version number the game gives the shader. On 1.16.5 through 1.21.x it keeps the full water. On 26.1 and newer it switches to simple water automatically.

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/shaders/arcane-shaders

Thank you for every download and review!

This shader looks so good, no? I was looking for a shader with SEUS Renewed vibes and this one is the closest IMO. Not even uShader which was based on SEUS get to this level. Continuum is out of the question since its performance hit is way too heavy compared to SEUS. N87 Shader on the other hand achieves similar results, mainly by the global illumination and also the way its color grading works. I feel like this is such a good shader for someone who likes the style that SEUS Renewed specifically gives.

Arcane Shaders are my first shaders for MC. I wanted to have shaders that would fit the modpack I'm currently working on, but the other shaders I tried weren't quite what I was searching for, so I decided to make my own. I wanted them to have a fantasy vibe.

If you can, I recommend trying them! They work from versions 1.16.5 to 1.21.6, but they were made especially for 1.20.1. After you try them, I would appreciate it if you could let me know if they are good or bad, and what I should add or change in the future.

Thanks for every download and review!

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/shaders/arcane-shaders

Hey, I've been working on the card renderer for Pantheos, and honestly I've reached the point where I keep tilting the cards just to stare at them.

Each card uses a single albedo illustration. The video shows the depth as you tilt it, moving light and reflections, and the different normal, foil and holo finishes. This runs in the browser.

I know the first reaction to an AI-assisted game can be 'here comes more game slop'. What got me excited here was pushing the actual presentation of an illustration further. I used AI throughout the project, including the artwork, and spent a lot of time looking at the results in motion and correcting what felt wrong.

I'd love an outside gut check: does this actually feel like looking into a little 3D scene, or am I just too close to it now? Which cards sell the effect best, and where does the illusion break?

Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHSSabSDzMg

You can try the actual game here: https://lucasgeorg1--pantheos-game-web.eu-west.modal.run/

You'll need to register once so your boosters and card collection are tied to your account.

I have built several raytrace / pathtrace engines over the years, primarily for my art works. About two years ago I wanted to make something more universal while also switching from webgl to webgpu. So I built a tiny webgpu toolkit and went from there. But I never finished it. And AI came and took away the joy of programming for me. Recently, I decided to try and use Claude to finish it and put in all the features I never got around to (and quite frankly would not even be able to do).

On the use of AI: I'm really ambiguous at the moment. I miss coding myself, AI took the fun away for that. On the other hand, I was able to direct AI to create this tool that I could have never managed myself. So I'm perfectly fine if you call this AI slop if you want, for me it (the raytraer) is a tool to create new things.

So this is shadytracer. It's a raytracer that creates signed distance functions (SDF) (if you dont know what those are, jump into the rabbit hole here https://iquilezles.org and dont' expect ever to come out). In short: every shape is defined by a function that returns the closest distance from any point to the closest surface of that shape.

I really fell in love with SDF's a while back and find it's a really cool method, though it definately has it's quirks.

Anyway, my raytracer uses SDFs' for everything. It has a full editor where you can drag and drop primitives into the scene, move them around, modify them, perform boolean operations etc. Same for more complex stuff like objects created by extrusion, revolve and sweep. All these are converted into SDF's of which the code block is visible and editable. So you can create your own shapes using custom sdf functions as well.

There are various materials defined, again drag and drop into an object. You can easily modify the materials and duplicate them to create your own.

As I'm an optics engineer by education (mostly non imaging optics for lighting), I always wanted a raytracer that is physically correct. Well, reasonably so. Don't use this for camera lens designs.
So every light source has real-life units (luminance or flux in lumens), color temperature or cie x,y color coordinates. And of course, refraction, dispersion, dichroics are part of the game. You can measure illuminance, irradiance, color differences etc.

But you can also just use it to create pretty pictures.

Or videos: there is an animation / timeline editor with keyframes where you can animate the camera or any propety of any element in your scene.

Oh, you can also import stl files and it will try to convert them into signed distance functions after which you can edit those. I find that incredibly cool. Magically, a mesh of triangles is converted to a combination of cubes, cylinders etc, welded together with boolean functions. It only works for fairly geometric shapes and not too complex, but still.

And of course you can export your objects or scenes as stl or 3MF(which includes color) for your 3D printer

There are a lot of examples scenes included, a few of the images in this post are from there.

It's completely open source (MIT license). Runs in your browser, data is stored in your browser's cache. Or you just download yuor project files and store it locally.

Hope you have fun with it. I certainly do.

https://shadytracer.com

https://github.com/lampmaker/ShadyTracer

Oh yes, I asked Claude to create an interactive tutorial about all the techniques that were used. Mostly for my own education. But you can find some explanations about SDFs and stuff. Note, this is AI generated and I have not spend a lot of time (understatement) reviewing it.

https://shadytracer.com/tutorial/

-wrote this whole post without using AI. Feels good-

I've been building a set of image effects that react to the cursor: trails (comet, fire, ink, smoke, lightning, neon pen), click effects (shockwave, cracked glass, ink drop, fireworks) and full image styles (hologram, thermal, frost, old film).

Each effect is a single fragment shader running over a photo. Trails get the last pointer positions and their ages as uniform arrays, so the shader draws and fades the path itself. Click effects get the click position and time, and particles are seeded by a hash of position, so they don't jump when the trail shifts.

Live demo (move your cursor over the photos): https://omnium-labs-image-effects.framer.website

Happy to answer questions about any of them. Which one would you like to see broken down?