Seas of Flame Effect

For this ability, we wanted to create some sort of ring that gets emitted around the player, acting as a damaging AoE that burns enemies who enter its radius. The ring visually represents spreading embers erupting from the ground outward. We used animated UVs, noise-driven distortion, and gradient-based coloring to make the embers appear more dynamic, with glowing embers traveling across the surface to simulate the motion of heat. This all gets emitted by a GPUParticle3D node.

Ember Shaders

This shader simulates the flickering embers by animating the UVs of a custom texture with scrolling noise-based distortion. Additionally, this shader is unshaded, ensuring the ember maintains consistent brightness regardless of the lighting.

• Billboarding The vertex shader reconstructs the model-view matrix to align ember quads facing the camera by overriding rotation while preserving scale, ensuring consistent orientation from all angles.

• UV Animation UV coordinates scroll over time using a speed parameter, moving the ember texture continuously to create a drifting motion.

• Noise Distortion A noise texture modulates UV offsets dynamically, combined with a gradient mask to control distortion intensity, adding flicker to the embers.

• Texture Sampling The distorted UVs sample the ember texture, which has its colors multiplied by the vertex color input to allow external tinting or fading.

• Alpha and Blending It uses premultiplied alpha blending. Fragment alpha is sourced from the ember texture’s red channel, enabling smooth, natural transparency.

Ember Particles

The shader is applied on top of a QuadMesh to create ember-like particles. Various configurations of the GPUParticle3D node are adjusted to make the embers float upwards. The emission amount is tweaked with explosiveness to create a mass eruption of flames.