Dylan's Unreal Material Tips #1 - Glitter sparkles

[@markb6506]

Oh man this is *exactly* the look I wanted, thank you so much for making this tutorial!

[@danielmateidesz2113]

I just trying recreate Journey, Sky Sand shader with this glitter effect and it helped me a lot to understand how it works! Thx!

[@TorQueMoD]

Great video, thanks for sharing! You can use the Light Direction as a mask to mask out the dark side so the sparkles don't show up there, and then one minus the result and plug it into Metallic, and it's a perfect solution for snow. Using Metallic is better since the sparkles will show up when you're back is to the sun, as opposed to using specular, they only show when you're looking at the sun. To make a Light Direction mask, Take the Atmosphere Sun Light Vector node and Dot against Vertex Normals WS, then saturate it, and power it to give you control of the coverage of the light and multiply this against your final output.

[@dmeville]

Yes this is true and worth mentioning, but masking things with the light direction like that only works for surface lighting (eg, sparkles that are in CAST shadow from another object or surface shadows from a different (not the main dir) light, will still be visible). This compromise is usually okay for a lot of people, but I hate how it looks tbh. I've modified the engine source to allow an extra material input specifically to solve this that lets me input any value and that value will be masked by _all_ shadow: forums.unrealengine.com/t/creating-a-custom-substrate-shader-model-bsdf/1773046/16?u=dmeville The main use for this sparkle shader I am working on is for water sparkles, and water that is in a cave completely in shadow should absolutely not sparkle from the sun!

[@coolguy-xb2yn]

@@dmeville depending on if you are using exposure or not (maybe not judging from how stylized your scene is) you could divide the result by the EyeAdaptation node, which will heavily darken in interiors.

[@rayvellart]

Woah! Awesome tutorial, thank you! Btw How did you made those stylized hair shader?

[@dmeville]

That’ll be next video I guess 😂 offsetting tangents with a streaky noise is the short answer though

[@dmeville]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/eXTWl315qZWhjtUsi=G1CtaR4GyHD2zb8U

[@fleity]

How does the sparkle behave when you move the camera further away? I always disliked that on many glitter shaders they become rather noisy depending on the view distance (its possible to fix that by manually controlling how and which mip maps are sampled and blended but that quite a bit of additional instructions)

[@dmeville]

Take a look at the tweet here: x.com/DMeville/status/1800617151352492223 I think it holds up well and doesn't get too oddly noisy

[@fleity]

@@dmeville it does loose the glitter quite a bit but I guess that's just realistic. Thanks 👍

[@ViktorartSnowtracked]

Sweet tutorial!

[@abdoulraoufgambo]

so cool !