Animated normal maps simulating geometry displacement

As promised – application example of Flow Editor‘s new functionality – an animation map.

I created a high-poly model of an alien eyeball in Blender and texture-painted it. Then I baked the color map and normal map onto a regular low-poly sphere.

After loading the generated color map into Flowed, I drew paths along the veins of the eyeball with color gradient going from yellow to white.

In the shader (source code below) I’m using red, green and blue components of the animation map as respectively: amplitude, frequency and phase of a sinusoidal function governing linear interpolation between normal maps and geometry normals. Since there is phase gradient in my animation map, the effect resembles actual flow of blood along the veins.

Watch in HD:

The shader itself is really simple – just extending the regular Bumped Specular shader with interpolation between normals according to the animation map. The visual impression should be even more spectacular with Parallax Specular shader or (preferably) a Relief Mapping shader. I might prepare another vid with the latter when I have time 🙂 In the meantime – enjoy!

Shader "Custom/AnimatedNormals" {
	Properties {
		_MainTex ("Texture (RGB) Gloss (A)", 2D) = "white" {}
		_BumpMap ("Bump Map", 2D) = "bump" {}
		_AnimMap ("Animation", 2D) = "red" {}
		_SpecColor ("Specular Color", Color) = (0.5,0.5,0.5,1)
		_Shininess ("Shininess", Range (0.01, 1)) = 0.078125
	}
	SubShader {
		Tags { "RenderType"="Opaque" }
		LOD 200

		CGPROGRAM
		#pragma surface surf BlinnPhong
		#pragma target 3.0

		sampler2D _MainTex;
		sampler2D _BumpMap;
		sampler2D _AnimMap;
		float _Shininess;

		struct Input {
			float2 uv_MainTex;

			INTERNAL_DATA
		};

		void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutput o) {
			half4 c = tex2D (_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex);
			o.Albedo = c.rgb;
			o.Gloss = c.a;
			o.Specular = _Shininess;
			half4 anim = tex2D(_AnimMap, IN.uv_MainTex);

			half t = 0.5 + anim.r * sin(-anim.g * 5 * 3.14159 * _Time[1] + anim.b * 4 * 3.14159) / 2;

			o.Normal = normalize(lerp(float3(0, 0, 1), UnpackNormal(tex2D(_BumpMap, IN.uv_MainTex)), t));
		}
		ENDCG
	}
	FallBack "Bumped Specular"
}