A Look at Spyro's Portals - Rendering the Background
Various
Visit resource ↗Description
Daniel Pokladek's November 2020 post begins a Unity series on Spyro Reignited portal shaders, focusing on the background visible through the opening while later installments cover distortion, outlines, and particles.
After cubemap and render-texture attempts fail, he builds a Built-in RP stencil pipeline: reverse-normals skybox sphere, stencil cutout and blocker quads, and a GrabPass plane using tex2Dproj, with gifs and GitHub code.
Intermediate readers need Surface shader comfort and basic stencil masks; Pokladek links Zucconi's non-Euclidean cubes and Unity manual pages.
One free WordPress article with long shader excerpts; the series continues in follow-up posts.
A practical case study for parallax portal interiors without loading another level.
Related resources
- 2D Water Shader Breakdown (Cyanilux)
A Shader Graph breakdown of stylized 2D water in Unity URP: sprite reflections via a second camera, scrolling noise distortion, fake highlights, and tilemap shoreline ripples for pixel art.
100% match · <general><intermediate><blog><art><catalog><cyanilux><free><online> - Book (w/ Turnable Pages) Breakdown (Cyanilux)
Cyanilux breakdown of a URP spellbook with vertex-shader page turns, flipbook page textures, dual Lit Graphs, pooling C# driver, and optional Blender setup notes.
100% match · <intermediate><blog><catalog><cyanilux><fairly><first><free><online> - Cloud Shader Breakdown (Cyanilux)
Cyanilux Shader Graph tutorial for URP that builds animated cloud decks on a subdivided plane with layered world-space noise, vertex displacement, and depth-based fading at intersections.
100% match · <intermediate><blog><catalog><cyanilux><each><free><online><paywall> - Crystal Shader Breakdown (Cyanilux)
A Cyanilux Shader Graph walkthrough for Unity URP that builds an unlit transparent crystal with object-space Y colour gradients, camera opaque-texture refraction, Fresnel opacity, and HDR glow for bloom.
100% match · <intermediate><blog><catalog><cyanilux><first><free><online><paywall> - Custom Renderer Features (Cyanilux)
Long-form Cyanilux guide to URP ScriptableRendererFeature and ScriptableRenderPass code: example effects, RTHandle setup, blit paths, and Unity 6 Render Graph notes.
100% match · <blog><any><catalog><cyanilux><free><now><online><paywall> - Depth (Cyanilux)
Long-form Cyanilux tutorial on Unity depth spaces, Z buffers, Scene Depth sampling, SV_Depth, and world-position reconstruction in URP and HDRP.
100% match · <blog><big><catalog><cyanilux><free><online><paywall><resources> - Dissolve Shader Breakdown (Cyanilux)
URP Shader Graph breakdown by Cyanilux on dissolve effects: Step and noise clip fragments with glowing edges, height-axis variants, and view-space UVs to reduce seam artifacts.
100% match · <intermediate><blog><catalog><cyanilux><free><online><paywall><resources> - Fire/Flame Shader Breakdown (Cyanilux)
Shader Graph breakdown of billboard fire on a quad: scrolling noise warps UVs for a flame texture or procedurally generated ellipse shapes, with per-instance randomization.
100% match · <intermediate><blog><catalog><cyanilux><fairly><first><free><online> - Gentle Introduction to Realtime Fluid Simulation for Programmers and Technical Artists (Shahriar Shahrabi)
Shahriar Shahrabi's October 2021 Medium tutorial explains real-time grid fluid simulation for programmers and technical artists with geometric intuition rather than dense Navier-Stokes notation.
100% match · <general><blog><access><article><artists><crawl><cyanilux><free> - see here for slides
Gilbert Sanders, Principal Artist at Guerrilla Games, gave this GDC 2018 Visual Arts session on vegetation in Horizon Zero Dawn.
100% match · <general><intermediate><various><after><artists><crawl><cyanilux><games> - New AMD Radeon Developer Tool Suite update brings shader source code, Extended PIX Markers, and command-line capture
New AMD Radeon Developer Tool Suite update brings shader source code, Extended PIX Markers, and command-line capture is a technical blog article by Chris Hesik. AMD GPUOpen…
100% match · <intermediate><blog><article><free><new><programmers><related><shader> - Colored Shadow Penumbra
Colored Shadow Penumbra is a technical blog article by Oscar Sanz. Short Unreal Engine tech-art note on adding colored shadow penumbra by editing deferred lighting shaders for…
100% match · <intermediate><blog><art><article><artists><free><programmers><shader> - Modern rendering culling techniques
Modern rendering culling techniques is a technical blog article by Nikita Krupitskas. Technical blog post by Nikita Krupitskas surveying culling techniques used in modern…
100% match · <intermediate><blog><article><free><modern><pipelines><programmers><real> - Behind The Scenes of the Anvil Engine
Behind The Scenes of the Anvil Engine is a free YouTube video on the Ubisoft channel. Ubisoft YouTube playlist of four short behind-the-scenes videos on Anvil engine features…
100% match · <access><free><interested><modern><programmers><real><series><time> - Lighting | Unity Shader Code Basics 06
Lighting | Unity Shader Code Basics 06 is a free YouTube video on the Daniel Ilett channel, an episode in the Unity Shader Code Basics series. Unity Shader Code Basics episode…
100% match · <access><after><basics><free><programmers><series><shader><style> - Hardware Image Compression
Hardware Image Compression is a technical blog article by Ignacio Castaño. Technical blog post by Ignacio Castaño comparing transparent hardware image compression formats -…
100% match · <blog><always><article><free><programmers><real><technical><things> - Enhancing DirectX Testing with AMD Smoldr
Enhancing DirectX Testing with AMD Smoldr is a March 2026 AMD GPUOpen post by Sebastian Neubauer announcing Smoldr, an open-source text-script tool for running DirectX 12 shaders…
100% match · <intermediate><blog><article><free><like><pipelines><resources><shader> - Adventures in Neural Rendering
Adventures in Neural Rendering is a February 2026 blog post by Kostas Anagnostou on Interplay of Light about using small multilayer perceptrons as signal encoders in real-time…
100% match · <blog><article><before><free><new><real><shader><small> - FragCoord
FragCoord is a browser-based shader playground and community site for writing animated GLSL-style visuals with a live preview, built by XorDev. Docs describe an…
100% match · <access><free><related><shader><shaders><style><time><writing> - SIGGRAPH Thesis Fastforward 2026
SIGGRAPH Thesis Fastforward 2026 is an official ACMSIGGRAPH YouTube recording of short PhD thesis pitches from SIGGRAPH-related graphics research. Featured talks include Monte…
100% match · <general><before><each><free><games><point><real><related>