Shader effects
Twenty nine stylised effects, from liquid warps and glass filters to ASCII, halftone, VHS, a thermal camera and a real X-ray, stacked as layers.
Open Shaders in the left column, or press Shift S. The panel is a grid of effects, each tile showing a live preview.
- Click a tile to turn the effect on. Click it again to open its settings.
- The switch on a tile turns it off again. An effect switched off keeps its settings and comes back exactly as it was.
- Search in the panel header finds an effect by name.
The effects
The effects come in four families.
Shape · moves the picture around
| Effect | |
|---|---|
| Fluid | A flowing, melting distortion |
| Smoke Fluid | Real smoke that follows the cursor: coloured plumes, a distortion, or a reveal of a picture underneath |
| Warp | Liquid waves |
| Lens Distortion | A fisheye lens with a colour fringe |
| Pattern Refraction | Ripples, glass or frosted refraction |
| Glass Filter | Looking through fluted, reeded glass |
| Progressive Blur | Blur that grows from a point, a line or a band, with handles on the canvas |
| Pattern Lusion | A field of lenses, dots, honeycomb or pebbles, that magnify what is behind |
| Slice Shift | The picture cut into slices and shifted |
| Pixel Stretch | Pixels dragged out in one direction |
| Cell Shatter | The picture broken into square, hexagonal or triangular tiles |
Print · redraws the picture out of marks
| Effect | |
|---|---|
| ASCII | The scene drawn in characters. Type your own set. |
| Dithering | Ordered dot patterns, from coarse to silk |
| Halftone | Print dots on paper, in grids, rings or stipple, in many shapes |
| Pixelate | A mosaic |
| Hatching | Pencil cross hatching |
| Pattern Grid | A dot, grid or diamond overlay |
Film · damages the picture like a camera would
| Effect | |
|---|---|
| RGB Split | Colour channels pulled apart, like a lens's aberration |
| Glitch | A broken signal: tears, lost register and dropped blocks |
| Film Dust | Specks, hairs, a scratch and lamp flicker |
| Chroma Smear | A motion blur trail with a two colour glow |
| VHS | Tape artefacts |
| Bad TV | Broken television noise |
Light · draws lines and levels on top
| Effect | |
|---|---|
| Heatmap | The scene read as temperature and painted through a thermal palette. See Heatmap. |
| X-ray | A real see through of the model. See X-ray. |
| Colour Edge | Coloured line art along the edges |
| Toon Shading | Flat, posterised cartoon shading |
| Scan | A beam of light sweeping across |
| FUI / Tracking | A sci fi tracking overlay with markers |
Settings every effect has
Open an effect to see its own controls, its presets, and these shared settings:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Follow mouse | The effect reacts to the visitor's cursor, on the published page too |
| Still | Freezes an effect that moves over time |
| Isolate | Applies the effect to objects only, leaving the background alone |
| Blend | How the effect meets the picture under it: Normal, Dissolve, Darken, Multiply, Colour burn, Lighten, Screen, Colour dodge, Add, Overlay, Soft light, Hard light, Difference, Exclusion or Subtract |
| Opacity | How strongly it shows |
Most effects open with a row of presets to start from. Some put handles on the canvas, such as the centre and radius of Progressive Blur, that you can drag directly.
Stacking effects
Several effects can be on at once. They apply in order, like layers in an image editor: the top of the list is drawn last, over everything under it.
Press the layers button in the Shaders panel header to see the stack beside the panel:
- Drag a row to reorder it.
- Opacity per layer, on the dial with the effect's name.
- Solo plays one effect alone and mutes the rest.
- Shy hides a row from the list, so a tall stack shrinks to the few you are working on. The eye in the header shows them again.
- Right click a row for its settings, or to turn it off.
Heatmap and X-ray rebuild the whole picture from the scene, so they start at the bottom of the stack, with everything else applied on top of them.
The stack also appears in Layers, mixed with your objects. There, an effect applies only to the objects below it, so you can keep one object clear of an effect.
Heatmap
The scene seen as temperature. It knows the real shape of what it is looking at, so it is not a tint over a flat picture.
- The heat is a mix of four readings: Depth (near is hot), Core (the mass of the subject, the one that reads as a real thermal image), Edge (the facing angle, which can make the rim glow or go cold) and Light (bright parts run warm).
- Spread is how far the heat diffuses, through the subject and into the air around it. Cold, Warm and Falloff set where the colour ramp starts, ends and how it curves.
- Bands splits the heat into contours, Lines draws them, and Dots adds a print stipple.
- Scan sends a plane through the depth of the scene. Freeze it with Still and place it by hand, or let Follow mouse drive it.
- Eight palettes: Thermal, Ironbow, Inferno, Arctic, Pastel, Ember, Spectrum and Custom. Backdrop decides what the empty air becomes.
X-ray
A real see through of the model. Parts inside the shell show through it, and overlapping parts stack up brighter, the way a radiograph reads.
- Density is how solid it reads. Depth makes near parts outweigh far ones.
- Spread blurs the plate, and feeds Glow, a halo around bright edges, and Edge, an outline around every part inside.
- Thickness cuts a slice out of the model, and Slice moves it through, like a CT scanner. Freeze it with Still, drive it with Follow mouse, or let it travel.
- Contrast and Grain finish the plate. Four films: Radiograph, Blueprint, Amber and Custom. Negative flips it to dark on a light box.
Make your own with AI
Press the sparkles in the Shaders panel header and describe a look. Facet either sets up existing effects for you, up to three at a time, or writes a brand new effect when nothing in the list fits. A new effect gets its own tile and dials, and lives in the stack like any other. You can also ask it to turn effects on or off. See Generate in the editor.
Good to know
- Effects appear in renders, on published pages and in embeds, and settings can differ per breakpoint.
- The first time an effect is turned on, the editor may pause for a moment to prepare it. The canvas says so while it does.
- For finishing touches like glow, grain and colour, use Post FX, which sits above the whole stack.