Cookbook

Practical recipes you can drop into your shaders. Each one is self-contained with a live preview — tweak values, see results, copy the code.

Color & Tone

Grayscale

Convert a color to grayscale using perceptual luminance weights (human eyes are most sensitive to green):

Sepia Tone

Warm vintage look by mapping luminance to a tinted ramp:

Contrast Adjustment

Push colors away from or toward mid-gray:

Procedural Patterns

Checkerboard

Classic two-tone grid. Works on any UV-mapped surface:

Stripes

Diagonal bands with configurable frequency:

Dots

Circular dots on a grid:

Grid Lines

Thin lines forming a grid — useful for debug overlays and ground planes:

For anti-aliased grid lines, use fwidth to adapt thickness to screen-space derivatives. See fwidth.

Lighting Effects

Rim Lighting

Bright edge glow when the surface faces away from the camera. Common for character highlights and sci-fi effects:

Hemisphere Lighting

Simple ambient that varies between a sky color (up) and ground color (down). Much better than flat ambient:

Matcap (Material Capture)

Sample lighting from view-space normals. Gives complex lighting from a single calculation — no lights needed:

Animation

Pulsing Glow

Sinusoidal intensity oscillation:

Vertex Wobble

Displace vertices with a sine wave for organic/liquid motion:

Screen Effects (Post-Processing)

Vignette

Darken the edges of the screen for a cinematic look:

Film Grain

Add subtle noise for a filmic quality:

Pixelate

Snap UV coordinates to a grid for a retro pixel art look:

Surface Effects

Dissolve

Clip pixels based on noise, revealing or hiding geometry over time:

Fresnel / Edge Glow

Surfaces become more reflective at glancing angles. Useful for glass, water, force fields:

Triplanar Mapping

Project a pattern from three axes to avoid UV stretching on irregular geometry:

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