Signature shaders

What this group is for

Every other group borrows a memory — film, glass, a broadcast tube. These don’t. They are pure shader looks with no real-world ancestor, the moment a viewer stops asking what it reminds them of.

They are loud on purpose, so spend them like a punctuation mark. One signature shader on the right frame is a fingerprint; three at once is noise.

The effects

Written up in full: caustic-glass — sample frame, parameter table and a downloadable project.

• caustic-glass — ASCII seen through uneven glass: a domain-warped fbm refracts the frame while caustic highlights flicker only across the bright regions. It feels like reading text through the bottom of a pool — legible, but submerged.
• holographic-interference — Iridescent foil: an angle-dependent hue shift from a fake normal field plus travelling interference bands, biased toward highlights and edges. The frame becomes a tilting holographic card — covetable, slightly unreal.
• liquid-crystal-smear — Directional anisotropic drag — bright regions pull their neighbours along an axis, and a history blend draws a prior-frame sample upstream for a long panel-drift tail. It has the sick, beautiful lag of a failing LCD held at the wrong angle.
• thermal-refraction — A genuine heat phenomenon: hot regions emit a turbulent UV warp around themselves, with an optional mirage rim along the hot/cold boundary. The air above the bright parts of the frame seems to boil — desert-highway shimmer for ASCII.
• caustic-interference — A living holographic field: animated low-frequency refractive folds plus thin spectral interference bands and RGB dispersion. Slower and more organic than the foil — oil on water, lit from below.
• moire-lock — Two slightly mismatched lattices beat against each other into a real moire pattern. The texture of a recaptured display, an anti-counterfeit print, a scanner finding its lock — deeply uncanny when held.
• bokeh-occlusion — Soft lens bokeh — discs, hexagons, or a bladed aperture — floating in front of or behind the scene as optical occluders. Not bloom, not blur: actual out-of-focus shapes obscuring the frame, like junk on a lens you chose to keep.
• feedback-recursion — Recursive feedback from the prior composited frame, in Glow, Smear, Tunnel, or Ghost modes. The camera-pointed-at-its-own-monitor spiral — a controlled hallucinatory loop that never quite resolves.
• voronoi-fracture — The frame breaks into irregular cellular plates or shards with edge glow, in cracked-glass, bio-cell, ceramic, or armour modes. The image survives but is no longer whole — held together by the lines between its pieces.
• shattered-signal — Long diagonal shards that never separate — each renders the source with its own UV drift, horizontal tear, stretch and temporal desync, while the cracks bloom white with an RGB-split fringe. Not broken glass but a broken feed: the monitor survived the impact, the signal did not.
• contour-crawl — A dashed marching contour traces shapes and high-contrast regions. A selection box, an occult ring, a scanning boundary — the frame is being measured by something, and you can see it thinking.
• flow-advection — Content is transported by a 2D velocity field — curl, radial, noise, or attractor — like ASCII dragged through smoke, wind, or current. The image stops being a picture and becomes a fluid the picture is dissolving into.
• halftone-impact-field — The frame crushed to harsh black/white and rebuilt out of warped halftone dots, detonated by a radial impact (or sucked into a vortex), then scratched apart and re-scanned through analog print noise. A dirty screen-printed punk poster surviving a blast — monochrome, printed, never clean.

How to reach for it

Add these from the effects rail on the segment that needs to be the one people remember. All of them are maskable, so a signature look can be kept to a single object — the foil only on the title, the fracture only on the face — which is usually the most disciplined way to use them.