Alright, so I was messing around with Unity the other day, trying to get this cool visual effect for a game I’m working on. I wanted something that looked like an old, faded photograph, you know, like a lost memento. I figured a custom shader would do the trick, so I started digging around.
First, I created a new shader in my project. Just right-click in the Project window, go to Create, and then Shader,Unlit Shader. I named mine “LostMemento” – seemed fitting.
I opened up the shader file, and It’s all just a bunch of code, looks pretty intimidating at first. But I knew I wanted to mess with the colors, make them look washed out and aged. There were many Cg/HLSL language that I am not familiar with.
Experimenting Like Crazy
I started playing with the color values.
- I tried to Reduce the saturation.
- added a bit of a sepia tone by tinting the colors towards yellow/brown.
- And to make it look extra old, I added some “noise” to the image, this can be achieved by use a value form tex2D function.
I would change something in the code, save it, and then go back to Unity to see how it looked. Back and forth, back and forth. It was a lot of trial and error, I won’t lie. Some of my attempts looked completely messed up!
Finally Getting There
After many times of tweaking and messing around, I finally started to get something that looked pretty good! The colors were muted, there was this slight yellowish tint, and the noise gave it a grainy, old-timey feel. It really did look like a faded photograph, and It was hard to get this result.
I applied the shader to a material, and then put that material on a plane in my scene. I played around with the scene a bit, and man, I was really happy with the result!It really gave the scene this nostalgic, melancholic vibe that I was going for.
So yeah, that’s how I made my “Lost Memento” shader. It was a bit of a learning experience, but totally worth it. Now I have this cool effect I can use in my game, and I learned a bunch about shaders along the way!
