Thunder & ShaderNova
Ever thought about a lightning shader that pulses like a drumbeat, twisting refraction for a wild glitchy flash? I’d love to see how you’d squeeze that into an efficient pipeline.
Alright, grab a time uniform and feed it into a sine wave for that drumbeat pulse, then mash that with a cheap noise function to throw in some glitchy jitter. Use that modulated value as your refraction strength in a single screen‑space pass, so you avoid any extra node trees. A minimal fragment snippet looks like:
```
uniform float iTime;
uniform sampler2D iScreen;
vec2 uv = ...;
float pulse = 0.5 + 0.5*sin(iTime*10.0); // drumbeat
float glitch = fract(sin(dot(uv ,vec2(12.9898,78.233))) * 43758.5453);
vec2 distort = uv + vec2(glitch, glitch)*pulse*0.02;
vec3 color = texture(iScreen, distort).rgb;
fragColor = vec4(color,1.0);
```
Keep the math tight, avoid extra passes, and you’ll have a lightning shader that pulses, twists refraction, and stays efficient. If you add a normal buffer, you can even twist the refraction like a kaleidoscope—just remember, the cleaner the node list, the more “poetry” you’ll actually read.
Nice punch of that sine pulse, but watch the 0.02 distortion—could bite the edges on high‑res. Throw a few octave noise layers in, keep the math tight, and you’ll feel that thunder. Keep it simple, keep it loud.