TV Static made in UE4 - Looking for critique

Hello there!

It has been a while since I have posted here, but I recently began to study shaders in Unreal Engine 4.

So far I have just been following Ben Cloward’s tutorials, and I have been creating projects based on them as I go. My goal is to eventually get into the industry as a tech artist, or as a 3D generalist who does coding for tools and shaders on the side.

In anycase, here is my tv. Static.

I was hoping for any critique, or ideas that others would have to improve the static. I originally wanted to put in randomized flashes of color, but it seems as though the material editor does not have a solid random function in it.

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What aspect would you like feedback on?
Should it look more “right”?
Do you want more elements to give it fidelity or make it believable ?
(You already have that occasional brighter streak)
Do you want a more versatile noise?
Something more optimized?
Or just fun ideas?

Because what you have is an adequate noise to go on a TV. I don’t think there’d be any problems with it as it is.

For believability or “character” you can add some fresnel-like and/or vignette-like effects. That’s not what they’re called but it’s what they kinda look like. So vague darkening close to the edges or at strong viewing angles.

You can also look at the noise quality itself. Right now you might see some tiny rings form, it doesn’t look super uniform and the panning might show when looking at it for a bit. I can’t tell from the video.
These are problems with panning a texture that define the UV input for another texture lookup.
Ringing is from the gradient between a black and a white pixels giving interpolated values.
The lack of uniformity is like the ringing but just a different symptom and the panning is… well… Because you’re panning and human eyes are super good at picking that up.

An alternative approach to noise, all together, can be found in the Book of Shaders, here https://thebookofshaders.com/11/

Making the UV coordinates for a texture sample so noisy (By, as you do, adding noise to it) also leads to “cache misses”, which isn’t a huge deal, but it is a bit less performant.

So yea, you can learn a different approach to noise and try that out if you want. That’s an option… :slight_smile:

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Thank you for the wonderful reply! I really appreciate it.

For the aspect of feedback, I suppose I was wondering if the stripe that goes up and down was authentic enough. Since I used a sine wave (I couldn’t find a way to properly randomize in the material editor) I was worried that it might be a bit too uniform.

The noise is supposed to be forming more random patterns, so it should be working in that way. For the other critique I really had no idea about any of that, so it was very useful! I was also not aware of the book of shaders, I’m going to read all of it!!!

My art side tells me to call the project finish and move on to another project to continue to learn. Thanks again MB.

I’m a liar. I was NOT finished apparently, and had to make an entire scene for my TV Static to exist in.

With a game ready TV and everything. NOW I will ACTUALLY be done with it.

The different stages of this project getting out of hand. Although I’m glad for it, because my 3D modeling skills needed to be stretched.