Here is a quick demonstration of a shader that i worked on recently and am pretty excited about: Holographic Armor. Many thanks to Brandon Hegland for the model.
By controlling parameters in the shader, artists are able to cause the “hologram” to appear and disappear. They are also able to control the direction of the blend with either a world space position or a direction. In either case, the hologram is “pulled” toward the position specified( in this example straight down). This distortion was achieved through the vertex shader. Additionally, I added a blend in the pixel shader that is similar to some of the crate effects from Toxologic (mathematically anyway) so that the hologram would disrupt into a grid pattern before going completely transparent. The blend is also modifiable, allowing for a thicker or thinner amount of the disruption texture to be shown, depending on the needs of the situation.
Overall, I feel this shader is rather promising. In the future, i would like to add a little more effect to the disruption, as it feels slightly static. Perhaps a bit of UV distortion to add more “energy” to it. The shader is quite efficient at the moment ( only 2 dependent texture reads! I love shader math! ) and so i have quite a bit of room to expand upon what i have here.