HLSL Material R&D

HLSL noise & flowing texture

This R&D focuses on custom HLSL in Unreal Engine to drive material effects: procedural noise and flowing textures that would be expensive or inflexible with node-based materials alone. Writing shader code directly gives control over UV animation, noise octaves, and blending so that surfaces can scroll, distort, or reveal patterns in real time—useful for energy shields, holograms, damage decals, and environmental VFX.

The clips above show different passes: noise-based distortion, flowing tex coordinates with time and parameters, and combinations with Unreal’s material system (e.g. masking, emissive, opacity). All are implemented in HLSL inside Unreal’s material editor (Custom Expression / Material Function) for iteration speed while keeping the heavy logic in code for performance and reuse across projects.

Techniques used include: animated UVs (pan, scroll), simple and fractal noise (value, simplex-style), flow maps for directional distortion, and parameter-driven blend between multiple noise layers. The goal is to have reusable, artist-tweakable building blocks (noise scale, speed, intensity) that plug into existing materials without rewriting entire graphs.