Interstellar wormhole using Shader Graph - Unity Tutorial

Game Dev Experiments episode 3 - part 1: recreating the interstellar wormhole from Subnautica.

In this Unity tutorial I create a simple cone model using Blender and then apply a Shader Graph shader to it in Unity to turn it into an interstellar wormhole, like the one seen in the game Subnautica. I use the vertex shader to give the wormhole a cool animated wobbly effect as if you're flying through it, and then add extra details using textures and the Shader Graph noise nodes to distort them.

This is the first of a two part series. The second video will take the basic wormhole effect created in part 1 and then turn it into a cutscene using the Unity Timeline tools.

This tutorial uses Blender 3.0, and Unity 2021.3 (LTS) with the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).

Please note that this is NOT a beginner tutorial. I assume a good working knowledge of Unity and how to set up the URP before starting. Familiarity with Shader Graph is also beneficial.

Part 2:    • Create a cutscene using Timeline - Un...  

Download the Unity package for both parts from https://stone-baked-games.itch.io/sub...

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00:00 Start
00:07 Introduction
01:28 Blender modelling
03:23 Unity model setup
04:07 Fresnel, bend, and twist
05:05 Shader Graph part 1
06:21 Noise scrolling
07:16 Shader Graph part 2
08:00 Animating the wormhole
08:51 Shader Graph part 3
09:13 Texture details
10:40 Shader Graph part 4
11:41 Putting it all together

Perlin noise texture generator: http://kitfox.com/projects/perlinNois...

The following music was used for this video:
Music: Chronos by Alexander Nakarada
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4854-chronos
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Artist website: https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com/