I’m pleased to share my Firefly shader, built for a job i’m doing now but to useful to not share. Hope you like.
MM Fireflies — a procedural firefly generator for Flame’s Matchbox, built entirely from scratch (no footage or particle caches). Composites straight over black for Screen/Add, so it drops into any comp instantly.
A full swarm of fireflies with organic drift and an authentic asymmetric flash (fast rise, slow fade, intermittent bursts — not a metronome blink)
Depth travel: fireflies swoop in close and huge, then recede into the distance and loop, with a controllable, animatable vanishing point (Target X/Y) so you can fake the trajectory implied by a camera move
An optional Hero firefly — a single, always-lit firefly with its own independent organic wander, occasionally sweeping close to camera or drifting off-frame, so there’s always a focal point in the shot
Fully procedural and resolution-independent — no source plates, no baked animation, everything driven by parameters and time
I’m pleased to share with you all some new useful shaders. I’ve made my own rain and snow shaders and added all the things that clients expect when i do these comps.
The smaller stuff like patches of rain in places that give it real depth. Similar for snow. Patches of snow, nice flurry, irregular shapes and a hot spot area for that xmas nightime street light.
Also adding Earthquake, It just does x and y shake or just x or just y and it flickers well. Recently used for a shot of people stuck in a broken down lift.
I’d really like, if worthy to get these on the portal but i don’t know what the etiquette is or how to do it. Can someone advise.
As recommended. I’ve made the following tweaks and all working well.
I haven’t experimented but i think these could produce some really nice light streaks as well.
M
External Sprite input (swarm) + Hero External Sprite input — feed your own image (with alpha) into either or both, e.g. a 1000×1000 sprite, in place of the procedural glow/core dot
Use External Input / Hero Use External Input toggles — off by default, switch between procedural glow and your fed-in image per group
Sprite Size / Hero Sprite Size — independent scale multiplier for each sprite, layered on top of the existing Glow Size/depth scaling
Count max raised from 32 to 300 (default still 8), with a tooltip noting the per-pixel render cost at high counts
A required-but-unused Front placeholder input on both, since Flame’s Matchbox needs a Front socket present whenever any other texture input exists on a generator node
I have made some significant changes to MM_Rain. Please give it a test drive if you have the time.
Background Plate input — rain now composites directly onto a connected plate (or stays on black, unchanged, if left unconnected)
FG/Mid/BG Occlusion Mattes — hide rain behind objects per layer
Independent Defocus per layer (plus Mist), upgraded to a proper 9-tap Gaussian circular blur for a smooth soft-focus look
Mist On toggle, independent of FG/Mid/BG
Independent FG/Mid/BG Density multipliers, with cell-shrinking above 1.0 so you can push genuinely heavier rain rather than just hitting a saturation ceiling.