Hexels Effects

Dither

Dither is a new layer blend mode shader similar to Dissolve. The shader turns each Hexel’s opacity into a discrete pattern of dots and offers 10 different patterns, from solid color at 100% opacity to sparse dots at 10% and below.

Dither patterns are often used in 8-bit pixel art, where the color palette is limited. A pixel of a single color drawn in various patterns can create a whole range of values.

Pro Tip: The Dither shader renders the pattern dots as single pixels. Images exported at higher resolutions will result in a finer dithering pattern, and lower resolution images will result in a coarser pattern.

Snow

The snow shader is a winter-themed layer post effect that makes your scenes a lot cooler. When animating, use whole numbers for the Speed, Wind and Wind Variation sliders for proper looping.

Chromatic Abberation

Chromatic aberration is a color-based blur layer post effect that mimics the varying focal distances of different wavelengths of light, typically seen in photography.

Thermal Distortion

Thermal distortion is a layer post effect that replicates the dancing waves of heat distortion that appear above a roaring fire or on the horizon in the desert. This works best as an adjustment layer.

Normal Map Lighting

Normal Map Lighting is a layer post effect that treats the RGB colors in a layer as normal vectors and lights them like a 3D shape! Best used with isometric art, you define the direction each surface faces by painting red, green, and blue walls, set the light direction in the layer properties, and the shader does the rest.

Paint right-facing walls red (255,0,0), left-facing ones blue (0,0,255), floor planes as green (0,255,0), and any ramp a combination of those colors, e.g. a right-up ramp should be yellow (255,255,0). Set the blending mode of your normal map layer to “Multiply” to have the lighting “shade” layers below it.

Sharing is Caring

All effects listed here are distributed under the MIT License, feel free to copy, tinker, and profit from them greatly.

Effects are nothing more than short text files of GLSL shader code. They are open source, tweakable, and easy to share. If you’d like to learn more about creating your own effects, check out our tutorial:

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