The freely available shield shaders for Unity don't accomplish a Star Trek like localized shield flare effect. Here is one that does. It's also somewhat faster than some of the others I've come across.
For a shield effect, you would pass the local hit coordinates to the shader's _Postion using Material.SetVector(), and pass a 'strength' of hit to the shader's _RadialFactor using Material.SetFloat(). Animating the _Offset and the _Color parameters allow the shield to phase and fade.
Shader accessible properties:
_Offset: float: Animate this to cause the shield to 'phase'
_Color: Color: Tint color of the shield. Animate the _Color.a value to fade the shield
_Position: Vector4; Local position of the hit effect. Pass a world space position transformed to object space position (eg. with Transform.InverseTransformPoint) to create a shield flare at the appropriate position
_RadialFactor: float; The scaling of the hit effect. Lower values give a more concentrated flare.
_MainTex: Texture2D: Texture to use for the shield's phasing effect.
The shader works on all cards that I've tested on. I've attached an example.
Shader "FX/Directional Shield" {
Properties {
_Offset ("Time", Range (0, 1)) = 0.0
_Color ("Tint (RGBA)", Color) = (1,1,1,1)
_Position ("Position",Vector) = (0,0,0,0)
_RadialFactor ("Radial Factor",Range (0,1)) = 1.0
_MainTex ("Texture (RGB)", 2D) = "white" {}
}
SubShader {
ZWrite Off
Tags { "Queue" = "Transparent" }
Blend One One
Cull Off
Pass {
CGPROGRAM
#pragma vertex vert
#pragma fragment frag
#pragma fragmentoption ARB_fog_exp2
#include "UnityCG.cginc"
struct v2f {
float4 pos : SV_POSITION;
float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
float2 uv2 : TEXCOORD1;
float3 normal : TEXCOORD2;
float color:COLOR0;
};
uniform float _Offset;
uniform float _RadialFactor;
uniform float4 _Position;
uniform float4 _Color;
uniform sampler2D _MainTex : register(s1);
v2f vert (appdata_base v) {
v2f o;
o.pos = mul (UNITY_MATRIX_MVP, v.vertex);
v.texcoord.x = v.texcoord.x;
v.texcoord.y = v.texcoord.y + _Offset;
o.uv = TRANSFORM_UV (1);
o.normal = v.normal;
o.color = _RadialFactor/distance (v.vertex,_Position.xyz),0.0,1.0;
if (o.color < 0.15)
o.color = 0.0;
return o;
}
half4 frag (v2f f) : COLOR
{
half4 tex = tex2D (_MainTex, f.uv)*f.color*_Color*_Color.a ;
return half4 (tex.r, tex.g, tex.b, tex.a);
}
ENDCG
}
}
Fallback "Transparent/VertexLit"
}
