About

I’ve been playing a lot of PoE2 Early Access, and a detail in one of the UI elements caught my attention. I tried to recreate the same behaviour in Unreal Engine 5.

Shader

The shader uses two noise textures panning at different speeds, combined with a custom material function that makes a bulge UV distortion to create the illusion of a sphere. A custom material function blends three colors and controls their positions, allowing tint manipulation similar to a gradient map in Photoshop. The line/marker effect is achieved by subtracting the red channel of a texture coordinate node and running it through smoothsteps.