Shaders

I went through so many shader experimentations. What can be achieved with ShaderForge is huge, even as a node based software there is huge possibilities. Unfortunately in terms of documentation and examples where hard to come by specifically surreal and warping Shaders.

I had many experimentations with my shaders to get the effects I was after

An early success called 'ripple shader' The shader animates a texture by another textures (one_channel) node

Bits of this where stolen from around the place.

UV tiling and Movement experiment, what we really where aim for was to have sand moving from a center point towards edges like flowing water, this unfortunately really hard to achieve. I Created the above shader to understand UV sets and there tilling better.

UV rotating shader with circular mask

My Experiments then next moved me to experiment moving sand, often this didn't look correct especially on a moving platform that must be jumped on. So I had a noise texture which I would move over the top and a slider to adjust the blend.

It then led me to this beauty of a shader, Flow Map Shader.

This shader move UVs with a mask select which Uv and at what speed. I could then multiply that speed.

Awesome right. At slow speeds creates a really interesting marbling effect. Flow maps are used to create realistic flow through water in games, like Skyrim. I generated the Flow map using a Unity application someone had built to paint flow maps.

This effect had a downside

This hurts your head as the gif unfortunately has to reset and so does the shader. Without both resetting it could look like the gif resetting not the shader. The shader requires for the Uvs once reaching the flow map full point to then reset back to the beginning and play again.

I m sure this shader can be improved in the future and achieve a liquid sand effect, maybe slow reverting the opposite way, or maybe to there is a way not to reset.

Final Effect 

These where created using the technique of animating textures of time and vertex offset! it also utilised depth blend and opacity to blend it into the environment.

Rolls off left to the standard animation by time