Texture / atmosphere · 9.3
Material-shaded gradient
The polish that makes colour feel expensive. Soft, fabric-like depth with inner glow. Colour that shifts as you move. Prismatic shimmer from the trading cards you collected.
A gradient field shaded as though it were a material, rather than a flat colour interpolation.
4 knobs
How it actually works
The difference between a gradient and a material is that a material knows where the light is. That is the whole entry. Four names, one shader, and the "expensive" read is exactly the target: cheap is when the specular is a white blob, expensive is when it is a ramp that follows a surface you cannot see.
A specular or fresnel term over the base field. Metallic is a sharp specular ramp. Velvet is an inverse-fresnel inner glow, the classic sheen read. Iridescent and holographic are view-angle-dependent hue shifts, thin-film style. The base field is the same one 3.4 generates: this entry is the lighting, not the colour.
The knobs, named
Specular sharpness, fresnel power, hue-shift range, sheen amount. Four presets sit on top of them.
| Knob | Source | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|
| Material | ours | Four names, one shader. Their names are the right names, so they are presets, exactly as they do it. |
| Specular sharpness | ours | The exponent on the highlight. Low is a wide sheen; high is a hard glint. |
| Fresnel power | ours | How strongly the edges catch light. This is most of what makes velvet velvet. |
| Hue-shift range | ours | For iridescent and holographic: how far the colour travels with view angle. At 0 they are just a shiny gradient. |
sourced means the source names this parameter. ours means the source names none and the knob is our design against the mechanism. No knob here is invented and passed off as sourced.
Evidence
VERIFIED (rendered) for existence; mechanism and knobs INFERRED
grep on gradientlab.co/features found /features/{metallic,velvet,iridescent,holographic}-gradient among the 19. The four names and analogies are theirs, verbatim. The mechanism and every knob are INFERRED/ours. Not upgraded.
- Seen on
- gradientlab.co (four sibling feature pages).
- Dependencies
- any shader context
- Difficulty
- moderate: trivial to switch on, hard to make look expensive
- Performance
- One quad; cheap. Static by default.
- Accessibility and the floor
- No motion at the default settings, so nothing to reduce.
Notes
Composability. Generator plus material: 3.4 decides the colour, this decides the light. Add ripple (3.1) and you have gradientlab's entire product in three uniforms.