Castlevania IV style cylinder effect?

Question

I'm trying to make an effect similar to this for my title screen

I wanted to make it vertical, and with an animated texture of a crowd. I'm not really familiar with shaders, I'm not really sure where to start. I did use a shader to make a texture rect scroll, so I have that all set, I'm just wondering if a shader like this can bend the texture in a sense, and if it could be done with an animated sprite so the crowd could move. Thanks!

Esthete

Answer 1

For some reason the timestamp in the link didn't show up, the effect in question is at 4:00

Esthete

Answer 2

OMG that video is making me dizzy. If you want the exact effect, you would need to write a shader for it. I don't think it would be too hard, but you'd have to know how to write shaders. The easier thing would be to have a cylinder 3D mesh and use 2D to 3D to map a 2D tilemap onto the mesh texture (using a viewport render target). This wouldn't require any special shader, but would take some time to setup.

Hilltop

Answer 3

@cybereality said: OMG that video is making me dizzy. If you want the exact effect, you would need to write a shader for it. I don't think it would be too hard, but you'd have to know how to write shaders. The easier thing would be to have a cylinder 3D mesh and use 2D to 3D to map a 2D tilemap onto the mesh texture (using a viewport render target). This wouldn't require any special shader, but would take some time to setup.

Yeah, I couldn't find any way to actually manipulate parts of the side of a sprite, so it seems like using a mesh is the way to go, even if it's less authentic to the aesthetic I'm going for. Thanks!

Esthete

Answer 4

Also, you don't have to render from a tilemap either. You can just use a low resolution texture with filtering disabled and do UV animation. Should be the fastest thing performance wise.

Hilltop

Answer 5

@cybereality said: Also, you don't have to render from a tilemap either. You can just use a low resolution texture with filtering disabled and do UV animation. Should be the fastest thing performance wise.

Yeah, I actually ended up making an inversed cylinder with a rotating camera inside of it with a texture that changes on a timer. Then I just put it and a viewport into the scene in the background. Pretty simple, thanks!

Esthete