Thank you two! Yeah, it's an intentional part of the shader. c:
Can you tell a bit more about how that went?
Sure!
I started by just throwing together a rough shape and then turned it into a particle system that generated a bunch of triangles to fill out this volume:
I kept the triangles and got rid of the original mesh. In game that would look like this (rendering both sides of each triangle):
Next step was to make a cutout to leave only a circle (UV-mapped the triangle in a way that made this very simple):
Like so (the origin of each triangle was also set to the middle of this circle so that the particles would spawn nicely):
The normals were all over the place at this point so the lighting looked off. Instead of using the real normals, I just used the direction from the middle of the crown towards the triangle, resulting in lighting basically as if it were just a smooth spherical shape:
The crown had also been set not to receive shadows as the lighting itself provided enough contrast for my tastes.
Finally I did another cutout step using a cloudy texture to get the leafy look:
And of course the texture itself (which is just a tiling blend of the colours you see painted with watercolour brushes in GIMP) is sort of spread out across the crown as if it were one contiguous object, rather than using the individual texture coordinates of each triangle~
As for the workflow, this time I actually "wrote" the shader in Blender first (using nodes) so that I knew basically what to do once it was time to write the actual shader code for the game. Have almost never done that, so that was fun (looks a bit different here because I did the fine-tuning in the game shader)!
Hope that was interesting!
