Glitch Material

What is a glitch material?

Glitch materials fluctuate between a solid, recognizable shape to random, discolored silhouettes. Glitch effects are often associated with modern holograms and computer graphics because the term “glitch” means to temporarily malfunction in sudden and irregular intervals.

As a stylized 3D particle artist who focuses on sci-fi, glitch materials are vital to my field. Throughout this blog post, I’ll bring up sci-fi topics to further explain how to create said texture and why they are important for technical-utopian worlds.

Research

Throughout this study, I did a lot of research into holograms used in today’s media as well as various glitch effects for my environment. I looked at everything from Horizon Zero Dawn to Iron Man and collected references to base my material off of.

Tutorials

After many tutorials on hologram materials in UE4/UE5, I finally came across a texture based glitch material that showed both hologram and glitch effects. The desired outcome which can be found here.

Unfortunately it is in Russian, which I don’t know, but I was able to follow along as their Unreal Engine was in English. It was great for figuring out the basis of how to achieve the effect I wanted, but the final result didn’t meet my requirements.

Why it didn’t work

The effect didn’t quite work because the color shift in the video did not match the actual work needed to achieve the effect. Due to the time frame, they skipped over most of the details in regards to color shift without mentioning the error throughout their video.

To quickly go over: the material didn’t warp the alpha the way I needed. Turns out I just needed to change how I implemented the glitch function.

Modifying the Implementation

Instead of faking the color shift, I actually warped the UVs of the channels independently of each other and recombined them. I also set the blend mode on the material to “Additive” in order to make them blend with the surrounding environment and actually feel like holograms. I created the mask texture by using the “Random Tile Generator” in Substance Designer, and made a panner so that the effect would flash at a specified interval.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m happy with how the material came out and the effect shown in the video. I’ve enjoyed working with material editors and shaders and plan to use this effect in future projects.