The prototype for Lux is working nicely, it’s time to start working on the look and feel.

Crucial for the Dark Stars is that they should not only absorb light, but also look menacing. This means that making them pure black – which would be logical – may not have the visual effect that I want.

I have been playing around in Amplify Shader in Unity, a cool asset that makes you create shaders and materials in a similar way as Unreal Engines Material Editor.

Below you can see a video of some preliminary candidates for the role of Dark Star. As with all the planets and stars (or atoms, electrons etc.) they should feel as if they are living entities. By animating some shader parameters this certainly comes close.