For a particle that I made, I needed a material that used just some simple white and black lines that I could change the color of as well as having those lines become distorted in a wave-like fashion.
I then decided to give this type of material another go. This time, I wanted there to be two different colors and not as much movement.
To conclude, this distortion was fun to learn as well as fun to mess around with!
In the image above is the entire material editor. To have there be something that distorts my original mask I used a cloud mask that I made in Photoshop. I then made a copy of that same mask so that I could manipulate the distortion better. For one of them I used a panner to have the cloud mask pan up diagonally. With the other cloud mask copy, I have it pan diagonally as well but this time it is going the other direction as well as a much slower speed than the first one. In order to give the cloud mask some more distortion, I decided to make one of the cloud mask copies smaller by having it multiply by 0.5 before the panner. This will help me down the line because once I connect the two cloud mask copies to a separate cloud mask that I have set up to just move downward, to give the cloud mask copies a path of direction, I can hook them up to a multiply. This multiply will be used as a controller with the help of a one constant node. With this hooked up I can now control how much distortion we want to be present within our material. I then hook up the multiply to a mask consisting of just black and white stripes, multiply that with Particle Color so that it can be used in the particle editor, and plug it into opacity. I then have a three constant multiplied with a one constant and have that all plugged into emissive color.
Here are some screen shots of the material on a plane and a cylinder:
I then decided to give this type of material another go. This time, I wanted there to be two different colors and not as much movement.
This material is simular to the one above but I organised it better. In order to get the two different colors, I just used a linear interpolation with two three constants and I put a one constant in the alpha channel. This one constant will blend between the two colors and it works the same way as the controller I talked about earlier in this post. Then I multiplied it with the original mask in order to apply the color to the black channel of the mask. I did this same process again and added it to the mask in order to apply it to the white channel. I then added these two together.
Here are images of that material on a plane:
To conclude, this distortion was fun to learn as well as fun to mess around with!