Guide: Whirlpool Shader from Hearthstone

Have a look at a guide by Enemy Hideout on how you can recreate the whirlpool from a Hearthstone gameplay video. Let’s learn something new.

“I saw the whirlpool in the Hearthstone gameplay video and I was hypnotized by it for some reason. I figured this is probably a shader…but how does it work? I was determined to see how.”

The artist’s shader doesn’t have the additional layers of transparency and fading that the original one does. The trick here is to convert your texture coordinate from Cartesian to Polar coordinates.

Here is the final result:

You can find the guide with all the math here.