Recreating Hiss Effect From Remedy's Control In Blender
Learn from Volodymyr Kravchenko.
In Remedy Entertainment's Control games, the Hiss is the main antagonistic force: an extradimensional entity that infects people and manifests through distinctive corruption VFX. It's pretty fascinating, much like many of the visual techniques Remedy uses in its modern games, and has also caught the attention of various artists over the years, who have studied and recreated it using different tools and game engines.
Recently, a video by Volodymyr Kravchenko showcasing this Hiss-inspired effect has gone viral online, with some users comparing its unsettling visuals to the experience of having a migraine. Volodymyr is a designer and visual artist based in Amsterdam, whose work focuses on experimental visuals, motion design, 3D, and real-time visual effects. We reached out to the artist for a quick walkthrough of his process for this volumetric fluid distortion effect:
"A major inspiration for this project was Remedy Entertainment and the visual language of their games, especially Control. I really admire their approach to visual design. The Hiss effect inspired me to explore similar distortion in Blender, using both fully CG scenes and live-action footage. I shot a few clips, built a simple test scene, and started experimenting.
I hope this breakdown gives you a starting point for your own experiments. There's a lot to explore in the space between photography, simulation, and moving images."
- The fluid simulation. The simulation can be created with Blender's smoke solver, a custom Python solver, or software such as Houdini. What matters for this setup is an OpenVDB sequence containing both density, which controls where the effect appears, and velocity, which provides the fluid’s movement.
- Freezing the first frame. For the CG scene, I rendered a clean frame without the effect. For live-action footage, I extracted the first frame of the clip. This frozen image becomes the source that stretches and flows throughout the effect.
- Carrying image coordinates through the fluid. This was the hardest part. A mesh has UVs, so you can push them around. A volume doesn't: voxels have no UV coordinates, and a velocity vector alone isn’t enough to tell a texture how to deform over time. I vibe-coded a Python script that stores a camera-projected UV coordinate in every voxel, then moves it along the velocity field. Every voxel remembers which pixel of the image it belongs to. The fluid drags that memory along, and the image follows. The result is saved as a VDB grid called uv_flow.
- Shading. For the CG scene, I read uv_flow through an Attribute node and connect it directly to the image texture’s coordinates. The VDB renders as a volume in Cycles, with density controlling where the distorted image appears. For footage, I project the transported coordinates into UV maps that warp the frozen image. The original video continues playing outside the effect.
- Look development. I added chromatic dispersion by sampling the image at slightly different coordinates for the red, green, and blue channels. These offsets follow the distortion, creating rainbow fringes along the stretched details. Finally, I adjusted the distortion strength and color to shape the final look.
If you've finished Control Resonant and are looking for another reality-bending adventure, Psych Rift is worth keeping an eye on. This solo-developed game tasks you with escaping a research lab consumed by a dark entity from another dimension using a telekinetic glove. The developer also regularly shares interesting behind-the-scenes videos:
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