Overview:

This is a CRT Shader in a Poiyomi module for use in your own assets, and to show you what's possible with it I've included a realistic retro CRT! Drop a CRT into the world to show off videos, animations, or play whatever's on the screen in (most) video player worlds. Users can even smack it on top to make it degauss, or use the knobs up front to control its settings.

By default the CRT scans through 91 SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) micrographs that I actually captured on the vintage SEM I installed in my living room. The micrographs are of various subjects magnified 100-8,000 times, like my cat's tooth, claw, and fur; a housefly; pollen from my yard; table salt; a ladybug; Velcro; obsidian; volcanic rock; a cigarette filter; and more. I created a preset that makes the images appear in a manner similar to how they actually show up on my machine's vintage green-phosphor CRT. Fun fact, all the samples you see are coated in a microscopic layer of pure gold, to allow the electrons to evenly discharge along their varied surfaces. I'm open to suggestions about what to image next, and sometimes stream it in VRChat.

Social Media

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Features

The CRT shader is packed with features that will be useful to asset or avatar creators. It has realistic retro effects from various eras of monochrome and color monitors/TVs, and has presets for my SEM, the Apple II, Atari 400, a generic color CRT, Commodore 64, Commodore PET, a blue/amber/ghosting terminal, an IBM 3278, IBM VGA, Monochrome Green, Neon Cyan, and Plasma CRTs. I started with a port of Swordfish90's amazing "Cool Retro Term" and added some features onto it:

• Phosphor persistence
• Degaussing simulation
• Overlay mode (useful for motion graphics like in a minimap, Protogen helmet, or a HUD)
• Animation mode (with BC4 support for ~3x smaller monochrome animations)
• Geometry mode (applies the effect to the underlying geometry and can use a separate UV map for determining scan direction)
• Projection Mode (squishes geometry onto a virtual plane and allows for clipping to a virtual screen space, useful to prevent your ears clipping through the top of a CRT model, for example)
• Screen gamma
• VRChat video player render textures
• Emission
• Integration into Poiyomi's global masking
• Edge Detection filter (useful for minimap or Pip-Boy assets, makes small objects stand out)

The upstream Cool Retro Term code provided the following features:

• Foreground/Background color & chroma
• Hue shift (static or time-based)
• Screen curvature
• Scanlines (pixel, pixelgrid, and scanlines)
• Static noise
• Jitter
• Glow line (similar to phosphor line but brightens only)
• Flickering
• Horizontal sync
• RGB shift
• Bloom glow
• Screen bezel

With these features you can make a wide variety of assets and effects. For example, a Pip-Boy-like minimap on your wrist, a little CRT that displays closed captions via an OSC app, a world-droppable video player, a realistic arcade cabinet, a 70s TV with rabbit ears you have to adjust to improve the signal-to-noise, a radar screen with a sweeping line, a Protogen with a retro mask, Max Headroom, your own avatar with a CRT for a head...this is just from a minute of brainstorming! Trust me, if I had time I'd make all of these!

Cool Retro Term is created by Swordfish90 (https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term) and is licensed under GPL 3.0, and thus my code and improvements are available for free under that same license! You can get it for free here and generate your own version with Poiyomi Pro: https://github.com/InconsolableCellist/CRT-Shader

Though by purchasing it here you support me and help me make more assets, which I greatly appreciate. Plus you get the SEM micrograph animation and the CRT.

Installation

Installation is easy and requires VRCFury. Simply drag in the prefab. Two detailed installation and customization videos are included.

The Shader is provided as a Poiyomi module/template and a precompiled Poiyomi Free + Foxipso's CRT.shader file. You can drop it onto your existing PC-only assets/avatars/anything and customize it using a huge variety of animate-able properties.

Stats

Shader: Poiyomi Free + Foxipso's CRT

Params: 3 ints, 2 bools

Materials: 1

Triangles: 1,408

Contacts Points: 5 (Source, YOffset, Preset, Aspect Ratio, smack to degauss)

Texture VRAM usage:

Base (5.3 MB) + Normals (5.3 MB) + MSAO (0.2MB) + Emission (0.04 MB) + Mask (0.04 MB): 11 MB

SEM Micrographs (91, BC4): 15 MB

License

By purchasing the CRT Poiyomi Module you may:

• Upload the monitor to VRChat or other social VR platforms
• Modify the monitor or pay others to modify your copy (provided the commissioner doesn't keep it or redistribute it)
• If you make a public version, I request you link back to me, though these are not requirements.

The shader code is licensed under the GPL 3.0, and thus you can generally do whatever you want with it, it's and freely available here: https://github.com/InconsolableCellist/CRT-Shader