Matthew Wilde
skilful.bsky.social
Matthew Wilde
@skilful.bsky.social
Visual Effects Developer at Valve
Liquid shader is back for the CS2 charms, this time with not-fake physics and not-fake refraction!*

*it's all fake, it's a videogame
October 2, 2025 at 1:41 AM
The Grandaddy show in Seattle last night, they had a slideshow of old photos taken from various places on tour mostly. The headline got a chuckle from the audience when it popped up. It was followed by a cool horse.
September 19, 2025 at 5:10 PM
September 19, 2025 at 4:49 PM
You should check out this new game @counter-strike.net prettyy good
June 23, 2025 at 6:21 PM
The caustics from the interactions come from sampling the buffer again, this time reprojected to fit the underwater geometry from the direction of the sunlight. It has its limits and the fade happens when you approach the edge of the buffer. It's also refracted in the same way as the frame buffer.
June 13, 2025 at 9:06 PM
The blue channel was originally just to add silt being kicked up but ended up used for more general long-lasting interations. It's used to carve out a path in the surface debris and the normal derived from this channel allows us to push the UVs apart a bit so it feels like you're moving it around.
June 13, 2025 at 9:06 PM
The green channel is used to define where foam should be and is combined with other textures to make it look more detailed than the buffer can handle by itself (although I wish this looked better to be honest).

You can also see here how the red channel perturbs the UVs to give it a parallax effect.
June 13, 2025 at 9:06 PM
The red channel's ripples become normals and are combined with ambient normals along with those from the surface debris and a little from the foam shape too (as we're calculating it anyway). These are then used for the lighting, reflection and refraction effects in the shader.
June 13, 2025 at 9:06 PM
My cat tree has fruited! Does anyone know if this plump beauty is ripe for the picking?
May 25, 2025 at 9:02 PM
How's it going on twitter sorry the everything app sorry twitter
April 15, 2025 at 7:15 PM
Genuine question @dominos-pizza.bsky.social : Is that stuffed crust or classic?
February 13, 2025 at 12:49 PM
Clearing out my parents house which isn't much fun, but it was heartwarming to see my mum kept hold of the t-shirt I made with Peter Beardsley's cock and balls hanging out
February 9, 2025 at 12:21 PM
Post you from a different era. I suppose I still do colouring in, in a way
November 22, 2024 at 2:41 AM
We had fun making some rain fx in the new CS2 de_train, maybe I should a breakdown?
November 13, 2024 at 11:39 PM
t'rain
November 13, 2024 at 11:01 PM
The atmosphere of our game
November 12, 2024 at 6:58 PM
More recently I worked on the CS2 water and effects. I hope to share some more CS2 (and other) shader work here (and not there) in the future.
November 10, 2024 at 2:16 AM
I do often tend to work on liquidy things - this was the water test we did at Campo Santo pre Valve move
November 10, 2024 at 1:47 AM
The Half Life Alyx booze / liquid / bottle shader which I worked on at the start of the Covid lockdown and got a ridiculous amount of attention
November 10, 2024 at 1:43 AM