I'm working on some new shaders for our Arcade location revamp, which is the home area and central hub for the Black Ice world map. My goal here was to create something like the old neon signs in Las Vegas.
Shout out specifically to Andy Kelly and his excellent Other Places youtube channel, and specifically this wonderful coverage of Yakuza 0. This video is a great chill watch and also very inspirational for me.
So I started out with my pixelated UV with a repeated texture mask to make it look like LEDs, worked out a way to do a percentage on without another texture.
Then my buddy Ed reminded me that I can shift to different patterns over time, hence the second gif. And another look at the Other Places video made me realize I could get more patterns out of the same shader by changing the UVs on the object. Fun!
That's all one shader! All the lights with the different patterns and colors and sizes, all one shader with a couple of different material variants and some simple UVing.