How To Make A Retro VHS Effect Shader In Unity

by Alex Merzlikin July 20, 2025July 20, 2025 6 Min Reading

For my latest prototype, I wanted to evoke a sense of analog nostalgia, gritty, unstable, and imperfect. Think lost tapes, old surveillance footage, or the glitchy intros of 80s sci-fi. A clean render wouldn’t cut it. I needed something with personality, something VHS.

To get there, I built a custom VHS effect shader that layers several imperfections: flickering scanlines, wobbly distortion, chromatic bleed, desaturation, and noise. Each is subtle on its own, but together they create a powerful mood cue. The effect isn’t just visual, it tells the player, this world is worn, haunted, and strange.

Here’s how it works, step by step.

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Sand Balls Mechanics Implementation: The Best Way To Deform A Mesh In Unity

by Alex Merzlikin July 22, 2022July 22, 2022 15 Min Reading

In this post you will learn how to deform a mesh in Unity using a real-world example. We will apply different techniques and measure performance of each approach using performance testing to find the fastest one. As a sample, we will look

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How To Write A Custom URP Shader With DOTS Instancing Support

by Alex Merzlikin April 13, 2022April 26, 2022 5 Min Reading

I wanted to enhance the look of my boids BatchRendererGroup (BRG) sample with more suitable meshes instead of cubes. For that I decided to use a custom shader with some simple procedural vertex animation. For me, who hasn’t worked with URP or HDRP in production, this turned out to be quite a journey. So I am sharing the solution so you don’t have to spend your time.

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Tutorial How To Make An Interactive Grass Shader In Unity

by Alex Merzlikin February 14, 2022February 22, 2023 9 Min Reading

This tutorial is the step-by-step guide on how to add interactivity to the grass shader. You will learn how to write a geometry shader to generate blades of grass and make it interact with objects moving through it.

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