Hey let's tweet about old tech art. Behold one of my favorite effects of all time: The Silver Scale from OoT

A scale floating in a wobbling blob of gelatin, on hardware with no vertex or fragment shaders, and no render-to-texture distortion tricks

It COULD do multitexturing however

The scale itself isn't terribly interesting; as far as I can tell it's just an old-school sphere map (reflected view vector as tex coords)

What IS cool is the jelly. That wobbling isn't animation. Engine-wise IIRC none of the zelda items are animated; they all just spin in place

It's a low-poly sphere rotating underneath two textures that are projected along the vertical axis, *in world space*

Cloudy blue texture, projected downwards with UVs animated so it slides sideways. Might actually be same as the caustics in the background?

And then a TINY texture, maybe 8x8, of white and blue specks, tiled and not animated

If you look at the bottom of the jelly you can barely make out the tiling

What makes this work is the textures are fixed in world space but the MESH rotates underneath them

The near-vertical sides of the sphere stretch out the texture into streaks, like you'd expect for a planar texture map on a sphere

But since the geometry is so low-poly, the shape isn't actually smooth, so the silhouette wobbles all over the place

Since the geometry is moving around underneath the texture, the distortions wobble all over the place is this wonderfully organic fashion

Again, you can sort of make out the underlying geometry by looking a the bottom section where the texture distortion is minimal

It's an INCREDIBLY clever piece of work. No animation besides spinning like every item, two textures, no special tricks, just brilliant UVs

And it straight up looks like an animated blob of refractive gelatin

Growing up with early 3D games was super inspirational bc you could actually see how stuff like this worked, even w limited domain knowledge

(addendum: on closer inspection the speckle texture is also sliding rightwards, just very slowly compared to the cloudy blue texture)