How to Add Radial Distortion for Round Textures

Whether you’re creating a warped look for a portal or vortex, or a curved distorted camera lens, we’ll show you how to add radial distortion to a round texture for some exaggerated visuals.

What is Radial Distortion?

Radial Distortion is an image distortion that causes straight lines to appear curved, and points are moved in the radial direction from their correct position.The benefit of this distortion is that it does not cause diagonal smearing or blurring when the distortion amount is increased.

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1. Create your base material shader
2. Create your distortion texture
3. Go through the usual motion of distorting your texture by adding a distortion amount parameter, multiplying it on the texture to distort, and adding that to the base texture’s UVs.
4. Diagonal distortion is not ideal.
5. Subtract a value of 0.5 from the distortion texture.
6. Multiply the distortion amount parameter.
7. Add a value of 1.
8. Plug it into a multiply node.
9. Subtract a value of 0.5 from the base texture’s texture coord node.
10. Plug it into the multiply node
11. Add a value of 0.5 and plug it into the base texture UVs.

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Distortion in a radial pattern!

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