"Psychedelic" background?

[Andrei]

This may be a bit outside of the scope of this section of the forum, but I've reached a point in the project where I want to simulate a scene inside a mindscape.

I need something that messes with colors in the background, but keeps all the actual objects in the scene untouched. I was thinking of perhaps multitexturing a skybox with different transformation effects, but I can't think of any that would look interesting.

Has anyone ever done anything similar to this that would help?

[BlindSide]

Not that helpful but if you look closely at this video you can see the wavy effects in the distance, it's a post-processing effect and I increased the intensity to simulate heat waves. You could probably just stick some red and purple colours and do this kind of thing to a greater extent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or7TWMFrcHY (Sorry the video quality is bad, it's easier to notice the effect halfway through)

Basically just use Sin() to offset the tex coords based on a timer and the Y-axis.

[slavik262]

Something like this? It's from a shader test I ran.



I'd take a psychadelic-looking image like this (just an example)



and set is as the texture. Then use a pixel shader to displace the texture coordinates like BlilndSide suggested. I don't know about doing it as a post-processing effect though if you want to preserve the shape of things. I'd just implement it as a pixel shader for the background's material.