Paper Burn Shader

I’ve been building a burning shader that combines dissolve, glowing edges, and dark scorch marks. My goal was to make an effect that users could adjust through material parameters without reconnecting nodes.

The effect starts with a noise texture. Its grayscale values create an irregular pattern that determines how different parts of the surface disappear.

Changing the dissolve amount moves the boundary through that pattern. The resulting mask connects to the Opacity Mask in a masked material, turning parts of the surface visible or invisible.

I used a single texture channel for this calculation. A mask needs one value at each point; using RGB can produce different results across channels if the texture isn’t truly grayscale.