Verdigris: 48 Material Ageing Shaders for Godot 4

48 material ageing shaders for Godot 4, each grown by one age slider

Verdigris ages your own 2D art while the game runs: rust blooming out of the rivets, copper going green, frost creeping in from the edges, snow settling on top, moss and ivy taking a wall, paint peeling, soot rising, a statue turning to stone. Every state is one number, age, from 0 (your sprite, untouched) to 1 (fully taken). Tween it over a campaign, tie it to days at sea, a curse meter or a burning building. The shaders read your sprite's own pixels, its silhouette edges, the faces that look up and its dark crevices, so the ageing lands where it would in life.

Four shaders, twelve states each

• Corrosion: rust bloom, scale rust, rust streaks, verdigris, bronze patina, tarnish, gilded, pitting, white rust, heat tint, acid etch, blackened.
• Frost: hoarfrost, rime, ice glaze, frozen solid, snow cap, needle frost, icicles, permafrost, frostbite, sleet, ice crystals, thaw.
• Growth: moss, lichen, ivy, mould, algae, barnacles, mushrooms, wildflowers, rot, roots, geodes, blight.
• Wear: peeling paint, scratches, cracks, chipped, sun bleach, soot, scorch, water stains, dust, salt crust, petrify, crumble.

What is in it

• 48 preset materials: drag one onto a Sprite2D, AnimatedSprite2D, TileMapLayer or TextureRect, then move age.
• Verdigris.apply(node, "rust_bloom", 0.0) puts a private copy on any node; Verdigris.set_age(node, 0.8) ages it.
• VerdigrisAger node: age_to(1.0, 30.0) tweens it, drive(days, 0, 90) maps a game value onto it, set_preset("petrify") swaps the state, signals aged and age_reached.
• Recolour with three colours per state; scale, reach and amount are sliders. Pixel art: pixel_size 1 snaps every pattern to your texels.
• Growth past the edge: snow piles above top edges, icicles hang below, ice crystals and moss tufts grow out of the silhouette.
• Five sample props (a shield, a bell, a stone stele, a door and a pixel art shield) and a demo with a live age bar and a five ages strip.
• Raw source: four shaders, one include and plain GDScript. Nothing minified, no binaries.

Both renderers, tested

Every state photographed under Forward+ and Compatibility (the renderer web exports use): 48 + 48 frames, zero engine errors, all 48 measured as distinct pictures against the bare prop. 50 aged sprites on screen at 1280x720 averaged 4.0 ms per frame at most across both renderers on integrated graphics, vsync off; a full screen TileMapLayer wearing moss averaged 4.9 ms. Godot 4.7.2; the addon was installed into a blank project from the shipped zip and every route exercised under both renderers, including age 0 leaving the sprite pixel for pixel untouched. Older Godot 4 versions were not run, so they are not claimed.

Free lite on this page

Verdigris Lite is free (MIT): 12 real states (three per shader), the same API and demo. Its shaders carry only those twelve.

Install

Copy addons/verdigris into your project. No plugin to enable. Drag a material from addons/verdigris/materials/ onto your sprite.

Licence

Royalty free in your games, commercial use, no credit required. Edit and recolour freely. You may not resell or redistribute the files as an asset pack, addon or shader collection. Plain language LICENSE.txt included.

AI disclosure, stated truthfully: the shaders, scenes and scripts were written with AI, every state is computed by that code at runtime, and the five sample props were painted by a program the same AI wrote. The cover is a designed title card over the pack's own render.

More from the same studio

• Weatherglass: 48 2D Weather Shaders for Godot 4, rain, snow, fog and aurora layers you blend and stack.
• Wrack for Godot 4, burn, ruin, flood or overgrow your own TileMapLayer.
• Emberflux: 120 2D Combat VFX for Godot 4, runtime shader hits, slashes and bursts.
• Sigil Core for Godot 4, procedural magic circles that cast, hold and break.