Shader Studio

A complete in-game graphics and post-processing studio for White Knuckle. Stack any combination of 191 effects, tweak everything live with sliders, load presets, or write your own shaders in real HLSL (like Godot's shader system) and watch them appear on the game instantly.

Press F8 in game to open the menu. Press F9 to flip all effects on/off for a quick before/after.

Features

191 built-in effects

Effects can be stacked in any order, duplicated, mixed and reordered. Every effect has a Mix slider. Many effects understand the 3D world (depth, surfaces, normals), so weather sits behind walls, snow lands on ledges and fog fills real space.

64 presets for testing

Cartoon, Comic Book, Oil Painting, Watercolor, Sketchbook, Cinematic, Ultra Graphics, Retro CRT, Game Boy, PS1, VHS Found Footage, Old Film, Noir, Sin City, Thermal Vision, Night Vision, The Matrix, Vaporwave, Dreamy, Underwater, Drunk, Nightmare, Neon Tron, Hologram, Stained Glass, Psychedelic, Miniature, PICO-8, Halftone Print, Scanner Pulse, Depth Debug, Rainy Night, Blizzard, Sandstorm, Toxic Zone, Haunted Mist, Horror Flashlight, Inferno, Firefly Grove, Abandoned, Clay Model, Blocky World, Liquid Chrome, Blind Echo, Synthwave, CCTV, Bodycam, Space Helmet, Gas Mask, Dying, Bad Trip, Paper Diorama, Ink Painting, Misprint Comic, Manga, Blood Moon, Golden Hour, Blacklight Party, Lockdown, Vector Arcade, Sunken Ruins, Dreamscape, Silhouette, Claymation. Save your own presets and share them as .json files.

Write your own shaders

The Code Editor tab is a live HLSL editor with line numbers and error messages. Every built-in effect is a normal .hlsl file you can open, read and copy.

// @name Red Alert
// @category Custom
uniform float strength : range(0, 1) = 0.5;   // becomes a slider
uniform float3 tint : color = float3(1, 0.2, 0.1);

float4 effect(float2 uv)
{
    float3 c = scene(uv).rgb;
    float pulse = 0.5 + 0.5 * sin(TIME * 4.0);
    return float4(lerp(c, c * tint, strength * pulse), 1);
}

• Uniforms become UI automatically: range(min,max) sliders, color pickers, enum("A","B") buttons, bool toggles, and texture2D images loaded from files.
• Multi-pass: #pass Blur 0.5 runs a pass at half resolution; read it back with samplePass(0, uv).
• Real 3D data: depth, world position, normals, previous frame, camera motion and sun direction let you write SSAO, reflections, fog, scanners and motion blur yourself.
• Hot reload: your shaders live in BepInEx/config/ShaderStudio/shaders/. Edit them in VS Code or any editor and they update in game when you save.
• Full API list: BepInEx/config/ShaderStudio/shaders/API_REFERENCE.hlsl.

Unity FX tab

Overrides the game's own Unity Post Processing Stack (Bloom, Ambient Occlusion, Color Grading, Depth of Field, Motion Blur, Chromatic Aberration, Vignette, Grain, Auto Exposure, Lens Distortion and the game's outline effect). Every parameter is editable.

Rendering tab

Shadow quality, resolution, distance and cascades, forcing soft or hard shadows on all lights, shadow darkness, light brightness, range and tint, ambient light, engine fog, reflection intensity, FOV, MSAA, HDR, per-pixel lights, anisotropic filtering and LOD bias.

Requirements and notes

• Custom shaders (the effect stack) need DirectX 11. White Knuckle normally runs on DX11. If the menu says otherwise, add -force-d3d11 to the game's Steam launch options. The Unity FX and Rendering tabs work on any graphics API.
• Shaders are compiled by Windows' own shader compiler (d3dcompiler_47.dll, included with Windows 10 and 11).
• Heavy effects (SSR, SSAO, Kuwahara, Depth of Field) cost GPU time. Most run their expensive work at half resolution.
• Settings: BepInEx/config/com.burak.shaderstudio.cfg (hotkeys, menu size, camera).
• Your last setup is restored automatically on the next launch.

Manual install

Copy the contents of the plugins folder to BepInEx/plugins/ShaderStudio/. Keep ShaderStudio.dll, ShaderStudioNative.dll, shaders/ and presets/ together.