This goal of this shader is to distort geometry around an origin point (e.g. player position) as though wrapped around a sphere. It's inspired by Daniel Santalla's Animal Crossing effect but expands on it by properly calculating the position on a circumference rather than just offsetting by an exponential value.

Let's start with just the z axis - offsetting around a 2D circle - then move to a sphere. The basic concept is to use the z distance from the origin as the arc length to calculate the angle around the circle each vertex should be placed. The coordinates for a point on a circle can be found with:


Where r is the circle's radius + vertex y coordinate. To find θ we can use:


Where d is simply the z distance from the origin. Let's put this all into Shader Graph: First we get the distance from the origin and split it into it's x, y and z components. Next we can get θ by dividing d (z distance) by the radius. We'll need to multiply this by -1 and add 90° to it (1.57~ radians) to get the angle from the vertical axis. Complete the equation, subtracting the radius from the y value as the centre of the circle is at origin.y - radius. The x value remains unchanged. Finally we can add this new position to the origin and transform it from world to object space. The process for caculating a point on the surface of a sphere uses the same principles.


Where θ is the longitude, the angle along the z/y plane (the same angle we've been working with so far) and ϕ is the colatitude, the angle along the x/y plane. We'll replace the middle section of our graph with new calculations for x, y and z. This shader does come with limitations: while an object has it's vertices transformed it's render bounds remains unchanged. This means the object can leave the camera's view frustum while it's mesh is still on screen, causing the object to dissapear if the camera is at a certain angle. Therefore this shader is best suited for games with fixed camera angles.