ketyl_plasma

The body of a ketyl radical: an electron cloud with a p orbital through it.

Self-shading — the radical emits and nothing lights it. All the structure comes out of the surface direction, so one shader draws a sphere as a cloud with two lobes and a set of drifting shells, and a cylinder as a glowing rod. The nucleus, the oxygen, the phenyl bonds and the spark are all this shader at different property values.

It reads the radical's live state off per-instance lane 0 — (charge, wetness, flare, fade) — so one material serves many parts that differ only in a number. A lane nothing has written is all zeros, which would draw a dead radical, so an all-zero lane falls back to (1, 0, 0, 1).

Wetness takes the colour out of it and the light with it: grey reads brighter than violet at the same energy, so losing only the saturation makes a drowning ketyl look like it is getting brighter.