dissolve

dissolve — Mesh Disintegration with Edge Glow

The dissolve shader samples 3D noise per fragment and clips pixels whose noise value is below a threshold uniform. Pixels just above the threshold are tinted with an emissive edge_color to fake the burning rim. Animate threshold from 0 to 1 over duration and the mesh appears to dissolve from "nothing missing" to "completely gone." Used for enemy death, item pickups, transitions, summon FX. NOT a particle system — this is a material override on the target mesh itself.

When to use

• "Enemy disintegrates when killed."
• "Item dissolves when picked up."
• "Banish the demon back to the void."
• "Thanos snap — character turns to dust."
• "Object burns away."
• "Stealth cloak fades the player out."
• The user wants an object to go away dramatically rather than queue_free() instantly.

When NOT to use

• The user wants fire on the object that doesn't consume it — use fire, not dissolve. Dissolve makes the mesh disappear; fire just sits on top.
• The user wants a particle-driven ash cloud as the object disappears — pair this with smoke (recolor to ash gray) spawned at the dissolving mesh's bounds.
• The user wants a fade-out via alpha (cheap, no shader) — set transparency = TRANSPARENCY_ALPHA and tween albedo_color.a to 0. Dissolve is better but more expensive.
• The user wants the world to dissolve in for a level transition — that's a screen-space post-process, not this per-mesh recipe.
• The character has skinned mesh + multiple materials — this works but you have to override every material slot. Confirm with user; consider a fade-out instead.

Recipe

1. Files to create

addons/vfx/_building-blocks/noise-3d-fbm.gdshaderinc   # copy from this skill FIRST
addons/vfx/dissolve/dissolve.gdshader
addons/vfx/dissolve/dissolve_controller.gd

No .tscn needed — this overrides materials on existing meshes.

dissolve.gdshader #includes the FBM noise file. A missing include is a hard compile error, so copy _building-blocks/noise-3d-fbm.gdshaderinc from this skill into res://addons/vfx/_building-blocks/ before writing the shader.