In this post, I will describe a shader for Unity3D that recreates the look of a reflex sight. A reflex sight projects the image of it’s crosshair to some distance in front of the viewer. Red dot sights holographic sights are both types of reflex sights, they only differ in the crosshair used for aiming.
The distance of the crosshair may be finite, such as 100 meters, or it may be infinite. When you move your head side to side, the crosshair will appear to be in the distance. It does not look like a red dot painted on the glass. This video is an example of the effect in real life.
There are multiple ways to achieve this effect. One method is to use a separate object for the crosshair and use stencil masking so that it only draws it behind the lens. However I don’t like the idea of using two objects or using the stencil buffer for a minor effect.
My solution was to use a single object (the lens) and a shader effect to change the UVs of a crosshair texture. This is much simpler to implement. The resulting shader acts like a reflex sight focused to infinity.
The code is available at this Github repo.
