archived-shaders

[tight phoenix]

time to start from scratch and spend 1000 hours trying to figure that out

[karmic hatch]

Transform sun direction to object space, then use rotational symmetry to your advantage (you only need an angle between the Sun and your point on the sphere)

So just acos(dot(object space sun direction, object space position))

For the angle

Though I've heard acos is slow in shaders and to avoid it where possible

But the cosine of the angle is very useful anyway

[tight phoenix]

Thanks again Pink, Ill try that out when I get back on the horse 👍

[meager pelican]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3dhlsl/dx-graphics-hlsl-refract

[tight phoenix]

Is that what I am doing here? I am familiar with refract custom nodes and refraction but it did not occur to me that this is what im doing here

[meager pelican]

Reflection is like what a mirror does, refraction is what happens when light goes through a substance and changes its direction a bit due to the different densities (refraction index). Think how a stick looks bent if you put it in the water.

So you used a semi-transparent sphere as an example. Crystal ball, whatever. So there's refraction going on, and some reflection too.

You may also wish to use a cube map, and check out the cube map routines for dealing with surrounding reflections/refractions.

[thorn tapir]

Hey so Im trying to make a shader now to just slap on a material to modify the contrast of a tilemap... but what do I use the tilemap as the input in the shader???

if I just connect a contrast node to the master color it blackboxes all my tiles

cause I have to modify the contrast inside of the shader, but within the shader, how do I specify the tilemap as the target???

[thorn tapir]

had to use the tilemaps base texture as the input

[thorn tapir]

https://i.imgur.com/7DzG1ew.png

[thorn tapir]

hmm so I'm trying to add saturation to this, but I'm not sure how to incorporate it all back together

https://i.imgur.com/K1xombq.png

add and multiply both result in some unwanted effects

[karmic hatch]

can you not just put the contrast and saturation nodes successively, so either contrast > saturation or the other way around?

[merry oak]

Is it possible to do multiple passes with shader graph in urp?

[thorn tapir]

yea, this was actually the solution the came to too

saturation first then contrast, instead of doing them in series

https://i.imgur.com/RixNYi7.png

I could even implement hue, but I'll save that for another time

Saturation and constrast is all I care about in this case

[glad egret]

For some reason, i cannot set global/local keywords/properties in shaders on any before event, such as RenderPipelineManager.beginCameraRendering, Camera.onPreRender, MonoBehaviour.OnPreRender

I am trying to make a material set a keyword flag for when a particular camera is rendering it, so it has a different look without need to duplicate geometry.

See this example code: https://gist.github.com/Lachee/6141391a039d3f0ab565d14786021f1a

[glad egret]

do i need to listen to a special event or something before i can change the material properties? How will i go about making a material have different properties for one camera vs every other camera

[meager pelican]

Set the value for the material in script.
The RenderPipelineManger.beginCameraRendering event is for c# scripts. So use a script.

Set the property on the material to true if it is your special camera, and false otherwise. Done.
You'll probably want to use renderer.sharedMaterial if you have that same material on several objects, rather than having to make material instance for each object, but that's up to you.

And IDK why your shader global isn't working.

[regal stag]

Just tested (with edited script, but basically the same), in URP 2021 lts. Seems to work.

private Camera enableForCamera;

void Start() {
    enableForCamera = GetComponent<Camera>();
    RenderPipelineManager.beginCameraRendering += OnBeginCameraRenderering;
}

void OnDestroy() {
    RenderPipelineManager.beginCameraRendering -= OnBeginCameraRenderering;
}

private void OnBeginCameraRenderering(ScriptableRenderContext context, Camera camera) {
    if (camera == enableForCamera){
        Shader.SetGlobalFloat("_TestFloat", 1);
        Shader.EnableKeyword("_TESTKEYWORD");
    }else{
        Shader.SetGlobalFloat("_TestFloat", 0);
        Shader.DisableKeyword("_TESTKEYWORD");
    }
}

If yours isn't working, add a Debug.Log, make sure the code is running somewhere. Also make sure the keywords/properties are global.

• In Shader Graph that's in the Node Settings tab of Graph Inspector, "Global" on the keyword scope and untick "Exposed" for properties
• In code, make sure you are using multi_compile (not multi_compile_local) and don't put properties in the ShaderLab section at the top, only define them in the HLSL

[regal stag]

No, shader graph doesn't do multi-pass. URP also uses single-pass forward rendering so you can't really use multi-pass in code-written shaders either. You can technically use two passes with different LightMode tags ("UniversalForward" and "SRPDefaultUnlit"), but it would break the compatibility with the SRP Batcher. It's better to use separate materials instead.

Can assign multiple materials per renderer, or if you have lots of objects can put them on a Layer and use the RenderObjects feature to re-render that layer with an Override Material.
(Or you can use a custom LightMode tag, and specify that in the RenderObjects feature)

[patent plinth]

@regal stag do you know if unity terrain editor already has support for shaderGraph or not? I remember they've this planned like two years ago on their git repo

[glad egret]

i got it working on a basic scene with just modifying global shader properties. its so bizzar its not working in my other scenes; im redoing the scene and seeing what might be causing it.

i do have like... 4 cameras, 3 10k render textures, and a couple additively loaded scenes so something going funky

[regal stag]

You can add texture properties with references : _Control, _Splat0, _Splat1, _Splat2 and _Splat3 (as well as the _MaskX, _NormalX, _MetallicX, _SmoothnessX) for up to 4 blended textures.
Can't do more though, as that requires the Dependency "AddPassShader" iirc, which Shader Graph doesn't support.

[patent plinth]

ah ok.. we'll try to play around with it then.. thanks! 👍

[lucid current]

does changing color of a material in code creates a new instance of such material?

I ask so bcs I want to animate color through DOTween

[grizzled bolt]

By accessing shader.material yes

[lucid current]

renderer.material.color

ok it is all the same

or not

[grizzled bolt]

Yes

[lucid current]

damnnnnnnn

sad

[grizzled bolt]

MaterialPropetyBlocks are one way to do the same thing without creating material instances, though it's not compatible with SRP batching

[lucid current]

I could make a shader graph that would change color though. I think it best what I can do

[grizzled bolt]

On URP/HDRP I don't think it's bad to create material instances as long as you keep track of them and destroy them along with the object

[lucid current]

hehe no I won't keep track of them

I am a simple man

you see I wanted to make my material sort of blink so that is why I asked

changing alpha channel of a color on it would create instances each frame

it is dangerous

so I would make shader instead

[grizzled bolt]

It doesn't create an instance every frame, just once for the object so it can be changed separately from the rest

[lucid current]

oh yeah?

[grizzled bolt]

It becomes a problem if you have a huge number of objects, each with their own instance, or if you're spawning and destroying such objects rapidly and filling memory with loose material instances

[hexed surge]

hello guys
I'm trying to track down the issue with a grass geometry shader
It generates root points for grass blades in the tessellation stage by subdividing the source mesh
then for each vertex it generates simple grass blades in the geometry stage

everything's fine, except the areas right on top of the edges of the source mesh
I can see that tessellation produces new vertices there just fine, but it looks like they are not passed down to the geometry stage (I'm not sure this is the case), and it causes visible empty areas to appear

maybe someone had experience working on a similar shader and recognizes the issue ?

source mesh

blades with a visible empty area

tessellation that generates the points

[ripe grove]

i am getting this error while building to android

could not find anything on google
i made 2 shaders and there are literally just 5 objects that have those shaders on, and it took me around 40 mins to build my project.
i turned off mesh optimization, i preloaded the shaders but nothing worked, and after waiting for the build to complete for this long, i got these errors

[kind juniper]

Are you using a scriptable render pipeline?

Or built-in?

[ripe grove]

Built in pipeline

[ripe grove]

I'm sorry i forgot to add this

[kind juniper]

Yeah, so shader graph is not very compatible with birp.

might want to switch to urp

Or not use shader graph

[ripe grove]

I came from urp

But it says it's compatible since the 2021.2 versions

[kind juniper]

Donno, it only mentions SRPs in the docs.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@15.0/manual/index.html

Shader Graph support for the Built-In Render Pipeline is for compatibility purposes only. Shader Graph doesn't receive updates for Built-In Render Pipeline support, aside from bug fixes for existing features. It's recommended to use Shader Graph with the Scriptable Render Pipelines.

So yeah, you shouldn't use it for birp in production

[ripe grove]

https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/2021.2.0

Here, it says shader graph added for built in render pipeline

[kind juniper]

Where?

[ripe grove]

Shadergraph: Added: Added a new target for the Built-In Render Pipeline which includes Lit and Unlit sub-targets.

This is what it says

You can search "Built-In" on the page

And you will find it, it's a little deep

[kind juniper]

Well, it doesn't mean that you should be using it. Or that it is as compatible as in URP/HDRP.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@15.0/manual/Getting-Started.html

They explicitly say that you should avoid using it on BIRP. And that's in the latest version.

[ripe grove]

Which is the latest version of shader graph?

[kind juniper]

you can see in the link that I shared - 15

[regal stag]

The built-in target should still work even if a SRP is recommended. If you're encountering errors when building it's probably a bug. Could try upgrading unity version or submitting a bug report.

[ripe grove]

This is what I was thinking, also it works clearly flawlessly in the editor tho.

[kind juniper]

But yeah, I guess it would be considered a bug.

There are probably platforms that have issues with it.

[ripe grove]

I have posted on forum to see if anyone replies, i will try different unity version now to see if it works there or not

[ripe grove]

This could also be the problem, i Haven't tested any other platform, will also try this.

[ripe grove]

Btw these are the errors I'm getting, for a reference

[grand jolt]

hi i am not that familliar with shaders. i have this Height Depended tint shader with following function that is responsible for the color:

void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutput o) 
{
  half4 c = tex2D (_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex);
  float h = (_HeightMax-IN.worldPos.y) / (_HeightMax-_HeightMin);
  fixed4 tintColor = lerp(_ColorMax.rgba, _ColorMin.rgba, h);
  o.Albedo = c.rgb * tintColor.rgb;
  o.Alpha = c.a * tintColor.a;
}

is it possible to make _ColorMin more dominant like in picture

so the color begins to change a bit higher than normal

ohh nvm

[shadow locust]

you could use any easing function you want

right now you're using a linear interpolation

[thin bear]

How do I send a per-object value to a shader?

I'm trying to make a "palette swap shader" so my sprites may use the same artwork, but each can specify a different palette index for the shader to look up on a reference texture.

I have done this in Kha (that's like OpenGL) embedding the index in all 4 verts of the quad, maybe I can do the same thing in Unity

[tardy oar]

i am trying to create a shader to cull pixels, following this tutorial: https://danielilett.com/2021-03-19-tut5-15-wall-cutout/
i have followed it but my output is a pink rather than the output shown on the tutorial?

i am also using a Lit URP shadergraph

this is the .shader file that was compiled from the shadergraph:

[regal stag]

A magenta/pink result means the shader has an error (unlikely with shader graph), or is not compatible with the current render pipeline.
Make sure the target matches your pipeline. (set under Graph Settings tab of Graph Inspector window, toggled with button in top right of graph).
Also make sure URP is configured correctly. See pinned messages in #archived-urp channel

[tardy oar]

thank you i had not set up URP properly!

[tight phoenix]

I know there is a parallax offset node, but can anyone tell why my graph and the real code are not equivalent? I'm not getting the expected results

Where have I made a mistake?

is it a pedmas/pemdas problem?

[regal stag]

The View Direction node should be in Tangent space for parallax

[tight phoenix]

Ahh I'll try that 🤔

[tight phoenix]

Hmm that just made it way worse

I could just use the parallax node but I'm doing this as a learning project to get a better understanding of shader math

[regal stag]

You should also be using the result as an offset, not to replace the UV entirely. Can use a Tiling And Offset node for that

Or UV node and Add

[tight phoenix]

is maybe my p- I was about to say that

[tight phoenix]

maybe the math is fine but I am using it wrong - Ill try that

[ripe grove]

What a coincidence @regal stag

I read all of this https://www.cyanilux.com/tutorials/intro-to-shader-graph/

Then i suddenly remembered I saw that profile pic somewhere

[tight phoenix]

That + Tangent space fixed it, thanks for pointing out my mistake 👍 Glad to know I didnt goof up the graph too badly, it was just how I was using it

[ripe grove]

I read all of it and it was really helpful. So for my previous problem, i changed the platform from Android to windows and it did not give me error

I upgraded to 2022.1.11

And when I changed the platform to mobile, it gave me same error while building it.

[ripe grove]

One thing i could not understand here is, you stated that one should apply a render pipeline asset if the shader graph is installed manually (which we only in built in pipeline) but how does one apply any pipeline asset in built in render pipeline.

[regal stag]

That's referring to installing urp/hdrp manually via the package manager, not shader graph. (as just installing the packages isn't enough, they need to be properly configured, like assigning the pipeline asset under the Project Settings)
Sorry that maybe isn't clear.

[ripe grove]

Wait, so does that not mean it's still urp and not built in render pipeline? I mean if we have to install urp then it's not really built in pipeline anymore? And unity stated it works for built in pipeline as well. This is a little confusing.
Cause by changing the platform i was not getting the error anymore (without installing the urp)

[regal stag]

You don't need to install URP to use Shader Graph. It does have Built-in support in 2021.2+.
The article is intended for all pipelines, so I mention URP/HDRP as shader graph is automatically installed alongside them. While for Built-in, you'd need to install the Shader Graph package.

[ripe grove]

Aah so that's for shader graph? I mean in your article, your saying install shader graph manually from package manager? I got a tiny bit confused when it said I need to apply a render pipeline, which we can only do in urp or hdrp, right?

[regal stag]

Yes that is only for URP/HDRP

[ripe grove]

Aah i get it now, thanks

Mate, just one last thing, if you got like couple of mins?

Only if you don't mind, it would take you like max 2-3 minutes to reproduce this error that i am having. And then maybe you can better understand this? I mean i am coming to built in pipeline from urp because I had to drop urp for lower performance on mobile. Now birp works flawlessly and have great performance but i cant really see any other option if the shader graph doesn't work in built in pipeline. So if you don't mind. It won't take longer than 5 minutes.

If you want to try it

Steps:
Just create a new project with built in render pipeline
Install shader graph from package manager
Create a new shader graph(lit)
Just hook up color property to base color
Create a new material out of the newly created shader graph
assign a color to material it in inspector (maybe red, or anything other than white)
Build the project for Android
That's it.

[regal stag]

I haven't got unity properly set up on this pc to test. But if those are the steps you need to take to reproduce it, it's definitely a bug. Should do a bug report, so hopefully it can be fixed.
In the meantime, you may want to avoid using shader graph for Android, or switch to URP (if possible)

[ripe grove]

its exactly that easy, like this is what you get when you do the steps above

do you by any chance have any idea what it could be tho? i am sorry if i am asking alot, but you know its a little disappointing to see it not work.
also where do i make a bug report tho? never made any so i have no idea

[regal stag]

It's trying to find a macro/keyword or something that doesn't exist. But I have no idea what is causing that, I guess the graph is just generating the code wrong or missing an include line.
Should be able to make a report via one of the buttons on the File, Edit bar. Maybe under "Help" iirc?

[ripe grove]

ahh okay thanks mate! thanks for all the help. i am going to make a bug report now. hopefully it could be fixed

[sullen jungle]

Hey epic devs
I want to know something about draw calls not sure I can ask here but do tell where I can if I shouldn't here
When does every draw call happen?
Every frame? every x seconds within 1 frame?

[dim yoke]

Every frame. Every object on screen is drawn once every single frame

[sullen jungle]

Damn so if you don't batch things up and have over 60 objects and your device runs on 60fps
Then like that you'll have frame drops right?

[dim yoke]

What?

[sullen jungle]

What would happen if you have 100 objects to be draw on screen and your pc cannot run over 60fps
What would happen? Would you have frame drops?

[dim yoke]

All 100 objects are drawn 60 times every second right?

So 60fps

[sullen jungle]

No so I have 60 frames to work with and I need to draw 100 and since every 1 frame can draw 1 object
So it will be able to draw to 60 objects and still have 40 that weren't drawn yet

[worn gorge]

Anyone know if we can setup instanced properties in shader graph now (without editing the final shader manually), such that we can use DrawMeshInstanced with them by passing in the MaterialPropertyBlock.

[regal stag]

In the past I've managed to get instanced properties via a custom function

[regal stag]

As AleksiH mentioned above, every frame all objects (at least the ones in the viewing frustum) are drawn, not just one object per frame.
But it's hard to say how long it takes to render a frame, as it'll vary - depending on how many draw calls (objects / batches), what shaders are being used and the target platform/gpu. You'd likely need to try and profile it. Then optimise later if necessary.

The statistics window might help a bit. https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/RenderingStatistics.html
(Though in URP I don't think it displays the SRP-batches, not sure how helpful it is)

[tight phoenix]

Question, I was learning from a tutorial and I noticed the result looks suspiciously like a fresnel

is that just what fresnel is under the hood?

[regal stag]

Yep

[waxen slate]

Hey, I'm writing a custom shader for TextMeshPro (Specialized anti-aliasing for a pixelated raster font) and I want to use Unity's UI effects components. Does anyone know what I'd have to do to support those in the shader?

[grand jolt]

Pretty interesting seeing these effects under the hood

[regal stag]

Can see the generated code for each node btw on the Shader Graph docs page. Right-click nodes and select "Open Documentation". Though recreating things in the graph may help understand it better if you aren't used to hlsl.

[grand jolt]

I'm having lighting issues with the unity toon shader (https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.toonshader@0.7/manual/index.html)

It works perfectly fine in the editor, but in game the lights flicker a lot.
Image 1: Standard shader in game
Image 2: Toon shader in editor
Image 3: Toon shader in game

Does anybody know of a fix?

[neat hamlet]

looks like URP 's point light limit

[grand jolt]

I'm on the standard render pipeline

[neat hamlet]

might still be a pixel light count issue ?

oh right, doesnt happen with standard shader

[grand jolt]

yea, it's pretty confusing lol

[kind juniper]

It is most likely. It's not rp specific, but rendering path thing.

forward rendering has a limit of point/pixel lights. Deferred doesn't, but it's a bit heavier by default.

[tall flicker]

how to fade an UI component from middle to edge
like the alpha is 1.0 in center, but 0 on outside

there are no exact tutorial about that, all i know is it can only done by making a custom shader

to be simple, alpha gradient

[grand jolt]

Hey ive been looking at a few videos on game toon shaders and have a little question

Are shaders normally used on the entire games models like the player model and world around the player

Or are they used on only a few models like player models to help performance

[tight phoenix]

is there a way to get 'Normal From Height' less aliased and pixelated?

im using voronoi there, I've seen that normal from texture is better, but I'm not using a texture in this case

[twilit geyser]

Why is shader graph fucking up the colors here?

[tight phoenix]

What is that shader trick where you combine two things and it ends up being a bunch of colored bands

I forget how its done or how to describe it so I cant google it reliably

Im trying to make random rainbow noise

this is what I meant by bands, maybe finding it now

[regal stag]

Should be able to use the noise texture sample as the X coordinate for sampling the rainbow tex. Maybe remap the noise a bit first. Then connect to UV port.

For bands, can use Posterize node.

[tight phoenix]

Oh yes that's exactly what I was trying to do 👍

It didnt do what I hoped for but looks good at least

https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/29634150/9a83a8394e63402d82dd15da40f55b73/eyJwIjoxfQ%3D%3D/1.gif?token-time=1660953600&token-hash=4aXaR_M331gaIdCEMLHMpAXOvxEU1eC7AjRH8DRE0I8%3D

I've been struggling to make "sparkles" similar to this, ive tried a bunch of different sparkle/glittery tutorials but none have looked the way I hoped for
either they left out too much 'assumed' info that I couldn't finish the tutorial without, or the effect simply wasn't what I was going for

a lot of tutorials are like 'just add parallax' and it doesn't do anything remotely like what they have there to attach it to a parallax node

https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/25312658/800c7cedce884657875bc1fb222cf505/eyJ3Ijo2MjB9/1.gif?token-time=1660953600&token-hash=6YOHZ8_-r_QDYzmKiXimDp3LjF_9dCFjS9iRIORMe84%3D

this is allegedly the method to do that above affect

I feel like about 50 more critical things are being left out

mine kinda looks like dogshit :/

doesnt do a single thing I set out to make it do, just shittier copies of other far better effects

[dim yoke]

Its not actually. Try to split r, g and b to see how it outputs hue, value and saturarion values correctly. Now you are converting the color into hsv and visualize hue, saturation and value as r, g and b component

[twilit geyser]

Oh x) I'm tired. I had another conversion from HSV back to RGB, but it was set to RGB to RGB so it looked wrong at the end. Thanks!

[wide thicket]

Why does my subgraph create an entirely different effect than what it outputs in my shader?

subgraph:

shader:

even when i remove the inputs, so that it only relies on it's own values, it does it's own thing

[karmic hatch]

Refraction and everything looks pretty good imo, just multiply the color for each sparkle by pow(dot(view direction, sparkle normal)*0.5+0.5, 50) or similar and then they'll sparkle depending on the angle (you can make it dependent on the direction to the light source but it probably won't matter too much since you won't be identifying the individual ones anyway)

[tight phoenix]

I tried to do that but I just fucked everything up and it never looked right

Ill throw all of this out and try again from scratch with that formula

[karmic hatch]

Did they just not change much?

Try increasing the power a lot

[tight phoenix]

either you could see nothing, or see all of them, nothing would do 'some of them'

rebuilding atm

[tight phoenix]

pow(dot(view direction, sparkle normal)*0.5+0.5, 50)
is the order of this
dot of:
view direction and sparkle normal
THEN multiply and add after? or before?

[karmic hatch]

Multiply then add

It's roughly the same as saturate -> pow

Shouldn't be functionally different

[tight phoenix]

What is that 50 at the end?

[karmic hatch]

The power

[tight phoenix]

is the dot product between all that stuff and 50?

oh right the first thing is pow not dot

[karmic hatch]

Dot is between view direction and normalize(sparkle normal)

[tight phoenix]

I didnt see the pow at the start

[karmic hatch]

Just make the power >> 1

If it's close to one, you just have diffusely lit things, not like specular highlights which you want

[tight phoenix]

What space should the dot product be in? Every space I try (object, world, view, tangent) results in no sparkles or all sparkles

or they do really weird stuff like only sparkles on the -x -y faces of the surface

all four of them, its not changing at all when I rotate the mesh

[karmic hatch]

I think view space won't work, but anything else will (you just want the view direction to be able to change). Object space or tangent space would probably be best since they'd make it change as the mesh rotates

[tight phoenix]

Im doing something wrong here but i'm too inexperienced to understand what or fix it

[karmic hatch]

Also you need to make sure the normals for the sparkles are distributed on all sides of the origin, you don't want all of the components to be positive or something (but in tangent space I think the B component should be positive always?)

[tight phoenix]

increasing/decreasing power only makes it look worse, broken texture pink

[tight phoenix]

How would I make sure of that? How would I know if that is the problem

[karmic hatch]

Make sure everything is normalized

[karmic hatch]

If they're initially all 0-1, you can do x -> 2x-1 and then it goes -1 to 1. Or just use the values to lerp between -1 and 1

[tight phoenix]

I'm doing something completely wrong because it just wont sparkle no matter what values I put in

it fades in and out completely as a single unit, and the faces are all @#$%^ up some showing, some not, some in reverse

I've been fighting with this all day long and I just feel fucking stupid and worthless, I can't do a single thing on my own

literally 100% of my "successes" are my successfully getting help from someone else to fix my stupid piece of shit mess :/

im getting really discouraged

I wish I wasn't such a stupid failure

[meager pelican]

(Sorry for butting in guys)
Nope
The random color texture is sampled.
In the example image, they ONLY subtracted .5 from the color RGB result. They didn't mulitply by .5 (although I'm not following the conversation well, so I hope you'll both excuse me if I F*** this up).
That result is a directional vector where the RGB components range from -0.5 to +0.5
They then applied the dot product of the view direction and that random vector, with a Pow or whatever.

[tight phoenix]

I dont really understand anything of what you just said

are you saying I should multiply before at some stage?

[meager pelican]

There was no multiply.

Just a subtract

[tight phoenix]

all my efforts are just complete dogshit it wont do a single fucking thing and im beyond emotionally compromised im not able to contine working on this without going into crisis

[meager pelican]

In that example.

[tight phoenix]

im going to close discord now

[meager pelican]

OK, chin up!

[karmic hatch]

The multiply should be irrelevant since you normalise

[meager pelican]

Sure, but IDK that they normalized either. Interestingly. Although I'd guess that you would normalize both vectors.

And then there's the question of how to apply the random color texture to the cube in 3D space. I'm not sure I can tell from that one image how they did that. Maybe they had a texture3D?

bunp is right in that the explanation falls a bit...short...IMO.

[karmic hatch]

I think through UVs? Triplanar mapping would certainly work well

[wide thicket]

why would my subgraph eb giving me a different outcome from my shader?

[karmic hatch]

@tight phoenix here i just took voronoi noise (i used 3d voronoi but you could try some triplanar thing or some other method to optimise it as 3d voronoi is slow), used the cell values to create 'flakes' with random normals, then used fairly standard specular (pow(dot(reflection(normalize(view direction), normalize(random normal)), sun direction), 200)) to make them sparkly

there are some strange correlations which is probably because of the way the random normals are distributed (not uniformly enough) but whatever

Btw I put the output color into emission

Might want to also multiply by saturate(dot(surface normal, sun direction)) so they don't sparkle in the dark bits unless you want that

[wet ermine]

Does anybody know a good technique to achieve an inline effect on 2D sprites? I tried using the Step node on ShaderGraph and it worked, but the inline is very thin and I couldn't make it any thicker...

[runic zodiac]

I'm using the shader graph and my material is always purple even tho I am changing tue colour

[kind juniper]

Probably using an incompatible render pipeline with an incompatible shader graph version.

[runic zodiac]

Idk I'm new to shaders
here's the shader if you wanna take a look

[kind juniper]

Yeah, you're probably using built-in render pipeline. And the shader graph is only compatible with it from unity version 2021.2 or something.

[runic zodiac]

I'm using the universal render pipeline and the default lit shader

[kind juniper]

Do you have the urp set up properly?

[runic zodiac]

idk

[kind juniper]

Then you should probably look it up.

[runic zodiac]

ok thx

[sly breach]

quick question , does this mean unity compiles 1000 million shaders or is it 1000 megabyes ?

[kind juniper]

Anyone have a clue how to implement sprite sorting with a custom mesh + shader graph?

[kind juniper]

I think it's megabytes. There are many shader variants, but millions is on a totally different level.

[kind juniper]

Oh, apparently there's a sorting order property even for regular MeshRenderer.

[twilit geyser]

Hey y'all 🙂 Can anybody tell me why this shader is not able to stencil? Is there anything I can do about that inside shader graph?

[neat hamlet]

afaik shader graph doesnt support stencil buffer stuff

[hidden oak]

so, I made a shader to simulate the refraction of light from water above for a game that is supposed to play out underwater. But when I apply it to an object in unity it only works on one side of an object, anyone know why?

I'm very very new to unity shaders so I have no idea how this works

[white marsh]

Is it like that in world space or object space?

[hidden oak]

what do you mean?

[white marsh]

If you rotate the cube is it sticking to the same side or us it always facing the same direction?

[hidden oak]

facing the same direction

[white marsh]

Sounds like you have accidentally mapped the texture in world space in one axis

[hidden oak]

oh! did not know that. do you know how I can fix that?

this is the last part of my shader

[white marsh]

Is this using a texture?

[hidden oak]

yeah

[white marsh]

Then the problem is probably where you sample the texture

[hidden oak]

i tried changing it to object space as well but it didn't seem to change

should it instead be sample texture 3d?

[white marsh]

What is the uv input?

Im kot exactly sure but i think texture 3d is. For itger types of textures not for 3d geometry

[hidden oak]

just checked ,it's not a 3d texture. that's apparently something else

[white marsh]

There we go, wold position as UV. If you want it ti scroll you should be using the x or y value of the UV not world position

I don't use the shader graph much so i don't know the name of the node you need but it should just be the mesh uv

[hidden oak]

and changing the type of position? would that help?

[white marsh]

Yeah, the UV input of the sample tex is essentially used to map the texture around it. If you aren't using the values that defines where and what should be where, ie, the UV coordinates it will map differently. In this case in world space

[hidden oak]

is it just a UV node?

[white marsh]

If you try to output the world position as the color vs the uv as the color you will se what i mean

Yeah should be

[hidden oak]

So, I tried a UV node. It worked somewhat, but I did realize that now not all the planes have the same size

as you can see here

[white marsh]

Wait hold on are you making caustics?

Or i guess simulating caustics

[regal stag]

Could continue using the world position, but Swizzle it with "xz" so it projects from above. It will still stretch on sides of objects though

[white marsh]

^ yes, i didn't realize thats what he wanted

But i assume you also want this texture to not effect the sides and bottom if this is an overlay for another texture

[wet ermine]

Does anybody know a good technique to achieve an inline effect on 2D sprites? I tried using the Step node on ShaderGraph and it worked, but the inline is very thin and I couldn't make it any thicker...

[elfin mesa]

hey all, does anyone know if there's a way to get all these options from the URP Lit material into a shader graph? if it has to all be done manually, has Unity put out any resources on how to do this?

[tight phoenix]

im still trying and failing to do glitter, im critically missing something, im not understanding something to make it work and I keep grinding my gears against it and failing to get any traction

I have a texture for testing random colors as vector directions to mask which parts of the glitter will be visible or not

but I cant figure out what im actually supposed to DO with it

what space it should be in, should it be added, multiplied, dot producted, literally anything I have no idea

everything I try looks completely wrong like complete shit

I really need help on this I cant do it on my own

and my mental health is in the pits, admitting that openly that im so worthless I cant do something this simple on my own is tipping me over the edge into criss, time for me to close the internet

[tight phoenix]

Trying this now

[karmic hatch]

Optimally you'd distribute them across a sphere surface evenly rather than across a cube but that is slower

Maybe you could create a random matrix and rotate but that's more effort too

[tight phoenix]

I have some voronoi dots but im struggling to reproduce the next bit:

(pow(dot(reflection(normalize(view direction), normalize(random normal)), sun direction), 200))

What is the reflection normal? and what is being dot producted? How do I get a random normal? What space is the view normal in?

oh the reflection is between the view normal and random normal
and the dot is between the that and the sun direction?

[tight phoenix]

im pretty sure im doing the reflection step wrong

and clearly doing the power step wrong

the raw voronoi isnt the answer

i wish i just understood, i wish i just knew the answer, i wish i had the ability to solve anything or even begin to know what step is wrong

[tight phoenix]

is this "flakes with random normals" ???

WHAT AM I DOING WRONG, WHY WONT IT EVER @#$#$^#$^ WORK

i get so fucking furiously angry at how fucking worthless and useless I am and i get so fucking angry at how knowledgeably everyone else is, things for you are so easy that you can literally just immediately type out the answer bracket flow like its nothing, and im too fucking stupid to read between the lines

i am in crisis now leaving again

why. wont. it. just. fucking. work
Why am i so fucking stupid
why cant i do literally anything without my hand being held

why can i be handed the answers on a golden plate but im too fucking stupid to know how to pick up a fucking fork and eat the answers

[karmic hatch]

Use the cells as your flakes, then use the cell values as seeds for new random numbers (can be as simple as multiply by big vector3 and fract)

[karmic hatch]

I've just spent lots of time messing around with this stuff, it just takes time to develop an intuition with how to get to the effect you want

[tight phoenix]

i desperately wish I could not feel emotions, my feelings hold me back from achieving success

if I could just act rationally, think clearly, not get down by repeated failures

[tight phoenix]

Ill try this when I relaunch unity

which wont be today

thank you for your kind words and patience

[karmic hatch]

fair, it is really frustrating when something that as far as you can tell should work, doesn't

[meager pelican]

I'll drop this here for fun.
This is NOT sparkles.
But it is a nice clear video tutorial, with shader graph, on how to make translucent crystal like things, with screen space refraction. Sparkles could be added to it. And this time I won't butt into the ongoing discussion about those.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIW2zM6ed8o

[boreal gust]

Hello everyone, I have a procedurally generated map and some textures are applied to the mesh according to the height of the regions. I also got a curved world surface shader I found from the internet (for a planet-like look). I am a complete beginner in shaders but I managed to merge the 2 shader together but it seems like the vertex modification is done first and then the textures are applied, so the far sides of the map is just water. Is there a way to fix this?

[regal stag]

You'd need to pass the vertex position before displacement (or just the Y/height I guess) through to the fragment shader. Is this in shader graph?

[boreal gust]

No it's a surface shader. I see that's the thing I need to do but because I'm a beginner in shaders and because there isn't much about this on the internet I don't know how to do it.

[regal stag]

Ah okay. My knowledge on surface shaders is a bit lacking, but I imagine you'd need to add your own variable to the Input struct (e.g. float3 customWorldPos;) rather than using the built-in one.

Then in the vertex modification function (probably named "vert"), should be able to specify out Input o as an additional parameter, and use o.customWorldPos = mul(unity_ObjectToWorld, v.vertex).xyz;, before the v.vertex is modified that is.

Also edit the surf function to use IN.customWorldPos instead of IN.worldPos.

[meager pelican]

make a variable in your v2f structure, and assign the value you want to stash BEFORE you modify it (or at the right place, maybe after Object2World but before WorldToClipPos, or whatever makes sense. IDK your code.)

Sorry Cyan for butting in, I was just typing this as you replied.

[leaden zinc]

Hey guys, im looking through pins and comments tho im gonna ask.
What are some good and hopefully up to date resources for shading programming with Unity?
Im interested in learning shading coding as well as using tools like shader graph.

[wet ermine]

Hello, everyone!
Does anybody know a good technique to achieve an inline effect on 2D sprites? I tried using the Step node on ShaderGraph and it worked, but the inline is very thin and I couldn't make it any thicker...

[meager pelican]

Well, the thing is this stuff has "history". It has history in the languages (API's really) used, as well as history within Unity, like the different rendering pipelines.

You'll find a lot of resources/tuts for Unity's older Built-in Render Pipeline (BiRP), these are almost all pure hand-written code but Shader Graph now works for a subset of functions for it. It's not intended to fully support BiRP though, IIUC. That's not at all to say that it isn't worth learning, particularly if you want to hand-write code.

But the newer pipelines are a bit different, both in syntax and functionality. So the question you have to ask yourself first is "Where do I want to start?" Open GL (GLSL) or DirectX (HLSL)? I'd go with HLSL, but you'll find tons of resources for GLSL (Grrrr). Unity will translate the HLSL to GLSL as required for the target platform.

Those pinned resources you mentioned have many links that can get you started, but you should form a plan. And there's not really any right or wrong answer, as long as you know what you're getting into has "history" to it. IMHO.

So it will be easier to learn BiRP coding-by-hand, but there are resources that can help you with the new pipelines (URP, HDRP) too.

[leaden zinc]

I have experience coding pure GLSL, but it was a long time ago. I would rather get into HLSL and Shader Graph all together, since i wanna know what the graphs do internally in order to use them better and most likely modify the generated code.

[meager pelican]

Maybe start with Cyan's stuff in the pinned links...

[meager pelican]

What value did you step on?

[leaden zinc]

okay thank you!

[wet ermine]

The alpha channel

Then subtracted the output with the alpha again, to get the inline effect

[meager pelican]

Well, you could "cheat".
The sprite system supports a secondary texture that you could use to "read" the inline or not-inline from.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SpriteEditor-SecondaryTextures.html
That's just one idea. That lets you do it at sprite edit time, rather than have an overly-nasty set of shader code.

I think. 😉
@wet ermine

[wet ermine]

Oh, thank you! But unfortunately my texture isn't imported... It's a RenderTexture from a camera with an alpha value

I already considered an inflate technique, but I have no idea of how to inflate plane 3D meshes, since it's normals are always pointing up

[wet ermine]

(in my case the camera is rendering a plane geometry, so I considered doing the inline on the mesh itself using inverse hull or something similar since I couldn't do it in the texture on the UI)

[heavy stirrup]

Anyone know why motion vector texture isn't being binded by Unity? I changed the depth mode on the camera

it's being rendered before post processing in a URP render pass

[heavy stirrup]

nvm

i dont think motion vectors are supported in URP 10.9

[fading fable]

Hi guys, I downloaded this TintedUIBlur shader: https://gist.github.com/jhocking/9de4197daf84698a60e51c67695d2be3
And it was working great with pre-URP, but now I switched to URP and I'm a bit noobie to update it.
In scene view it works just as before, but in game view it's no longer transparent but all grey.
Could you help me please? 🙂
Console has lots of errors like this:
Shader properties can't be added to this global property sheet. Trying to add _HBlur (type 4 count 1)
Thanks in advance!

[cinder path]

it is struggling to use the grab pass of "_HBlur" that it uses to redraw over it

there are lots of errors because it tries every time the shader is called

i'd look into the horizontal blur pass to see if it isn't that one that has compatibility issues

do you have that problem with the _VBlur as well?

[fading fable]

No, only _HBlur, _HBlur_ST, _HBlur_TexelSize

[cinder path]

right all properties

mh i'm not familiar with URP shaders but it seems an entirely different beast

are you a bit fluent in shaderlab writing? or you just brought the code in your project?

[fading fable]

Not really familiar :\ Not especially bought, downloaded it from the github link above.

[cinder path]

right

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102487/0100/Migrating-built-in-shaders-to-the-Universal-Render-Pipeline

this is the reason it isn't working

if you are using a custom shader i'm unsure it will automatically update it with the tool, it's possible that it needs manual rewriting but as I never did it I cannot tell you for sure

but the article above gives you a good overview of what's different

[fading fable]

The automatic update only works with built-in shaders. That's why I'm asking for manual help with this custom one sadly :\

[cinder path]

yeesh i was afraid it wouldn't

here is another article for the custom shaders

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102487/0100/Migrating-custom-shaders-to-the-Universal-Render-Pipeline?lang=en

it gives you a table of the differences

you'll need to update all the shaders in your pipeline to get it working

i hope it helps!

[fading fable]

Thanks!

[native otter]

I've created a shader in shadergraph for simulate some wind effect through leaves using time and on the vertex position.
Now all the prefab trees using this shader are acting the same, I would like to have some randomness and difference between the same prefab tree.
It's probably easy using a trick with a transform on world node probably? In which direction should I think?

I use this setup.

[cinder path]

yw!

[cinder path]

you can have a field in your material (a shader property) and assign its value at start for each instance through script

like a sort of random seed

[regal stag]

Since atm you use Cosine Time, it's not possible to offset the phase of that. You'd need to switch to using the Time output -> Add/Subtract some random value (see below) -> Sine/Cosine node.

For the random value : I imagine your trees won't move around, so could use the Position output from the Object node - this gives you the worldspace origin of each tree. I'd then Swizzle with "xz" and use it as the Seed to a Random Range node.
(If the objects did need to move, then would need an offset or seed property, as exitshadow suggested)

[regal stag]

URP doesn't support GrabPass afaik, so it's going to bit a little difficult to convert this. You'd need to use a renderer feature instead (e.g. using blits).
This might work better (uses a compute shader) : https://gist.github.com/Refsa/e006f1a8d3a974ae88cb7ecd93bf306b

[native otter]

Thanks, will try that.

[boreal gust]

Thank you so much for the help. I got a bunch of errors at first but a bit of googling helped and it works!

[grand jolt]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5h2ClMUguQ
Followed this tutoriel and ended up with this

However I want to add a outline to this

Something like this but filled ( not just a weird line )

Something nice would be another circle under this one

However idk how to do that

[regal stag]

The first part of the tutorial goes over how to set up a circle, you just need to replicate that part again with a different width. You'd use that new circle for your Alpha.

[grand jolt]

Sure thing , i tried to do something like that.
I copy pasted the part with the circle and made it thicker

However idk how to add them togheter

Here I have a thicker circle

[regal stag]

Connect it to the Alpha port on the master node/stack

[grand jolt]

nvm

being dumb comes with its problems

[grand jolt]

thx for the help

on the same note

how could I add an outline to the red part like this

I could add another red stuff but smaller, but idk how to add them

[regal stag]

You'd use a Lerp, with the "smaller" part as the T input, set A to a white color and B to the current red result.
Though I imagine it may be cheaper to just use a texture. Maybe UI images with Radial Fill type.

[grand jolt]

yeah but idk how to make it fill roundish

and be ,,animated"

I just use a noise to change the black parts in red and it looks super nice

[grand jolt]

and how could I add the gray thing under the red?

[tulip carbon]

Hi, I'm pretty new in everything related to shaders, but could anyone tell me how can I modify a shader to show like a white part in the highest part of the mesh please?

[cinder path]

like a snow effect?

[tulip carbon]

hmmm more like the top part of a wave

[cinder path]

grossly, you have to set a condition using the vertex position, and everything above a certain threshold will be tinted white

[tulip carbon]

and how do I do that exactly please?😅

Like, I have no idea about shaders

[cinder path]

i'd follow a tutorial about shader graph then

or find a snow shader, it is likely it will achieve the same effect

[tulip carbon]

like, I have this big wave, and I want it to get like a gradient from the top part to about the middle with a white tint

[tulip carbon]

okay I'll search that and see if I can understand something

[cinder path]

if you aren't on URP this should help you out

https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Unity-2021-Shaders-and-Effects-Cookbook-Fourth-Edition/blob/main/Shaders-and-Effects-Cookbook-2021/Assets/Chapter 07/Shaders/SnowShader.shader

[tulip carbon]

I'm on URP 😦

[cinder path]

you still can look at the structure and eventually see how to implement it in the shader you've got in your image

[tulip carbon]

and the snow shaders (at least the one I'm watching), won't work because it only applies snow to the parts facing up

[tulip carbon]

okay thanks

[cinder path]

it's basically really getting the data of the vertex.y and deciding from there

[cinder path]

it applies snow given a direction in the properties

and then extrudes in that direction (very grossly this is a teaching shader)

alternatively you can also make a color range with a white tip and map it to your wave

it might be less expensive

[meager pelican]

"Just" use the object-space Y values, in a range, for the gradient. It will still scale later.
So if your wave model goes with its origin at the base, and the top at 1.0 Y value, you'd have a gradient from white to blue between 1.0 and 0.5 and blue from 0.5 to 0.

[tulip carbon]

okay and how do I do that in shader graph? Like, I still don't understand how it works, and I would need some examples to understand it😅

like, I've tried with something called gradient but doesn't seem to change anything

[meager pelican]

Maybe position node, set to object space, and a conditional/branch or perhaps lerp.

[karmic hatch]

Don't use UV, use position (object space)

But sample gradient is a good idea

[meager pelican]

Right. Assuming the model is a mesh and it is set up that way. IDK your setup.

[tulip carbon]

like this?

[tulip carbon]

idk, it is just a wave mesh and then I added that shader

[karmic hatch]

yes

Also whatever you're adding it to is already white I think

So doesn't look like much

[tulip carbon]

hmm then no idea what I have to do tbh😅

like, the wave still looks the same

[karmic hatch]

Try multiplying the position by a float and make that float big

Also see where the origin for your wave mesh is. Is it at the top, bottom, or middle?

[tulip carbon]

top

[karmic hatch]

Ok then put the object space y into a negate node first and flip the direction of the gradient

Might actually make things easier tbh

[karmic hatch]

(make it so it's white at y=0 and fades as y increases)

[tulip carbon]

like this...?

[karmic hatch]

So position > split (y) > negate > multiply [by float property] > sample gradient

[karmic hatch]

Yeah, add a multiply too for more generality

(anywhere between position and sample gradient)

[tulip carbon]

like this?

[karmic hatch]

Yes

[tulip carbon]

now I see a white line there, but is in the middle not the top

[karmic hatch]

then the origin of the object must be in the middle I think

You can just add a float to the y component before the negate node

[tulip carbon]

probably, then I migth have looked it in an incorrect way, my bad

[karmic hatch]

And tune it to land at the top

[tulip carbon]

how?

[karmic hatch]

Just make it a property and move it around until the foam is in the right place

Also to make the fade wider, decrease the multiply float

(create node, right click, select 'convert to property')

(then when you click on the material, you can edit the properties in the inspector)

[tulip carbon]

where do I right click sorry?

[karmic hatch]

just search 'float'

Create a float node and give it some value

Then plug it in

Then right click on the float node

[tulip carbon]

oh like this?

[karmic hatch]

Yes

[tulip carbon]

and to move it up?

[karmic hatch]

Before the multiply, put in an add node and create a new property for that

And then you can change it to put the foam wherever you want

[tulip carbon]

idk what I did but now everything is white 😦

okay nvm found it

but the add thing before the multiply doesnt move it up

[karmic hatch]

if you change the float it should move it up or down?

[tulip carbon]

what did I do wrong?

[karmic hatch]

Are there perhaps two meshes, with one upside down?

[grand jolt]

How to multiply something to make it more transparent?

[tulip carbon]

as far as I know it is just one mesh

[karmic hatch]

Use alpha or lerp between scene color and object color (for unlit objects, equivalent to alpha)

[grand jolt]

sincerely , didn't understand a thing

I have this

and I want it semi transperent

[karmic hatch]

There's an alpha option in the fragment node for transparent shaders

It should be there by default if you've set your shader to be transparent

[grand jolt]

I did

[karmic hatch]

So then create whatever shape you want your transparency map to be, then plug that into the alpha

[grand jolt]

well

what about semi transperent part?

[karmic hatch]

It's a prefab, can you open it and make sure? It would be very odd otherwise

[karmic hatch]

Alpha=0 makes it fully transparent, alpha=1 makes it fully opaque, alpha=anything in between blends between the background and the color your shader is putting out

[tulip carbon]

this is it

[grand jolt]

sure , how do I set it between 1-0?

[karmic hatch]

You plug something into the node that's between 1 and 0 for some parts of the object

[grand jolt]

if I multiply the clamp by 0.5 would that work?

[karmic hatch]

Oh, maybe it's rotated differently? Try using the z value instead of y

[karmic hatch]

Yep

[karmic hatch]

(or x)

[tulip carbon]

nope, don't think so

[karmic hatch]

Make VALUE quite large

[tulip carbon]

oh wait now when I set it to the X value yes

but I tried it before and didn't do that

well thank you so much 😄

[karmic hatch]

Np :)

[tulip carbon]

and sorry for being such a noob😅

[karmic hatch]

We all have to start somewhere :)

[tulip carbon]

okay and do you know if it's possible to like set the tiling of a procedural noise please?

[karmic hatch]

You can use the x,z positions as input for a simple or gradient noise node (combine into a vector2, scale by multiplying by another vector2, then put into the noise node)

Or voronoi noise if you like the look of it but I find it has more limited use

[tulip carbon]

but with that one where do I set the tiling?

[karmic hatch]

The scaling gives you the scale of the noise, if you want it to tile you'd be better off using a texture

[tulip carbon]

and is there a way to create a texture with that procedural noise...?

[karmic hatch]

Idk, you can download noise textures online though

[tulip carbon]

oh okay

[karmic hatch]

You probably could create a texture but you'd need to modify the code creating the noise so it lines up

[tawdry thistle]

Hello!
I'm trying to read my own global texture in my Shader Graphs with Shader.SetGlobalTexture("_LOS_TEXTURE", renderedTexture); in my script.

Unfortunately I'm getting a 'tex2D': cannot implicitly convert from 'Texture2D<float4>' to 'struct UnityTexture2D'

Anyone can help with that? 😄

[steel notch]

How do you convert a color to greyscale in shader graph?

[olive hinge]

if I have gpu instancing enabled on a material, grass in this case, should I notice it in the stats for batching/saved by batching? it seems to have no impact on performance when its enabled.

[slender sonnet]

heya, was wondering how i could perhaps reverse the spherize on my shader graph as to go from:

to something like this, dont mind the poor photoshop

[meager pelican]

Well you can check out the color conversion node for SG. Use the HSV value component (.z) of the result, and input your either linear or RGB value.

Or you can take the dot product of the color.RGB and float3(0.2126729, 0.7151522, 0.0721750) which if the internet didn't lie to me, gives you a float result for the grayscale that you'd just make into a color for all 3 channels.

[steel notch]

I added the RGB together and just divided by 3 >_>

[meager pelican]

That works. It is appropriately lazy (wink), but unfortunately it is a bit less accurate since the green value of the color has more influence because the human eye is more sensitive to it.
If you're not picky about it, that value is very efficient if not completely accurate.

[meager pelican]

The shader has to support it and usually you'll see a big difference in performance as long as you have many instances that is.

[olive hinge]

oh i see, ill need to figure out how to support it in my shadergraph or if i can

[meager pelican]

I thought SG supported it by default, but maybe there's things that screw it up.

URP, if that's what you're using, batches differently too, but I'm not sure that matters really...it still groups by shader in that case, and should support instances. So IDK what the deal is.

[olive hinge]

im using HDRP

and it doesnt seem like instancing is doing anything with the default lit shader, no reduction in batches

[meager pelican]

Oh, IDK about HDRP....anyone using that is on the "advanced, figure it all out" side of the pipelines, IMO. Sorry I can't help more.

[olive hinge]

i very much regret using it

[regal stag]

You could just use the Sample Texture 2D node if you need to read the texture.

But otherwise, should be able to use SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D(_LOS_TEXTURE, _LOS_TEXTURE.samplerstate, uv); macro instead.

[tawdry thistle]

Thanks, will try! ❤️

[merry bone]

Any time I use a simple noise node in Shader Graph I get these artefacts. Is this just an inevitable part of the value noise Unity throws out, is this a bug, or is this pilot error?

[regal stag]

Haven't seen this before. If you're offsetting the UV by a large amount the procedural calculations do tend to break down. Otherwise might be a bug

[karmic hatch]

lots of ways, try max(color.r, color.g, color.b) or length(color)

[merry bone]

Thanks Cyan, this example just used the default plane with default UVs and the noise scaled to 100, but it's also visible down to scaling of less than 20, and stays until very high values. The material is just an HDRP lit shader with a noise node dumped straight into albedo. Any ideas how I could go about trying to debug this one or sending anything of value to Unity? Good to know you don't normally have this issue at least!

[regal stag]

Looks like this is a related thread from a while ago : https://forum.unity.com/threads/strange-tiling-seams-in-simple-noise-node.710105/
For them it was occurring due to a low-end GPU. It's just down to the method used to generate the noise. May be better to use a texture instead.

[merry bone]

Ohhhh, this might all explain it then. I was under the impression that simple noise defaulted to being deterministic (my use case requires it), but it turns out I'm using a version that's just a notch behind when they added that so I am indeed using the sine hash. I'm going to try updating and see if that unlocks the parameter the documentation talks about. Thanks again for the help!

[regal stag]

Oh cool, didn't know they had updated that. Looks like it's only 2022+ atm

[lusty wadi]

i'm trying to make a swirl animation for a scene fade, but i cannot seem to get it right, im looking for a spiral that kinda closes in and out with a simple variable change

[vital smelt]

Anyone have any possibly solutions for the issue I posted in #archived-urp ?

[lusty wadi]

this was the closesti could get but, i need to make this have a cutoff, and there is no "cutoff" node, what is the correct name for this

how do i make this more toony

[regal stag]

Could use a Step, or Smoothstep

[lusty wadi]

thank you, ill look up what tstep is..

yup, thank you, this was exactly what i needed

[regal stag]

Posterize might also work if you want to convert it to multiple bands/steps

[lusty wadi]

these are some very weird naming schemes, i must say.

[karmic hatch]

step is bc functions like that are called step functions in maths, and posterize is because posters often have that sort of stepped color scheme

[echo flare]

Created a procedurally generated fuel gauge and it looks great, in the preview. When I created the material and attached it to a quad, it looks very strange and I see NullReferenceException's in the console

[echo flare]

My solution involved copying chunks of the graph over to a new graph. Still not sure what happened, but here is the final result, any feedback is appreciated

[karmic hatch]

Probably something with scaling?

[vital smelt]

So, I have a Subgraph that modifies the H and S values of a colour, but how do I apply the V?

[young lantern]

I could use some help with shaders if anyone knows those. At the moment the texture of an object is set based on its world position. As such, moving that object around will change the texture. I only want the texture to be set based on the position ONCE and then not change from there.

[meager pelican]

Use object space, not world space. May need tiling and offset node too.

[young lantern]

I'll give that a try tomrrow, thank you 🙂 @meager pelican

Would that cause any issues with the texture getting stretched when the object gets enlarged? As that was the point of world position

[regal stag]

Object space would indeed stretch.
Might be able to keep using world space but offset using the Position from the Object node.

[young lantern]

I feel like that would stretch too?

[regal stag]

It wont stretch if you keep using world space. To clarify a bit, the Position output from the Object node gives you the worldspace origin of the object. Subtracting that origin from the world space fragment Position means the coordinates are then always centered around (0, 0, 0), so now the texture moves with the object.

Alternatively, I think you could also use a Transformation Matrix node with "Model", and Multiply with a Vector4 containing your Position (xyz) and a value of 0 in the w component. (That means it won't apply the translation part of the matrix). Same thing as above but there the translation is already applied and we are removing it by subtracting.

Though with both of these, it still won't make the coordinates rotate with the object if you need that too.

Important to note that only really works with MeshRenderers/SkinnedMeshRenderers too.

[regal stag]

Instead of using Hue/Saturation nodes, you should use a Colorspace Conversion node if you need to alter all 3 HSV components.

You can then use math on each component. e.g. R -> Add (with R from your other Vector3) to replicate the hue offset. Though if it goes above/below 1 you'd probably need to wrap that back around manually. I think the Fraction node should work.

Then on G and B could Multiply (with the G/B of your other Vector3) to control how saturated/bright it is.
Then recombine them using a Combine or Vector3 node, and put through another Colorspace Conversion back to RGB (or Linear?)

[young lantern]

I'm going to give this a go tomorrow, thank you 🙂 I'll definitely have more questions though if thats ok as I'm very new to this stuff

[fading fable]

Hi guys, I tried modifying a hex tile shader to support transparency.
Which I kind of achieved, but now with Surface Type == Transparent, the UI won't be rendered above them.
On the example below the UI is only visible if there are other objects, like trees between the tiles and the UI.
Why? 😄 Thanks in advance!

[cinder path]

I don't really know where to post this, but as it's GPU-related this is my bet.

What would be a good and reasonable upgrade from a GeForce GTX 1060? I am not convinced by the RTX 2060 and most above are still too expensive for what they can bring that is better than my old thing. Is there anything reasonably priced around 500€ / 600$ that brings significant increase in performance?

[mental bone]

can someone explain to me the frag function in the DepthOnlyPass in URP ```half4 DepthOnlyFragment(Varyings input) : SV_TARGET
{
UNITY_SETUP_STEREO_EYE_INDEX_POST_VERTEX(input);

Alpha(SampleAlbedoAlpha(input.uv, TEXTURE2D_ARGS(_BaseMap, sampler_BaseMap)).a, _BaseColor, _Cutoff);
return 0;

}``` What is this Alpha method ? what does it do and why does it return 0 instead of the fragment depth ?

[regal stag]

It should just be for alpha clipping, as the DepthOnly pass still needs to discard fragments.
It doesn't matter what value is returned afaik, as what is important is writing to the depth target, not the colour one.

[mental bone]

oh right...

thats why we have ZWrite On
ColorMask 0 at the top of the pass

[regal stag]

Yep

[karmic hatch]

i think if you set the UI objects to be later in the transparent queue then they render over everything

[fading fable]

Hmm, and how do set the tiles' shader's position in the queue? I use multiple shaders on my UI, so it would be easier to make the tiles's transparent queue order earlier than the UI.

Got it under Advanced options. Thanks! 🙂

[karmic hatch]

In the material i think there's a place for it

default is 3000 or something and if you increase it it goes later

[summer trellis]

is there a way to create a gradient in the shader graph?

not with the gradient node

like a way to input stuff and make a gradient

something like this setup, but with more than two colours

[shadow locust]

i mean sure gradients are nothing but taking colors and Lerping between them

[summer trellis]

i get that but i'm not entirely sure how i'd do it

[shadow locust]

well each color needs to be associated with a "t" value - then you just find the two colors closest to the "t" and interpolate between them

[summer trellis]

right

[echo flare]

There's a gradient sampler node, use the uv coords as the sample position

oh, missed the part where you don't want that

[shadow locust]

I mean id definitely suggest using the built in gradient

[shadow locust]

also another thing you can do is just use a texture

[summer trellis]

yeah

another thing, is there a way to click on a node and have that output automatically be the overall output of the shader, like you can in blender?

rather than dragging it all the way over

[tulip carbon]

Why does my shader looks completely white in the VR headset please?

[karmic hatch]

Might be easier to write a custom node for that but it'd just be recreating the sample gradient node...

Why can't you use sample gradient?

[summer trellis]

the gradient will be different at every point

[karmic hatch]

Could be worth doing something slightly more sophisticated so it's smooth in perceptual space rather than RGB space (lerping between blue and yellow for example would be noticeably darker in the middle than at either edge)

[karmic hatch]

How many colours do you plan on having?

[summer trellis]

1-10

it's a biome type thing

every biome has a gradient so the colour is dependent on the height

but i also want to seamlessly transition between the biomes

no ugly sudden colour changes

[shadow locust]

Why can't you use the built in gradient node?

[summer trellis]

it's randomly generated

[shadow locust]

That's not an issue

you can create the Gradient procedurally too

from your randomly generated colors

[summer trellis]

oh?

[shadow locust]

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Gradient.html

there's an example on that page

Oh crap wait https://forum.unity.com/threads/set-gradient-node-value-from-script.756467/#post-5038859

[summer trellis]

yeah i can make the gradients for each biome in c#

but then when i get to the edge of two biomes i'd need to make a gradient between them for every vertex

[shadow locust]

Another thing you could explore is the free gradient you get from using vertex colors and uv mapping

it's a bit limited based on your vertex locations in the mesh though

[summer trellis]

yeah i think i've got a solution going rn

thanks for the help though

[karmic hatch]

Lerp between the output colors

[summer trellis]

yeah

got it working now. thanks 👍

[tulip carbon]

no idea I guess then...?

[abstract yacht]

Hello everyone ! I'm a complete noob with shaders ... I found some shaders to hide 3D objects in a UI scrollview but the shader on the object only renders it completely white and I'd like to be able to take a material and only add the "mask" effect via a script. Do you think it's possible? Portal is the "inverted-"masking cube and Backobjects is the one on the "white" 3D object. Any tips? Can't find my way through that one

[unique pumice]

nvm im stupid I forgot about the mask 🤦‍♂️

[royal vale]

So I have a Render Texture I'm constantly updating and I'm trying to use it as a sort of heightmap to apply a nice specular shader on. I can't really figure out the right path to start implementing this-- any pointers?

[dim yoke]

So what you dont know?

[royal vale]

Well I'm not super familiar with writing lighting shaders but there's enough info online to do that part-- the main thing I'm trying to figure out is to get the data from my render texture in a usable format to treat it as a heightmap (afaik a heightmap is the best way to do what I want)

https://feralfile.com/artworks/embryogenesis-ba2?fromExhibition=primordium-i8m

something akin to this lighting effect, it's basically the classic physarum model which I have done and working great. Just trying to get the lighting portion now

[dim yoke]

Render texture is just one type of texture. Render textures works as a textures exactly same way as any other texture

I dont really know what you mean by ”treat render texture as a heightmap”. Heightmaps are just textures representing height

[royal vale]

right, I'm new to using unity so bear with my fuzziness haha. I guess I'm just asking how you would go about adding specular lighting to a texture then

[tight phoenix]

how would one remap voronoi's roundness into squareness?

[dim yoke]

What kind of texture? So you have the main color texture already and you want to add lighting on top of that? And in addition to the main color, you also have heightmap to be used to determine the surface direction (normal) which you need to make the lightijg right?

[royal vale]

So this is an example of what the texture would be while running. the main color would be black and the heightmap would be based on the amount of whiteness at each pixel (in motion it's changing constantly). The whiter parts would be "higher" so would show lighting highlights from whatever direction the source is at. in practice I would have color variants so the highlights don't blend in

color example

[regal stag]

The built in Voronoi node can't do it, but you can use a Custom Function. I have an example on my old site which should help. See the "Voronoi Edges (2 Loops)" at the bottom : https://cyangamedev.wordpress.com/2019/07/16/voronoi/
(Custom Function is named "Voronoi" and has 3 inputs : Vector2, float, float. And 2 outputs : float, float)

[tight phoenix]

Thanks Cyan I'll check out your implimentation

[dim yoke]

Ok, so in order to calculate the lighting, you need to know the normal on each point. Fortunately normals are not too hard to reconstruct from heightmap using partial derivatives

You can take a look at this conversation which is based on the Normal From Height node (shader graph) implementation https://forum.unity.com/threads/solved-height-to-nomal-in-shader.713894/

[royal vale]

Okay cool that's useful

A normal is basically the instantaneous 3D slope of a point on a texture right?

[dim yoke]

Normal is basically the direction surface is pointing at certain point. You need to know in which direction the surface is facing in order to know how much light it will receive and how it reflects the light etc.

The Normal From Height node uses the heights on the adjacent pixels (using partial dericatives) to figure out the normal vector

[royal vale]

Okay gotcha that makes sense

Shader Graph looks nice haha thanks for mentioning

[dim yoke]

I think the amount of resources about custom lighting with shader graph is quite limited tho. Most of those uses handwritten shaders as they have been out there so much longer and shader graph is bit more limited with its features

[karmic hatch]

I don't think you can remap but the top effect is reached by subtracting the distance to the nearest point from the second-nearest point

(hence it's zero at the edges, and increases to the middles of the cells

)

[river wharf]

So, weird question maybe. Say I wanted to apply uv scrolling to just a specific quad of a texture and not the rest of the texture. Is there any way to do that?
I'm basically using a texture atlas for low poly solid colors and want one part of the model to scroll, but the rest to stay solid.

Base texture looks like this and let's say that's a swords "blade" uv is mapped in red, and the "handle" is mapped in blue quad.

[regal stag]

Sure. Should be able to produce a mask of the portion you want to scroll. (e.g. UV -> Split -> Comparsion with 0.5 on both R and G axis, then Multiply together)
Then Multiply that with your offset value. Put into Offset on Tiling And Offset node. (Or Add to UV node)
(Then into the UV port on the Sample Texture 2D)

[river wharf]

Nice! I will play around. I understood some of those words 🙂

[karmic hatch]

This is more for the square shown there, right?

[karmic hatch]

If you want to do it more generally, compare your texture color to the color it's supposed to be, then use that bool to lerp between the color in a different area to the color in this area

[regal stag]

Yeah, I guess my answer is more for that example in particular. Though I'm sure it can be extended to a larger atlas too.
I'd typically avoid using another texture as a mask / comparing colours as then you have a texture read dependant on another which is less performant afaik.

[karmic hatch]

you're best off doing that with a script by calculating distances to a few points in the branches. You probably could use a divide-and-conquer technique by writing the tree positions to a texture, then running through 2×2 squares and downsampling until you find the overall minimum distance, then use a script to plug that in, but that's going to be a pain and unnecessary

[heavy stirrup]

is SampleSceneDepth linear depth?

[regal stag]

If you're referring to the URP function in DeclareDepthTexture.hlsl, then it's the "raw" value sampled straight from the depth texture.
In an orthographic projection it would be linear. But in perspective you'll need to put it through Linear01Depth(rawDepth, _ZBufferParams) (or LinearEyeDepth for units)

[heavy stirrup]

awesome, thanks

[meager pelican]

It can, that's why I mentioned the tiling and offset node may be needed to counteract that. If you stretch it 2x, you'd tile the result 2x, but I'm unsure of the exact computations you'd want off the top of my head because I assume you're using triplanar mapping of some sort (details of what you're up to are a bit light).

Tiling and offset for UV's are easy....tiling is just a float2 multiply and offset is a float2 addition.

So you seem to be saying that for, say, a brick wall, regardless of how long you make it, or how high you make it, or where you place it, the bricks stay the same size across the object (more bricks get added as it grows in a direction). Rotation on the other hand would be ignored in model/UV space and get applied later with the full scale/rotate/translate.

But see Cyan's post too. Note as he mentioned, those techniques won't work for rotations though.

[tight phoenix]

How does shader forge multiply differ from shadergraph? it has three inputs somehow?

[tight phoenix]

What's the easiest/best way to get random vectors pointing in any 3d direction?

a lot of them, each different, probably in object space 🤔

[tight phoenix]

this feels like its not covering a very wide range of values

[tight phoenix]

better 🤔

feels like im doing a lot of steps for something that should be much easier to obtain though

that and its not noisy enough

[icy merlin]

Is there any way to convert depth buffer into raw scene depth?
Second camera uses depth from main camera sadly.

[exotic kraken]

How can I do an image effect on everything except for the UI without a second camera?

[exotic kraken]

You mean you want the actual distance for each pixel?

[icy merlin]

I want to get raw scene depth like in the screenshot but for another camera

[exotic kraken]

The second camera doesn't have its own depth buffer?

[icy merlin]

idk about that, but "Scene Depth" node return only main camera's depth

[exotic kraken]

A shader should run once for each camera each frame. Are you saying the depth data is taken from the first camera's depth buffer even when the shader is running for the second camera?

What effect are you using the scene depth for?

[icy merlin]

for outline

[icy merlin]

there is a shader on character and it's rendering on main camera

item on second camera with the same shader

[exotic kraken]

What does the first camera render look like when taken from the same angle with the same objects in the scene?

[icy merlin]

if I change culling mask it would looks like that

but I need an item to be in orthographic projection so I use the second camera

[exotic kraken]

Does this error still exist when the second camera uses perspective projection?

[icy merlin]

I was trying almost everything. It doesn't depends on projection or any camera settings. All I found was a depth problem with second camera

[lethal grotto]

hi guys, im a huge noob when it comes to lighting and shaders, so does anyone know where a good starting point would be if i was trying to get my game (3d) lighting/shading to be cartoony, like not flat colors, but like pixar-ish, fall guys, or something like that yk

[royal vale]

Hey all, so I have a particle system that I'm trying to add a shader to. I have a texture that has all the particles with their trails, then another texture where it's mainly the density of the particles on the screen with whiter being more dense. My goal is to add reflective ish highlights onto the denser parts, then put that ontop of the nice colored texture.

How I'm trying to do it is I have a material that uses the density texture, then I call Blit(niceTexture, screen, material) so the (hopefully shiny) material is added ontop of the nice colored one

This has largely been unsuccessful lol, I'm using the standard material shaders provided and they usually just give me a black screen or will just change the color if I change the Albedo or Emission color

[thorny falcon]

im new to shader and was wonder if there was a why to add like noise to break up dirt to "sand" (surface shader)

[shadow locust]

sure you basically described it yourself - use a noise function

[thorny falcon]

yea idk how to apply it tho

[shadow locust]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@15.0/manual/Simple-Noise-Node.html or https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@15.0/manual/Gradient-Noise-Node.html

[karmic hatch]

'Standard' easy random number generator is just multiply by large number, add large number, sine, multiply by large number again, fract

If you multiply a vector3 of 3 independent such random floats by a 'random' matrix you should get random rotations and so no cube symmetry

(probably also worth doing ((2x)-1), aka remap((0,1),(-1,1)) to the fracted numbers to let them be negative too)

The 'proper' way to create a unit vector on a sphere is to create two angles in the right distributions and then use some trigonometry

But that's slow

Iirc one of the fastest ways is to just generate random numbers in a cube and loop until one vector3 lands inside a unit sphere, then normalize.

But can't do loops in shader graph

Roughly half of the time you should get a vector inside the sphere so ig you could just repeat the procedure 3 times and accept that ~12% of your cells won't be spherically distributed

[honest bison]

Does anyone feel like explaining tangent space to me?

[regal stag]

Tangent space uses vectors from the model to stay relative to the mesh's surface. It can be different per-fragment/pixel.

The "normal" vector you might be familiar with, points out from each vertex/face - It's the Z axis of tangent space. The X and Y axis use the tangent vector and a bitangent (or binormal) vector (usually calculated from the tangent and normal, using a cross product).

The tangent & bitangent are also aligned to the axis of the UVs. The space is most commonly used for applying tangent space normal maps. You also see the tangent space view direction used in parallax mapping.

[honest bison]

What you really want for triplanar mapping is to calculate the unique tangents and bitangents for each “face” of the triplanar texture UVs. But, if you remember near the start I said don’t do this. Why? Because we can make surprisingly decent approximations with very little data. We can use the world axis as the tangents. Even more simply and cheaply we can swap some of the normal map components around (aka swizzle), and get the same result!

https://bgolus.medium.com/normal-mapping-for-a-triplanar-shader-10bf39dca05a

I am trying to understand this method.

[honest bison]

Thanks!

[honest bison]

If I want to create my own tangent space for a shader, so I need to set the shader to accept world space normals, and then transform my tangent into world space myself?

[native otter]

At this stage I have setup my vertex 'wind' shader perfectly.
Now I wanted to only the ends of the tree leaves to be effected, so I painted them with vertex color.
I want to give the wind effect only at the outward parts (green vertex color), but it won't work.
If I hook up the red and green channel, then all the leaves are effected.
Am I missing something here?

lerp A is a position Node Object space

[honest bison]

What is the combine node?

[native otter]

Oh, a left over from I tutorial I followed. I now understand, I don't need it. Thanks!

[honest bison]

Does that change anything>

[native otter]

Yeah it works now, perfectly!

[regal stag]

Based on the article it seems so. I'm not that familiar with the methods being used.

But as I think Ben Golus is getting at, can use swizzling (reordering the components) rather than constructing transformation matrices to convert between the spaces. Which I think makes sense... as when you sample the normal maps they are already aligned to the world axis.

[honest bison]

Does that mean they are in world space then? We wouldn't need to transform them into tangent space...

[regal stag]

Not quite. Take the planar projection from the top/bottom (Y axis) for example. We use the X and Z of world space position to sample that.

Lets assume a blank normal map for now, which stores values of (0.5, 0.5, 1), and becomes (0,0,1) after the NormalUnpack. That vector has 1 on the Z axis. But World-Up is 1 on Y. Hence it needs to be swizzled in order to "transform" it into world space.
(Hopefully that makes sense. It's quite hard to explain)

[native otter]

If I understand it correctly, I cannot simulated wind on non flat meshes like my branches with my vertex position shader, correct?
I get distorted geometry. I thought maybe I had doubles, but I think I need to rig the branches, or is it possible with my vertex position shader?

[wary horizon]

is cyan about (I dont want to ping) I'm using the blit render feature. But i have some floating damage text (3d Text, that the blit is occluding) I need it to render after transparents for the effect im making. But i also dont want it to occlude this 3D text i have. Is there a way to make this work?

[regal stag]

You'd likely need to render that 3D text after the blit occurs. Should be able to use the RenderObjects feature to do that

[magic ravine]

how can i make the sin wavelength shorter on the time node?

at the moment it stays at the end of the gradient for a couple of seconds

[wary horizon]

OH! thats how you use this thing! rah thank you

[magic ravine]

how do i make it 'bounce back' immediately

[regal stag]

You can't change the wavelength of the "Sine Time" but you could do Time output -> Multiply by some float -> Sine

The problem here isn't necessarily the wavelength though. Sine outputs a value between -1 and 1, while the sample gradient expects 0-1. You'd need to use an Inverse Lerp node (or Remap) first.

[magic ravine]

thanks!

[exotic kraken]

How can I do an image effect on everything except for the UI without a second camera?

[desert orbit]

You have to be more specific of what you are talking about. If it's about #💥┃post-processing , if UI is in screen space, it's not affected by post processing.

[magic ravine]

Im trying to make a rainbow gradient texture but i can't get it to swap between the colors smoothly

the sin wave seems to stop at 1 and -1

how can i make it flow nicely

[regal stag]

If you want to cycle through colours it might be easier to use the Hue node on a Color node (red). Can then use the Time to offset (hue-shift) it.

[magic ravine]

Awesome thanks mate

[broken sinew]

can I use the depth buffer from first pass in the next pass?

I want to render the backfaces to the depthbuffer in the Pass #1 and later read that depth in the Pass#2 in fragment shader

in some cheap way

I heard about command buffers and grab pass

but is there something cheaper (and shader-only)

i'm in built in render pipeline

[elder ingot]

im trying to create a simple lit shader shadows using an unlit shader

basically adding artifical shadows based on the direction of the face

it looks fine in the material preview (the right side is darker)

but looks fully black in the scene

does anyone have any idea why?

[elder ingot]

solved

turns out shader graph is buggy when you dont make the variables exposed

[pearl frigate]

Never worked with shader graphs before, but i have made a texture/material which is working.

Now i want to apply it to part of my procedural island, but it doesnt really apply, and i don't know how to do this.

As seen on this image, the texture works completely fine on the ball. The green that you see on the ground of the island is the exact same texture, but doesnt show the same...

[shadow locust]

textures are mapped to 3D objects via UV mapping

what is the ground? Is it a MeshRenderer? A Terrain?

[pearl frigate]

MeshRenderer :)

[pearl frigate]

I am using UV's for both the detail map and albedo map

I am also not sure how to properly apply normal maps, rough and metallic maps... at all, but i guess ill figure out

But i still need to know how to get it onto a mesh

[shadow locust]

you need to just have a proper UV map for the mesh, that's all

[pearl frigate]

:O
How do i do this? :)

[shadow locust]

depends how you made the terrain

if it's procedurally generated, you need to procedurally generate the UVs too

[pearl frigate]

Ahhh... That might be my issue.

I am also new to procedural generation if you cant tell :P

[shadow locust]

If you have no uvs it'll just use the 0,0 pixel of the texture everywhere

hence why it's all green

[pearl frigate]

Ahh alright.. Guess ill look into how i generate the UV as well

[pearl frigate]

Would you be able to help out here? :-)

Getting this odd behavior now. As you can see here i got the uvs (somewhat) working. Right now they are just set to be equal to the vertices, to have it projected at the size of the triangles.

But for some reason it seems to be morphed by the shape of the terrain, but looking at the wireframe, the triangles are how they should be. Why does this happen?

[shadow locust]

I mean I can't really say. procedural uv mapping is tricky

it all comes down to which UV values you give each vertex

[pearl frigate]

Right now i am just setting it 1 to 1. I was hoping that would atleast yield some decent resault, even if it isnt the size i am looking for. But this warping is very unexpected :(

[olive hinge]

When you have a Sample Texture 2D node in shadergraph, are the output color values, R G and B, 0 to 1?

it seems like for a pure green color, when mapped to alpha, is less than 1

[broken sinew]

how do I properly write to Z buffer :(

I have position in world space, but idk what value I should write

I don't know what kind of value should I write to SV_DEPTH

[regal stag]

Assuming a perspective projection,
Should be able to transform your worldspace position into view space.
-viewPos.z then gives you what is commonly referred to as "eye" depth.

Can then do the opposite of the LinearEyeDepth function, which should be :

float rawDepth = (1.0 - (eyeDepth * _ZBufferParams.w)) / (eyeDepth * _ZBufferParams.z);

That rawDepth should be the value you need to write to SV_Depth iirc.

(And in case of orthographic projection, -viewPos.z * _ProjectionParams.w should work)

[broken sinew]

Ok, thanks

I am amazed though, that there is no helper macro/function to Invert LinearEyeDepth

Does z buffer have values in range [0, 1]?

[regal stag]

Yes

[broken sinew]

Or is it platform dependent

I heard that opengl has something else than gles for example,and in one or the other the buffer is inverted, or in a different range (-.5 +.5?)

[regal stag]

I think clip space can be in different ranges, but afaik the SV_Depth is 0-1.
You are correct that some platforms have it reversed and some don't though. I think the above inverse-function might already be accounting for that (as the values of _ZBufferParams also differ between those platforms)

[broken sinew]

Ok, thanks, I'll try that

[tight phoenix]

What constitutes a random matrix? Just any old number in each of these cells?

[tight phoenix]

What should the output value look like? I can't get it to be anything but a single solid color, I am not sure how to then use it as random values

[karmic hatch]

i was meaning one where each element is random

idk if you can do that in shader graph though

well you can do equivalent

make 3 more random vectors (A, B, C), dot them with your random vector (R) and then combine them into a new vector3 (dot(A, R), dot(B, R), dot(C, R))

[karmic hatch]

they should take in the cell value as the input

[tight phoenix]

Oh from the voronoi, will do

[karmic hatch]

ye

[tight phoenix]

that already works a lot better

[karmic hatch]

nice

[tight phoenix]

Is putting in just whatever in the matrix3x3 what I should be doing? I will google into the matrix node because I am not familiar with matrix math

[karmic hatch]

you would want the matrix3x3 to have random elements, otherwise you're taking vectors distributed in a cube and then just deforming that cube

if it has random elements then you deform each vector randomly so it shouldn't be far off a spherical distribution (if it's not a true spherical distribution)

though tbh vectors distributed across a cube are probably fine to get the rest of the effect working, then you can come back to making the distribution as good as possible later on

[tight phoenix]

Does "you would want the matrix3x3 to have random elements" mean having a random value in each of the 9 boxes?

[karmic hatch]

yeah

[tight phoenix]

I cant plug in anything to that node so I just put random numbers in from my head, okay

[karmic hatch]

you want it to change with each different cell value too

[tight phoenix]

Is that something I am not doing currently?

[karmic hatch]

but tbh just an identity (1,0,0; 0,1,0; 0,0,1) would be good enough to look OK, you'd just have more sparkles in some directions than others

[karmic hatch]

no bc the matrix is constant

[tight phoenix]

How do I make the matrix not constant 🤔

Matrix Construction?

[karmic hatch]

you'd have to put in a random number to each cell; it's equivalent to what i said earlier with the dot products with random vectors but also it's probably more important to get the rest of the stuff working so it actually sparkles then come back to it

[tight phoenix]

Oh

This looks pretty random now

Even more random than it did before

I will leave it at this and get the rest of the stuff working now like you said

[karmic hatch]

hmm combining like that seems dodgy since the vector3 is already made of those floats - i think that's just equivalent to squaring the vector3?

(hence also why it's darker ig)

probably doesn't change things much though

[tight phoenix]

Oh 🤔

Ill plug them in a different order, so its not RGB both times

[karmic hatch]

just normalize and then use that to build the rest of the sparkle shader

[karmic hatch]

what you can do is abs the b component, then convert from tangent space to object/world space

means you never have sparkle normals pointing inwards (more sparkles)

you could also just overlay multiple sparkle effects on one another

[karmic hatch]

btw for my sparkle attempt, here is the bit that calculates the normal from the random vector3

and here's the specular part (taking in the normal vector and returning the brightness of specular reflection)

could be worth adding in a fresnel or something but that's the gist of it

the two outputs are multiplied further to the right

[tight phoenix]

👀 Sweet, thank you for the help as always. Ill post my graph results when I get it working

[tight phoenix]

I keep following tutorial after tutorial after tutorial, am I just stupid? NOTHING I try works. I have examples that look exactly what I want, but when I try to follow them step by step, the result looks nothing like their output

I cannot make this glitter shader at all, im too fucking stupid

Im too dumb for any of these
https://walkingfat-com.translate.goog/sparkle-shader-闪烁亮片材质/?_x_tr_sch=http&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en
https://80.lv/articles/guide-parallax-cards-in-unity
https://github.com/LadTy/ParallaxGlitter
https://danielilett.com/2021-11-06-tut5-19-glitter/
https://realtimevfx.com/t/amplify-cloth-shader-sparkle/8733/3
https://godsgreg.artstation.com/projects/9eEEZq
https://bobacupcake.tumblr.com/post/168070756354/continuation-of-this-ask-from-last-night-gonna
https://twitter.com/jctecklenburg/status/968182525926543362
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btTOVexNIGk
https://www.jctecklenburg.com/dlc

everyone else seems to be able to just make it work

and every fucking tutorial is just like 'take the dot of view and normal'

it never works, I dont know wtf im supposed to do because it never works, it doesnt do a single #$%#^&@ing thing

I keep looking and looking and doing tutorial after tutorial, going into crisis daily because im too fucking stupid to solve anything myself

and it never fucking works

[humble robin]

i actually came here to ask help

but you just made me realize

my error isn't that bad

thanks

[tight phoenix]

My problem isnt that im fucking stupid, its that I ALSO have crippling mental health problems

that make every aspect of my life 1000x harder

if I just couldnt feel feelings, I would be better than any other shader coder out there, because I could just mechanically produce content, practice 24/7, until I die

inject soma into my eyeballs please

back to the grind of being a worthless failure unable to achieve even the smallest shader effect

it hurts so badly to want to just fucking make nice things, to just have a single drop of worth or value, to not be a worthless insignificant piece of shit incapable of supporting themselves or making a single nice thing ever

I hate how incredibly bitter and angry and envious and hateful and jealous I am of every other talented artist that I cannot be no matter how hard I grind my blood and bone into the dirt spinning my wheels trying to acomplish a single thing that im too fucking stupid to do

im off the deep end now in mental health crisis, time to close discord until I calm down

and then try and fail to achieve anything all over again, and end right back in the exact same place, because nothing will change once I calm down, ill still be just as fucking stupid and clueless as before my fucking worthless stupidity pushed me into crisis in the first place

[tardy oar]

im following a shader tutorial from https://danielilett.com/2021-03-19-tut5-15-wall-cutout/

i got it to work but i would like to make it toggle-able and i cant seem to figure it out.

any help is appreciated!

[long bramble]

why arnt any of the nodes plugged into the master

@tight phoenix Thats achually a really really complicated shader

[rich silo]

Can someone help me figure out why the color preview and the actual color on the line are so different here?

[vocal narwhal]

Because you only have 2 points. The line only has 4 vertices.
Line color uses vertex colors

[mental bone]

I want to use a global texture array as a atlas for our environment in a Oculus 2 app. What would be the best way to encode the slice index into a mesh directly. Vertex color ?

[mental bone]

Also if anyone knows how to export extra data from Blender, that would be great. I would hate to have to write custom scripts in Unity just to get one extra float into the vertex pos or UV's

[meager pelican]

That's always irritated me too. That there's no "user defined uint" (or whatever) value PER MESH. So you end up plugging the same value into, say, 100K verts on the one mesh. But when you think about it more, what you realize is that you probably want per-mesh-instance. Then we get into GPU instancing.

The thing is that instancing is a bit weird in the new pipelines. If you're in the BiRP, "just" use instancing to give each instance of the mesh a unique value per instance. In URP/HDRP, unfortunately, you end up having to create a unique instance of the material for each unique value. So you could have 500 green tree materials, each one having a unique uint or something so you can index into your global texture array. Argggh!

I much prefer the BiRP method of functional material property blocks. The URP/HDRP method just seems very wasteful and short-sighted, but I admit I could be wrong in my assessment. IDK if there's a way around it, because the engine is what assigns the mesh-instance-index as it draws each frame. So you can't go off and create your own CBUFFER for each instance.

[mental bone]

Well what I'm doing right now is to read the UV's of the mesh, remap them to a vector3 and set them back

that way we encode a extra byte into UV0 per mesh and use that in the shader as the slice index

we are not doing instancing, because we dont have a huge number of repeating meshes anyways

we are trying to optimize gpu bandwidht for the Quest2, basicly push as little data as possible per draw call

[mental bone]

 private void OnPostprocessModel(GameObject gameObject)
    {
        if(gameObject.name.Contains("chunk"))
        {
            Mesh mesh = gameObject.GetComponent<MeshFilter>().sharedMesh;
            Vector3[] newUV = new Vector3[mesh.uv.Length];
            for (int i = 0; i < mesh.uv.Length; i++)
            {
               newUV[i] = new Vector3(mesh.uv[i].x, mesh.uv[i].y, Int32.Parse(gameObject.name.Split('_')[1]));
            }
            mesh.SetUVs(0, newUV);
            gameObject.GetComponent<MeshFilter>().sharedMesh = mesh;
        }
    }``` pretty ugly code, but in the end this is how I got that extra byte into the uv

after that the sample is just half4 texColor = SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D_ARRAY(_EnvironmentAtlas,sampler_EnvironmentAtlas, input.uv.xy,input.uv.z);

works

[ripe jackal]

hi all, I'm trying to make a fire shader. The shader uses a 8x8 texture to determine what part of the tile that should be burning (and reveal another texture beneath). It works fine, but now I want to sample neighboring pixels as well, to make the edges better looking and more natural between tiles. To do this, I sample a 10x10 texture instead where all the edge-pixels are from neighboring tiles.

But here's the issue: I want to use the 10x10 texture when performing all Steps in the shader graph, but in the end I want to "crop" the shader (scale it) so that it doesnt include the edge pixels from the neighboring tiles. Does anyone know how to achieve this? Would greatly appreciate any help!!

[grand jolt]

I was looking for something like this but for URP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4utgRuIekk
Is there an asset or shader script that exist and can show object with light?

[mental bone]

Use a spheremask node, raycast to determine sphere center, pass that data to the shader

[hexed surge]

and how do you blend the indices on seams ?
I'm planning on iterating on my ground shader
I had to send indices in one texture and their intensities in a separate texture, so that each point of the ground mesh could hold 4 textures and blend them together

it works, but it's so incredibly hairy in both the shader and the c# part, want to make something more robust and straightforward

[native otter]

Is the _TreeInstanceColor part of shadergraph GUI for control in the terrain paint trees (custom made trees)?

[mental bone]

huh ? we dont have any seams to begin with. I think you are doing something totally different from me

[open sable]

Hey every one,
I have a shadergraph question:
How can I pass modified texcoord0 UV's from the vertex stage, to the fragment stage?

The vertex block has only Position, Normal, Tangent; but I'd like to plug in UV's that I'm modifying via a custom function, so that the UV nodes in the fragment stage (and the mesh it self for other shaders), use the updated UV's.

I can use a custom interpolator, but that seems a bit of a roundabout and not efficient way to do it.

I've fiddled with some semantincs, creating a vertex struct in the custom function I'm using

{
    float4 vertex : POSITION;
    float3 normal : NORMAL;
    float4 texcoord : TEXCOORD0;
};```

but so far, I can't get it to work. Halp?

[regal stag]

A custom interpolator is exactly what you want to achieve this

[amber saffron]

You can't modify directly the UVs in shadergraph, you have to use a custom interpolator for what you are doing.

[open sable]

bummer

[amber saffron]

Ah, Cyan, always rapid firing here

[regal stag]

I'm not sure why you think it's roundabout / non efficient, it's not really any different from what you are trying to do in a custom function

[amber saffron]

I think that what he is trying to say is that it adds a non necessary interpolator if he doesn't care about keeping the original UV values.

I don't think it's a perf killer, but hey

[regal stag]

I see

[open sable]

Hmm, I always thought, that the way the vertex stage passes the v.info into to the fragment stage, it's streamlined and optimized.

And this way, it's doing 2 things: interpolating UV (which are bad for my use case) and does a custom interpolation, that will not work with UV nodes for example

Thank you. On the same topic. This is part of a bigger problem I'm facing, maybe you guys could point me in the right direction?
I'm creating a custom unlit terrain shader for use with instanced drawing. I got my terrain draw working, but for one of the effects, I'm using the Internal-DepthNormals texture (outlines)

the issue is...(I don;t really know what the issue is), the depthnormals texture is not beeing drawn on the instaced mesh (even though, the shaders seems capable of doing so)

[regal stag]

I think there may be some confusion as to what custom interpolators are doing. It allows you to do the calculation in the vertex shader and pass to the fragment. In the generated shader it's implemented in the similar way to using a TEXCOORDn semantic in the VertexInput.
(Though in this case, shader graph packs data into a "PackedVaryings" to make full float4 use of each interpolator. And uses INTERPn, but that should be the same thing as TEXCOORD afaik)

[open sable]

I have a suspicion, that in my case, the DepthNormals texture, is using the wrong UV's...

now the noobquestion: how could I supply the "good", uv's I get from the shadergraph, to the other shader

[regal stag]

The DepthNormals texture would be in screen space so should use the screen position to sample it, (rather than model UVs)

[open sable]

hmm..makes sense. So it could be vert positions that it's getting wrong...or something complety different?

[regal stag]

Can you clarify on how these outlines are being drawn? Is it a post-process effect?
Also what render pipeline are you in?

[open sable]

as a side note: Big fan of your work Cyan 🙂

URP, the outlines draw is base on work done by NedGamesGames, using Sobel filters on the depth normals texture (after unpacking it and doing some filtering on it).

It works fine on normaly drawn geometry and terrain

It's the instanced bit, that screws it up

This is the code I'm using to make it work:

#define CUSTOM_TERRAIN_INSTANCING
#ifdef UNITY_INSTANCING_ENABLED
    sampler2D _TerrainHeightmapTexture;
    sampler2D _TerrainNormalmapTexture;
    float4 _TerrainHeightmapRecipSize;   // float4(1.0f/width, 1.0f/height, 1.0f/(width-1), 1.0f/(height-1))
    float4 _TerrainHeightmapScale;       // float4(hmScale.x, hmScale.y / (float)(kMaxHeight), hmScale.z, 0.0f)
    UNITY_INSTANCING_BUFFER_START(Terrain)
        UNITY_DEFINE_INSTANCED_PROP(float4, _TerrainPatchInstanceData)  // float4(xBase, yBase, skipScale, ~)
    UNITY_INSTANCING_BUFFER_END(Terrain)
#endif
void setupScale()
{
}
 
void ApplyMeshModification_float( float2 vertXY, out float3 vertex, out float2 Newtexcoord, out float3 normal )
{
#ifdef SHADERGRAPH_PREVIEW
    Newtexcoord=float2(0,0);
    normal=float3(0,0,0);
    vertex=float3(0,0,0);
#else
#ifdef UNITY_INSTANCING_ENABLED
    float2 patchVertex = vertXY;
    float4 instanceData = UNITY_ACCESS_INSTANCED_PROP(Terrain, _TerrainPatchInstanceData);
    float4 uvscale = instanceData.z * _TerrainHeightmapRecipSize;
    float4 uvoffset = instanceData.xyxy * uvscale;
    uvoffset.xy += 0.5f * _TerrainHeightmapRecipSize.xy;
    float2 sampleCoords = (patchVertex.xy * uvscale.xy + uvoffset.xy);
    float hm = UnpackHeightmap(tex2Dlod(_TerrainHeightmapTexture, float4(sampleCoords, 0, 0)));
    vertex.xz = (patchVertex.xy + instanceData.xy) * _TerrainHeightmapScale.xz * instanceData.z;  //(x + xBase) * hmScale.x * skipScale;
    vertex.y = hm * _TerrainHeightmapScale.y;
    Newtexcoord.xy = (patchVertex.xy * uvscale.zw + uvoffset.zw);
    normal = tex2Dlod(_TerrainNormalmapTexture, float4(sampleCoords, 0, 0)).xyz * 2 - 1;
#else
    Newtexcoord = float2(0, 0);
    normal = float3(0, 0, 0);
    vertex = float3(0, 0, 0);
#endif
#endif
}
#endif // CUSTOM_TERRAIN_INSTANCING```

and also this pragma: #pragma instancing_options renderinglayer assumeuniformscaling nomatrices nolightprobe nolightmap
Edit: It's not a postproces, it's integrated in the shader itself

[harsh marsh]

Optimizing my LIDAR thingy. Rendering millions of points using instancing, want to use a better mesh for the points (currently using a low poly sphere).

Ideally, I want to use a quad but then I'd need to figure out a way to make sure that the quads are billboards and always facing the camera.

I've seen people do this from within the vertex shader but I've been having trouble applying it to my current code to the point where I'm just doing random stuff in hopes that something works so I've reverted back to the original code

v2f vert (appdata_full v, uint instanceID : SV_InstanceID)
{
    float3 instancePos=PositionBuffer[instanceID];
    float3 worldPos=v.vertex+instancePos;

    v2f o;
    o.pos = mul(UNITY_MATRIX_VP, float4(worldPos, 1.0f));
    o.uv=v.texcoord;
    return o;
}   

Anyone know what I should do to worldPos in order to make sure it's always facing towards the view direction?

[open sable]

Hey...dunno if this will help. I'm using this to rotate my tree billboards, maybe something will stick nudge you in the right direction?

{
    OutputData output;        
    float4 CENTER = In.vertex;
    float3 CORNER = In.inputNormals * In.uv2.x;    
    float3 worldspaceCenter = mul(unity_ObjectToWorld, CENTER).xyz;    
    float3 clipVect;    
    clipVect = (In.vertexWP + float3(0, In.uv3.y, 0)) - In.CameraPos; 
    float3 camVector = mul(unity_ObjectToWorld, CENTER).xyz - In.CameraPos;       
    if (length(clipVect) < In.CullDistance - 3 || length(clipVect) > In.FarCullDistance)
    {
        output.normal=0;
        output.tangent=0;
        output.vertex = 0;
        return output;
    }
    else
    {
    float3 zaxis = normalize(In.camVect);    
    float3 xaxis = normalize(cross(float3(0, 1, 0), zaxis));
    float3 yaxis = cross(zaxis, xaxis);
    float4x4 lookatMatrix =
    {
        xaxis.x, yaxis.x, zaxis.x, 0,
                    xaxis.y, yaxis.y, zaxis.y, 0,
                    xaxis.z, yaxis.z, zaxis.z, 0,
                    0, 0, 0, 1
    };    
    output.vertex = mul(lookatMatrix, float4(CORNER.x, CORNER.y, (yaxis.y - 1.0) * In.uv2.y, 1));
    output.vertex.xyz += CENTER.xyz;
        
    output.normal = -zaxis;
       
    output.tangent.xyz = xaxis;
    output.tangent.w = -1;
    return output;
    }
    
}```
(ignore the Cull parts)

[regal stag]

I see. If the feature is using an override material with the Internal-DepthNormals shader to generate the CameraDepthNormals texture then yeah that wouldn't include these mesh modifications so be drawing in the incorrect place.

And/or it could be that the instanced call doesn't even get included in the DrawRenderers call to begin with. I'm not too sure. Could likely confirm this by editing the outline shader temporarily to output the depthnormals to the screen. Or view the texture via the Frame Debugger window.

[open sable]

hm, no overides. There is a custom render pass that draws the texture, sets it name globaly, and is then used in the terrain shader that does all the stuff (outlines included)

not beeing included in the DrawRenderers seems plausible, buuuut...I've had issues with the texture when using Indirect Instanced foliage.
Trees render with this method, were showing up in the texture

They were messed up as hell, I had to filterthem out, but they were showing up

[regal stag]

Yeah but if it's a DepthNormals feature, then in it's code it should use something along the lines of drawingSettings.overrideMaterial = depthNormalMaterial;

[open sable]

indeed it does

[regal stag]

Then yeah, that would be replacing the material/shader completely and might not be able to render the terrain correctly if it was intended to be instanced instead. I'm not too sure

[open sable]

hmm, woud there be a brute force way to supply the modified mesh info to the depthnormals shader/material?

[regal stag]

Hmmm yeah, you might be able to put the terrain on a separate layer... that would allow you to filter it for another DrawRenderers call (assuming it shows up in that). Where you could then use a specific terrain shader that supports the instancing for the overrideMaterial.
Basically the same setup that is currently there, just duplicated with different FilterSettings / DrawingSettings

[open sable]

alright, I'll see where this rabbit holes gets me 🙂 Thank you so much Cyan 🙂

[regal stag]

For the record as well,
Technically, URP can generate it's own CameraDepthNormals texture now without relying on overrideMaterial. But it requires the shader to have a specific pass (using LightMode = "DepthNormals"). It's nice because that pass can include the same mesh modifications and it would then work...

... the annoying thing is that Unlit Graphs don't generate that DepthNormals pass. 🙃

I think because it's mostly intended for the SSAO feature. And I guess it does kinda make sense for unlit objects to not have ambient occlusion.

[open sable]

huh, interesting

Yeah, most of my shaders atm are unlit. Switching them to Lit, might be an unnecessary hassle (even though I'm lighting the objcets up...just using custom lighting)

[regal stag]

Yeah, I still stick to generating my own depth normals texture when dealing with outlines since I tend to use unlit + custom lighting too.

[harsh marsh]

well I made a billboard shader that worked on a plane by itself but doesn't work on my instanced geometry :/

seems its rotating all of the geometry at once

I feel like at this point my only option is a geometry shader? not sure.

[tight phoenix]

They arent plugged in because none of them worked so I unplugged them and didn't clean up the graph

[open sable]

ah yes...instancing. The bane of us all 😛

[open sable]

could you share the graph you are working with atm, and the tutorial you are following? There might be a myriad of problems along the way. Are you setting up your material corectly?
what is the specific problem you are haveing with the output?

[rain niche]

I converted my GLSL code to CG and I'm getting very different results from a lot of calculations. Are there any altered behaviours I should look out for when converting my code to CG?

[tight phoenix]

I'm trying to make a glitter effect shader. Linking my graphs probably won't be productive because none of them get even close to working because I don't know what I am doing.
As for tutorials, take your pick

https://walkingfat-com.translate.goog/sparkle-shader-闪烁亮片材质/?_x_tr_sch=http&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en
https://80.lv/articles/guide-parallax-cards-in-unity
https://github.com/LadTy/ParallaxGlitter
https://danielilett.com/2021-11-06-tut5-19-glitter/
https://realtimevfx.com/t/amplify-cloth-shader-sparkle/8733/3
https://godsgreg.artstation.com/projects/9eEEZq
https://bobacupcake.tumblr.com/post/168070756354/continuation-of-this-ask-from-last-night-gonna
https://twitter.com/jctecklenburg/status/968182525926543362
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btTOVexNIGk
https://www.jctecklenburg.com/dlc

[rain niche]

GLSL just doesn't work on Mac at all so CG is critical.

[tight phoenix]

the specific thing that I cannot get to work correctly is the 'show glitter based on viewing angle or not'

everything I attempt ends up with either all sparkles showing, or none, never 'some but not at all based on angle'

I will punch myself in the face if someone tells me 'take the dot product of the viewing angle and normal vector' because I know that is step one, but then what do you do with that, because when I do that I get this:

[open sable]

first things is...try to get your head space from: I'm stupid mode, into: I'm learning mode.
Of course you don't know what you are doing ;] your learning. That;s not stupidity

[regal stag]

One main one I can think of is GLSL mod (equivalent to x - y * floor(x/y)) is different from cg/hlsl's fmod (equivalent to x - y * trunc(x/y))

I'm not sure if there's any other big differences, other than some naming differences of course. (e.g. mix -> lerp, vec4 -> float4)

[tight phoenix]

You're right, I struggle with self-abuse and poor mental health, its hard to not get frustrated that I've spent the better part of 9-5 every day trying and not succeeding to make any progress at this

[open sable]

is this your first approach at shaders in shadergraph? or shader at all?

[rain niche]

your mod suggestion at least helped a bit.

[tight phoenix]

Its not, but it may as well be, if its not explicitly spelled out in a tutorial, I don't have the knowledge to achieve anything without my hand being held at every step

[rain niche]

it also may be that vector components disappear when using simplified syntax

[tight phoenix]

cleaned up version of the one that seems closest to working

random vectors ✅
dot product of view and normal ✅
any idea what im supposed to do next 🚫

I know the clown vomit random vectors in some way has to combine with the dot product, but what that way is is beyond me

[regal stag]

I think you don't need the Normal Vector here, and can do the Dot Product with the Random Vector & View Direction

[open sable]

thats what shadergraph is for, pokeing and proding. It will take some time. After a few months, it will start changeing.
what about that daniel lett tut. it seems laid down step by step

[tight phoenix]

how do I make it so subsequently not every single sparkle is showing though?

they arent -all- showing there but like 90% of them are

[tight phoenix]

I can go dig up my graph from copying that one but it didnt work out in the end

[open sable]

first thing is...test your shader on a material in the scene, not the oupput of shader graph

[regal stag]

Changing the value in the Power node might do that

[tight phoenix]

Why would the preview exist if im not supposed to use it?
you're right though - in scene it doesnt glitter at all.

so its completely nonfunctional in scene

this has been my experience with every attempt, I do what im told, never works

also the back is double dark for some reason

[open sable]

that's a comlicated question ;] often, when creating parameters, you forget to set defoult values to proper number. When you have a parameter in the material, it's easier to see what you acualty control.
Also: dunno what the rest of the shader looks like, but it seems like you unpluged the view direction. Is that intentional?

[regal stag]

You replaced the wrong input. Use the Random Vector in the A of the Dot Product, and View Direction in B.

Then it should glitter in scene view too

[tight phoenix]

Ah yes scrolling up you are right, you said normal vector and I replaced view

[regal stag]

I'm not too sure why the back is darker though. That might be down to how the random vectors are generated. Hopefully with view direction it won't be noticeable? 😅

[tight phoenix]

Well now it doesn't glitter in preview but does in scene

which is extremely frustrating because there was no way for me to know the preview wouldnt preview how it actually looks

[open sable]

part of learning ;]

[tight phoenix]

it is however still super dark on the back

probably my random vectors like Cyan said

[regal stag]

The Main Preview is basically a fixed camera and you rotate the model, that's why it doesn't glitter there when using view direction. It's kinda annoying. I tend to always use scene view for previewing

[tight phoenix]

Oh

that's a problem then

yeah rotating the model in scene it doesnt glitter

Its gotta do both 🤔

[regal stag]

Using Object space in the View Direction should fix that

[tight phoenix]

this is how I am generating random vectors atm

[tight phoenix]

I literally went and changed normal vector and then was like 'why didnt it work' 😐

my brain is wired backwards

[regal stag]

Maybe delete the Normal Vector node for now. Can always add it back in if you need it later

[tight phoenix]

yeah

behaviour in scene and preview is the same now, namely that it gets dark from certain angles

skipping all this didnt fix it

I've gotten this far on other attempts I think, but im stuck again that now its randomly dark on the back, and I have no ability to diagnose why

[tight phoenix]

raising the power did work to make less sparkles though, before this gets lost in chat

[open sable]

what do you mean by randomly?

is it not because of the light direction?

[tight phoenix]

afaik light direction is not being factored into this at all atm

its an unlit shader