archived-shaders

[tight phoenix]

trying to simplify my mess, this is the distance through an unrounded cube 100% working

getting unrounded cube is easy, but now how do I round the edges is the hard part

[meager pelican]

I wish I knew, but I'm lost. You're doing some sophisticated stuff that I don't do off the top of my head.

[tight phoenix]

I appreciate it

I think where I am going wrong is the method/means by which I round the edges

[meager pelican]

IF you know those results and can save the rounding so that you know the world space value of the rounded result, you'd know the distance. But how? IDK, I'm frankly not tracking well since others have been helping.

[tight phoenix]

dont worry, ive started over so many times even I'm not tracking it well

and this is version 6 of graphs that big

time to delete all but the most recent and start version 7 🔥

the position node isnt square, its spherical, if you get distance its from its center point

meaning higher distance at the corners than the faces

I... cannot concieve of any possible way to round the edges of that

its not a physical thing with bounds and dimensions, there is nothing to round

when I look at this and say it has rounded edges, what it actually has is that the distance to the center point values are all the same along the faces and the corners alone the distance is longer

[meager pelican]

Right. But somehow you're rounding the pixels. I haven't de-coded the SG enought to know what you're doing. But you're not using real position at those edges, you're rounding them off to a NEW postion

[tight phoenix]

Yeah im realizing that now as well

the edges arent round, the edges are now a new distance further from the center position

[meager pelican]

So if you can compute the world-space location value for that pixel you rounded off, and you can take the distance between that pixel and another one in WSpace, you'd have it.

[tight phoenix]

understanding that its not rounded, its just further (or closer?) to the center point makes me understand why im getting these shapes

[tight phoenix]

compute the world-space location value for that pixel you rounded off
Ill have to google how to do that

can the mesh somehow tell me?

[meager pelican]

Well, you said it has the "same distance to the center" except...
So if you know the center, and can add that distance, don't you know the pos?
I'm talking off the top of my head here.

I also have to hit the shower, going to dinner. Laterz all.

[tight phoenix]

hmm I was subtracting instead of adding, maybe this is the mistake thats cascaded forward this entire time

ill try add

nope adding isnt the answer, that got weirder

hmm

the distance here im seeing is black where the view distance and mesh intersect

black means distance of zero

so.. somehow the distance from the center of the mesh and the surface of the mesh is zero where the view direction is aiming?

god the hardest part of debugging shaders is trying to grasp wtf the color data is trying to tell me

is it a space problem?

maybe I should be doing it all in world instead of object?

doesnt seem to be an improvement

now im even more confused

the distance ffrom position is totally different if I send it in

oh its the normalize doing that

normalize makes a lengh be between 0 and 1 right?

im starting to doubt everything I think I know

-1 and 1 rather?

saturate is 0 to 1

[leaden turret]

hm looks like the metallic-ness basically exchanged blue-tinted landmass reflections with blue-tinted specular highlights... any way to have both white specular highlights AND colored reflected environment?

also still no success yet with automagic reflection probes.... still trying at it....

[tight phoenix]

yeah im stumped

nothing im doing is getting me any closer

i keep ending up with this shape

literally 7 * 6-7 attempts all coming from different methods, all result in that

i have exhausted everything I can think of, everything I can find on the net, and exhausted anyone able to help me

im starting to think its just not possible

it can't be done, i'd love to be proven wrong but Its just not possible to get the distance of a ray length through a rounded cube

[leaden turret]

does it make sense that i needed Box Projection? i'm just playing around pushing buttons, and apparently when i enable box projection it seems to automagic

next issue is - previously the reflection looks nice and defined 👆

now i seem to have gotten the dynamic baked Box Projection thingy to work, but now the reflection looks very very mild & washed out.... any known reason why?

[tight phoenix]

could a rounded cube SDF somehow be used for distance purposes?

[tight phoenix]

i have the box and I have the roundedness

but im struggling to combine them to make the upper one rounded

I keep getting results like this

with my different attempts to blend them

hm maybe one of them should be adding and the other subtracting?

[karmic hatch]

subtract middle from top?

[tight phoenix]

doing that gets you bottom

[karmic hatch]

ah right

what if you multiply by some factor, like the roundedness divided by cube size?

[tight phoenix]

how would I do that? what are my roundedness and cube size values?

this value controls roundedness to the best of my knowledge

cube size I have no idea what value that would be

[karmic hatch]

Just see if you can multiply the middle one in your three images by something and subtract from the top, to get something that looks rounded

And then if it works, see if you can rewrite whatever value you get in terms of the parameters you're putting in

[tight phoenix]

that looks pretty rounded

but it only works on that specific value

any more or less and this happens

[karmic hatch]

yeah that looks pretty perfect

[meager pelican]

Absolutely! Matching it all up precisely might be a challenge, or you could just go full goose bozo SDF showing on a quad. Maybe, but I don't want to redirect you. Then you'd have issues with making sure to update the depth buffer (somehow) and put a collider in the right place if you need one. IDK what you're fully up to, but the exercise is interesting.

[karmic hatch]

it should be like that though because there's only one value where the thing you're subtracting exactly removes the sharp corners; otherwise you either undershoot and still have corners, or you overshoot and your corners are sharp but pointing inwards

[tight phoenix]

you can still see a little bit of an edge there

but its definitely like 95% of the way there now

[tight phoenix]

im already using an SDF for both sides of this so I think matching it up I already have

but I dont have depth buffer

[cursive swift]

Havent i declared them though?

[cursive swift]

// Each #kernel tells which function to compile; you can have many kernels
#pragma kernel CSMain

// Create a RenderTexture with enableRandomWrite flag and set it
// with cs.SetTexture
RWTexture2D<float3> Result;

Texture2D BaseMap;

//static const float2 du = {1, 0};

//static const float2 dv = {0, 1};

[numthreads(8,8,1)]
void CSMain (uint3 id : SV_DispatchThreadID)
{
Result[id.xy] = BaseMap[id.xy];
}

like that should be enough to run it right?

[tight phoenix]

I declare this close enough

oh the gif shit itself

no roundedness and 2.5 roundedness

hm I dont know if this is a problem but

5 roundedness is a sphere

[meager pelican]

IDK why. Maybe review all the settings to see if there's some kind of scalar. But if not, make your own! Make a slider variable and just multiply the color by the scalar before you add it into emission or to the color. (I think you were doing emission...)

[tight phoenix]

but its only a sphere from that precise angle

from straight on, its not a sphere

[karmic hatch]

that's weird

[tight phoenix]

that to me implies something is wrong deeper in the code

[cursive swift]

Setting a colour works

[tight phoenix]

my guess is there is something wrong with the interior/exterior UV coordinates?

[karmic hatch]

i'm trying to think of a way that you could create a rounded cube that might lend itself more easily to analytic solutions, i'll tell you if i come up with anything

[tight phoenix]

here is the shader if you want to look at what I have so far directly

[meager pelican]

@tight phoenixAre you using a mesh-cube that is rounded anywhere in all that stuff? You know, like rounding it in the modeling program with lots of polys. I ask because there's a way to get front/back with that.

[tight phoenix]

Im going to go make supper now myself

[tight phoenix]

yes and no, I am using a rounded cube mesh, but all the rendering is based on a cube SDF

not based in any way on the cubes geometry

so the look is identical on a regular cube and on the rounded cube, since the SDF is just treating it like a window, I could throw this on a plane with no difference

[meager pelican]

And you want distance along the view-ray from the front-side to the back side.

For any pixel?

[tight phoenix]

My end goal is a color value equal to the distance through the cube, where 1 white is corner to corner
but on a rounded cube instead of a perfect cube

getting distance straight through is easy

making it rounded is very not easy

more obvious when converted to 2.2 gamma

[meager pelican]

OK, you man manually do a 2-pass shader. Render the back faces of the rounded mesh. That updates the depth buffer.
Then in pass 2, render the front faces, and subtract off the values from the depth buffer since they are "in the back" from the front, and that will give you some type of depth....IDK if that's from the near plane of the camera or from the view ray though.

[tight phoenix]

shadergraph has no depth buffer

can't be accessed

[meager pelican]

It does have one.

[tight phoenix]

thats not what the internet says when I google it

[meager pelican]

You might have to hand-write shader though 😦

[tight phoenix]

I have no ability to do that

anyways if its just the back face coordinates you want, I already have that without a second pass

inside out cube uvs

[meager pelican]

OK, it was just a thought.
There is a scene depth node.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@6.9/manual/Scene-Depth-Node.html

[tight phoenix]

gif isnt happy but you can tell what im trying o show off

isnt depth buffer going tob e expensive? id like to avoid it if possible

the mesh isnt transparent and there is no second pass atm

if the whole purpose of the depth pass is just to get the back face coordinates of a cube, i have that alreadyt

[meager pelican]

Just something to ponder over dinner, bunp.
It's not the coordinates, it's the actual depth. If that's what you mean, cool. You could "just" subtract that from the current front-face pixel depth and you'd know the depth I would think.

[tight phoenix]

where does the roundedness come from?

the mesh itself is not rounded enough

[meager pelican]

Oh, IDK then. I'm lost. Ignore me.

[tight phoenix]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/940458330458062879/976919694902706186/burningMaeSmall.gif

anways yeah i gotta make dinner

thanks for the help and suggestions

[cursive swift]

im very lost with compute shaders

I dont know why I cant read any texture information in this one compute shader

yet it is using the same code for accessing the texture that the compute shader that does work is using

its like i need to write the rest of this shader that I have ready to go, but i cant get it out to work

cause it cant read a texture, but its basically identical to the code that can read texture colour

and Ive tested that texture with both shaders

what could be causing a compute shader to read each pixel value in a texture as (0,0,0,0)?

[karmic hatch]

what does your c# side look like? @cursive swift

[grand jolt]

Anyone know how i access and activate the double-sided bool on a material at runtime?

cant seem to find docs for accessing it

[cursive swift]

`using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;

namespace Ustyler
{
public class NormalMapRotation : MonoBehaviour
{
public ComputeShader computeShader;

    public Texture texture;

    public RenderTexture renderTexture;

    public Vector2Int resolution;

    private void Start()
    {
        renderTexture = new RenderTexture(resolution.x, resolution.y, 0,
            RenderTextureFormat.ARGB32);

        renderTexture.enableRandomWrite = true;
        renderTexture.Create();

        computeShader.SetTexture(0, "Result", renderTexture);
        computeShader.SetTexture(0, "BaseMap", texture);
        computeShader.Dispatch(0, renderTexture.width / 8, renderTexture.height / 8, 1);
    }

}

}`

@karmic hatch

I originally was testing my rotation compute shader with it

I have it set now to using my height to normal map compute shader

which atm looks like this:
#pragma kernel CSMain

`// Create a RenderTexture with enableRandomWrite flag and set it
// with cs.SetTexture
RWTexture2D<float4> Result;

Texture2D BaseMap;

[numthreads(8,8,1)]
void CSMain (uint3 id : SV_DispatchThreadID)
{
Result[id.xy] = BaseMap[id.xy];
}`

Tried to strip it into being the simplest possible shader I could with a texture

[karmic hatch]

did that work?

[cursive swift]

yea

[karmic hatch]

hmm

[cursive swift]

that one was working great

and my normal map overlay compute shader is working great and still working

and ive given it the same textures Ive been trying to use in this one too just to confirm its not the textures

[karmic hatch]

everything is set correctly in the gameobject running the script?

[cursive swift]

yea

the render texture is getting created in the start method

[kind juniper]

You need to define the texture type of Texture2D at declaration as you do for the render texture.

Texture2D<float3>

[cursive swift]

that was it!

but, then how did my other shaders work?

[kind juniper]

Yep. The shader didn't compile probably. I guess you missed the error. It only shows once I think.

[kind juniper]

They do?

[cursive swift]

yea

[karmic hatch]

good spot!

[cursive swift]

`#pragma kernel BlendNormalMaps

// The target render texture used for normal maps.
//The results of the rendering will be given to this material.
RWTexture2D<float3> Result;

//The base normal map that will have the detail map overlaid ontop of it.
//Set the accent layer to this.
Texture2D BaseMap;

//The detail normal map that will be overlayed onto the base normal map
//Set the fabric material to this
Texture2D DetailMap;

//The blend normal maps function.
//This is the reoiriented normal mapping implementation
[numthreads(8,8,1)]
void BlendNormalMaps (uint3 id : SV_DispatchThreadID)
{
//The write up for this implementation can be found here:
// https://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/blending-in-detail/

float3 t = BaseMap[id.xy].xyz * float3(2, 2, 2) + float3(-1, -1, 0);
float3 u = DetailMap[id.xy].xyz * float3(-2, -2, 2) + float3(1, 1, -1);
float3 r = t * dot(t, u)/t.z - u;

Result[id.xy] = r * 0.5 + 0.5;

}`

[kind juniper]

Hmmm... Perhaps it uses the texture format by default then?🤔

[cursive swift]

this one has been working great

but then again, the code is asking for xyz values

[kind juniper]

Yeah, that could be the issue

[cursive swift]

maybe it could figure out it needed to be a float 3 from that?

Thank you so much for that

cause yea, i had spent a long time testing and trying to figure out why one was working and the other wasnt

[kind juniper]

I always define my texture types. Didn't actually think it works without it.😅

[cursive swift]

😅 Im still very new to compute shaders, so since it worked with the other i didnt think twice about it.

[kind juniper]

Well, we both learned something 👍

[kind juniper]

Are you sure this one provides the expected result though?🤔

[cursive swift]

it was yea

though i could have changed it since i started this shader

I wasnt checking if it was producing the correct results

I was only checking then if it was outputting anything

I'll define it with float4 now and test it with normal maps

yup its working as expected

[cursive swift]

Got the shader working!

though, i did notice following that example code for how unity's height map to normal code works is that the normal map seem to be right.

the blue is very intense compared to a standard normal map

and without some extra processing, the normal map generated looks like that too

[tight phoenix]

unity's normal maps range from -1 to 1 is my understanding instead of 0 to 1, is why the deep blue

[cursive swift]

ah okay

I might adjust it back then

can thre be a structured buffer as an array? or could i have the elements of the struct be arrays?

[kind juniper]

Nope

[cursive swift]

Dang. I might have to rethink how I’m making this last compute shader

My plan was to have a array of them merge with some additional float values to control things like position

[kind juniper]

Array of what?@cursive swift

[cursive swift]

oh an array of textures with some additional information

I know the textures are possible to store in an array

and I can store floats in an array too so olong as theyre predefined in length

[kind juniper]

Well, have some kind of struct to store additional data for each texture, then upload a compute buffer with an array of these structs.

[fervent flare]

No color related nodes exist ?

[kind juniper]

Yep. A color is just a Vector4/3

Or float4/3 in hlsl

[grizzled bolt]

Doesn't seem quite right

[kind juniper]

Oh, there are some😅

[digital pelican]

Hi,
does URP support scene normal sampling?
If so what shader graph (v12.1.7) params i need to define, and what would be best way to sample it as rgb in custom code node?

[umbral hollow]

Hello i need magician shader 🪄
,,Redcolor outliner'' I have using UVFree shader and put the materials for ramp and cube, ramp have blended because it has an angle of 90 degrees ,,Green outliner'' used standart assets and have blend material with gimp so somebody know or can help me for rebuild UVFree shader and get this same resoult for cube ,,Bluecolor outliner''
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/uv-free-triplanar-shader-pack-23425

[amber saffron]

Not by default, but you can use a custom renderer feature to create a normal buffer, or for example the AO one already has it.

[digital pelican]

I'm gonna look into that, thanks

[fervent flare]

Anyone know if disconnected shadergraph logic is considered during the shader pass ?

basically, is it a performance concern if I have some disconnected heavy-computation shader logic in my shader?

I'm leaving it there, assuming that while disconnected, it is in a quasi-commented-out state. But would love some confirmation if this is in fact the case

[regal stag]

Pretty sure if it's not connected it wont be included in the generated shader code. You can view the code to double check (button in inspector on graph asset)
And even if it was, it would be ignored for the compiled version

[fervent flare]

Thanks for clarifying

[cosmic prairie]

what are you trying to do?

[umbral hollow]

i trying to get this smooth textures one to two for borders but my game is tile system then have problem and need to modyfied this shader
,,green outline'' is good because have angle 90 degress, but idk how to doing for ,,redoutline'' ground because it is flat

[cosmic prairie]

the angle and the ground blending have nothing to do with eachother

you need to either paint the material with vertex colors for a blended material, or create seams manually

so, by modifying the mesh and the shader if it isn't supported in it

[umbral hollow]

I am just reading and looking for information you say "vertex"

[cosmic prairie]

https://youtu.be/aGHJqMaGADU

what are you using for terrain

are you placing the tiles manually?

[umbral hollow]

the map is created in the editor, it is read later from the file

[cosmic prairie]

the stuff that loads the tiles needs to make the borders smooth

(along with a shader ofc)

but it needs preparations to work

if that 3d tile managing / building system is an asset talk to it's creator about it

[umbral hollow]

yeah but the textures is automatic continous for next tiles then it is hard work for making all borders

@cosmic prairie but I think it will be it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxTi1vFOObk&t=54s

[zenith heron]

Hello, I have an issue related to the Graphics.Blit() function. My situation involves a shader which utilizes an Ellipse node, of which the RGBA values are changed to, say, 1f,1f,1f,0.5f during runtime. When I render the resulting Texture2D, the circle indeed is white and has an alpha of 0.5f. However, when blitting this circle onto my Texture2D (which I call my canvas), instead of drawing a circle with an alpha of 0.5f it takes the circle's alpha and multiplies it by itself (in other words, the alpha of the circle is squared). I am unsure as to why this would happen, which is why I came here to ask for any ideas on why the alpha values would change in such a way. Thank you very much for your time.

the second image is during runtime

_Brush is the Material shown in the first image, whose alpha was proven to be 0.5f through Console

A and B are interchangeable RenderTextures meant to render onto each other so that the Blitting process can actually be done

rtSwitch is what switches these around

CallRender() copies the resulting texture onto the Canvas, known as C

I'm thinking I probably missed a rule about Graphics.Blit() that I would have to follow for this to work

[zenith heron]

I used the quick solution of getting the square root of my alpha (the alpha range is 0-1), so that when the alpha gets squared, it's actually the square root getting squared and undoing everything. Although, I'm not sure how costly that may be and it'd be nice to know where the error comes from.

[leaden zinc]

Hey hello! Im trying to recreate a holo card shader using built in pipeline, i wonder if somebody has an example of the parallax effect with this pipeline?
I only got to do it using two cameras... but seems less customizable.

[olive hinge]

I am trying to overlay an image onto a mesh, from the perspective of my viewport. For example, imagine overlaying a flashlight circle (a square black image with a white circle in the center) onto the ground from my view camera. I am still quite a noob at shadergraph and I can't figure out how to transform the UV/view space to make it work.

edit I think I figured it out, using the Sreen Position node

[regal ivy]

How can I make it so that my character sprite is as bright as it's brightest pixel?
Makes no sense that half of it's head is in shadow.
Thanks

[karmic hatch]

Maybe instead of having it be lit/having that attenuation mask applied, have a script on the C# side sample the brightness at each of the corners, then set a material property that changes the brightness

[frigid spindle]

hey i am making a particle simulation on the gpu using compute shaders. i am confused rendering routine does not display anything? i was trying to optimize it because there was a massive bottle neck when i sent the data between the cpu and gpu, and i made it so the data remains on the gpu only. but my circle routine does not work. my clear method works perfectly though

heres the c# side

[zenith heron]

Hello, I am looking at the documentation for IJobParallelFor https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Unity.Jobs.IJobParallelFor.html, and I had a question regarding what the second parameter is. The documentation refers to it as the batch size of something, but what would that mean in this context? If the first parameter is the amount of times the job iterates through its loop, then does that make the second parameter some sort of limiter?

[fringe karma]

So the HDRP's decal function has an ability to alter the normal map as well as the regular texture:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@6.7/manual/Decal-Shader.html
How would I achieve something like this in the URP? I'm not super experienced with shaders but I need a system to add visual embellishments to a surface, in runtime and without adding extra polygons. Would anyone be able to give me a breakdown of how to pull this off?

Thanks!

[shadow locust]

Doesn't seem shader related? #archived-code-general

[zenith heron]

oh-

sorry i was used to asking questions here

it was related to my shader stuff but the question didn't actually involve that sort of stuff

[cursive swift]

Im trying to multiply a float3 by a float3x3.
I know its a matrix multiplication, but I'm. not getting the correct result
float3 MultiplyFloat3ByMatrix3x3(float3 vec, float3x3 mat) { return float3( vec.x * mat._m00 + vec.y * mat._m10 + vec.z * mat._m20, vec.x * mat._m01 + vec.y * mat._m11 + vec.z * mat._m21, vec.x * mat._m02 + vec.y * mat._m12 + vec.z * mat._m22 ); }

[wanton grove]

How do I set the values of a structured buffer through C#? I've tried SetData() but it doesn't seem to work.

[kind juniper]

Well, that's the way.🤷‍♂️

[wanton grove]

For some reason using a list won't work but an array will

The list probably requires some specific formatting

[kind juniper]

Does it even accept lists?

[wanton grove]

Apparently

[kind juniper]

Oh, I guess it does.

[cursive swift]

So, with moving a texture, how should I be doing it?

I know that is a weird question to ask probably, but in kinda stuck thinking of how im going to be able to move it.

I know I need a transaltion,rotation,scale matrix to be able to perform the operations, but how should I be applying them in a compute shader?

cause atm im not sure if I should be multiplying a UV by the matrix and then sampling the texture or if I should be multplying the ID by the matrix and then accessing the pixel in the texture at that new ID

[tender marsh]

Not sure if this is more fit for coding but trying to make a cleaning minigame using shaders yet it's currently not working. Using URP (would prefer not to if possible) Unity 2019.4 and a sprite lit graph at the moment.

Any help appreciated!

https://pastebin.com/GVrcFKRi

[fervent flare]

Anyone know if the rounding node in Shadergraph is comparable to divisions in terms of its performance cost ?

[kind juniper]

You should be transforming the id. And make sure to make out of bounds checks.

[regal ivy]

wouldn't being lit always have the same brightness?

[karmic hatch]

you multiply it at the end by the new brightness

[regal ivy]

unity_4LightAtten0 is the Attenuation you spoke of?

[karmic hatch]

Just however you do your lighting, instead of doing it like that, use a C# script to sample what it would be in the corners, and then create a property in the shader for it so you can apply that light level to the entire sprite

[meager pelican]

I'm not sure what that pixel calc is, but it looks suspicious to me. So if you don't have the right screen pos, your circle test will fail. Depends on how you did the dispatch, I'd guess. It seems your number-of-circles is id.z... maybe your x and y ranges are the size of a quad around the potential circle? Anyway, you should bounds-check that and early exit if you're processing out of bounds.

Also your circles will be distorted by the aspect ratio of your output device, so you have to take that into account since "pixels" are not square.

One thing you can do to test is to set the color result in your output buffer to a 0..1 value representing the screen position...so remap pixelPos to be a 0..1 value in x and y. Set the color in the result, and if your pixel calc is right you'll see (0,0) black at 0,0 pos, and (1,1) yellow at (width,height). That lets you skip your if-test, and just paint the quads (if that's what you're doing). Remember to bounds check it though.
You should probably just use different kernels for each "state" of your dispatches, I assume you're doing some check for state and calling clear or calling CirclePass. Just call a clear kernel, followed by a dispatch to the CirclePass kernel. Again, bounds check id.xy depending on numthreads.

[meager pelican]

GPU's already know how to multiply a float3x3 by a float3. You don't need a routine for it.

https://developer.download.nvidia.com/cg/mul.html

[cursive swift]

oh wow! that makes things so much easier!

[cursive swift]

Thank you for that! I was getting a bit unsure if things weren't working cause I was trying to transform the id. that helps narrow down the issue

[frigid spindle]

Hey I fixed it. My gpu buffer was not supposed to be closed

*Computer buffer

[frigid spindle]

Also i was getting half circles so I passed in the radius sqaured instead

Which fixed it

[frigid spindle]

that doesn't seem to happen, but my field of view does not work

like increaseing my resolution decreases my fov, so i definitely will have to convert cords to something like 0,1 pixel cords instead of the current integers

[little onyx]

does someone know how to achieve this ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsj8l2pB0uo&ab_channel=AlpagoGöktenay

[karmic hatch]

i would guess:

1. have a C# script that detects when you click, then hands that position and the current time to the shader.
2. the vertex shader checks the distance between that vertex and the click position, and compares it to the current radius of the click effect (radius = speed*(time - click time))
3. If the difference between the two is within a certain range, it moves the vertex position by some function of the difference in the direction of the vertex normal (this will only work for meshes with smooth-ish corners and lots of vertices)
4. The difference, or some function of the difference, is then stored to be interpolated for the fragment shader.
5. The fragment shader then does something similar to the vertex shader; it checks whether the interpolated value is inside some range, and if so, it whacks a bunch of emission on (calculated however you want).

(note that with this method, if you click twice, it forgets the first one. I think you can set vector arrays so you could modify the same method to use an array for multiple clicks)

[little onyx]

i did what you said and it work switching to the entire new color instead of having a wave like

[karmic hatch]

Both of your smoothsteps go to 1 as time increases, you want to have one go the other direction, then multiply them together or something

[tight phoenix]

I think I asked this before but what is the difference between the camera direction and the view direction?

I am trying to fix a bug so I went back to an old tutorial and they use camera direction instead of view direction

but camera direction for me produces weird distortions

camera vs view direction

the weird part is the distortion only appears in scene, not in preview

hm actually I think its there in preview, its just way way less pronounced

is the source of the distortion apparent to anyone else?

is there some way I could clean up this graph to get to the point with less nodes?

they are subtley different

[olive hinge]

I am sampling this render texture in my shadergraph for the ground mesh on my game, experimenting with fog of war. I use the green channel of the render texture to "light" the ground mesh. I'm relatively happy with it, but I want to remove the hard edges of these fog of war "shadows" so that they look less like shadows. Can you think of some way to blend/gradient between the green and red channel maybe with a shader?

[tight phoenix]

how do I access a 3d texture in a custom hlsl script?

what do I declare it as in here?

im trying to port someone else's code that they didn't share all of the code and didnt share explinations so I have to guess randomly

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3dhlsl/dx-graphics-hlsl-tex3dlod

I need to figure out what VolumeS 'was'

and how do I replace it with the correct thing

im assuming its the 3D texture based on that doc

but I have no comprehension

[meager pelican]

Yep, it's a 3D texture, reading color at pos.xyz (which range in xyz from 0 to 1) and .w is the level of detail (mip map level).
It can return a float4 or int4, they're only assigning the red channel's value as a result. It might be of a format that only has a red channel.

[tight phoenix]

so what should I declare it as, a float4?

I need to know what I put in the arguments named VolumeS

a float4?

[meager pelican]

Texture3D for the texture, and float4 for the pos.

[tight phoenix]

I tried that already, Texture3D is not a thing

[meager pelican]

Huh, it's in the drop down. One sec (or more)...

[tight phoenix]

yeah I know I can INPUT as texture3D

but I cant use that input without knowing wtf to call it in the actual hlsl

its name in the code is not 'texture3D' just like how vectors are not vectors they are floats

vec3 = float3

its not texture3d, Texture3D, tex3D, tex3d

[regal stag]

hlsl does have a Texture3D type, though for shader graph it's probably UnityTexture3D assuming v10.3+ as it defines it's own structs containing texture & samplerstate. https://www.cyanilux.com/tutorials/intro-to-shader-graph/#better-texture-data-types

[meager pelican]

You're calling it "New" right now...probably want to rename that to VolumeS. And like @regal stag just said, you may have to try UnityTexture3D as the type.

[tight phoenix]

UnityTexture3D doesnt want to turn blue either, maybe its VSCode and not the name?

yes im aware Im calling it New, I havent got that far but that doesnt affect VS code in any way

also I THINK? I just want the 3d texture, not the sampled 3d texture,

im trying to port someone else's code they havent commented and is missing half the code, so I cant really give you any definitive answers

http://graphicsrunner.blogspot.com/2009/01/volume-rendering-101.html

this guy gets it working ergo it works and so if I can port it right, ill have it working

but ive only gotten as far as porting these 3 results

[tight phoenix]

error I get when using UnityTexture3D

im pretty sure I just need the 3d texture, not the sampler, because it gets sampled inside of the code

[regal stag]

Use SAMPLE_TEXTURE3D_LOD(texture, texture.samplerstate, uv, lod); instead of tex3Dlod

[tight phoenix]

If I do that, what do I plug in for all those values? the code im porting doesnt have any of those things

there is no mention of UVs anywhere

this is going from 'I dont understand but its all there' to 'I dont understand AND make a ton of substitutions'

[regal stag]

It would be pos here

Well pos.xyz

lod would be 0

With tex3Dlod it's combined into a float4

[tight phoenix]

is Texture the UnityTexture3D in this circumstance?

[regal stag]

Yeah

[tight phoenix]

Ill have to google how to pass in texture.samplerstate

I know it can be used as an input

but not what to call it in hlsl

[regal stag]

It's just .samplerstate on whatever your texture is named. That's the purpose of using a UnityTexture3D instead of a regular Texture3D

[tight phoenix]

oh

no error

seems to be correct

[brazen locust]

Hey guys, I'm having an extremely weird shader graph problem an di'm wondering if some shader wizard can help me

Essentially i'm using Random range node to generate a random seed that will offset my varanoi uv by a certain amount

[tight phoenix]

hrmg its mad about something

looks like syntax error?

[brazen locust]

Everything is working great, but i'm getting what feels like arbitrary flickering on my shader

[tight phoenix]

I dont see any missing ;

it says unexpected token pos at 27

but pos is defined just fine above that

im not seeing any wrong snytax

[meager pelican]

You're mising or's in the if expression (||)

[tight phoenix]

oh you are right

huh the person's code had the same problem

dunno how theirs ever worked like that

[meager pelican]

IDK, would flicker if seed changed, otherwise IDK.

[brazen locust]

That was my thoughts exactly @meager pelican. But as far as I can tell I don't change the seed anywhere

This is where I generate my seed

[tight phoenix]

it works, 3d texture mapped onto 2d cube

[meager pelican]

And how do you set the value of the seed? In the inspector? In code?

[tight phoenix]

granted it doesnt look that great but its nice to know its possible 🤔 now that it actually works it can be improved

[brazen locust]

I set it via the inspector (material).

[meager pelican]

So I see

[brazen locust]

The strange part is it looks like it may be some sort of a strange cache bug or something. As long as I set the seed last it doesn't flicker

[meager pelican]

Hmmm. Does it still flicker in game screen during run mode?

[brazen locust]

While adjusting?

I'll try

[meager pelican]

No, adjusting makes it flicker

[brazen locust]

Yeah adjusting makes it flicker but only of other properties beside seed if that makes sense

[meager pelican]

Does it flicker if you don't adjust anything?

[brazen locust]

Other properties being adjust causes flicker, Seed property being adjusted causes no flicker 🤔

[meager pelican]

But those things are inputs into the random node and/or Voronoi....things are going to change....

What are you trying to do?

Voronoi changes based on neighbors IIRC, or at least in effect. So changes to it changes results, may look like a "flicker".

[lean lotus]

Hey is there any way to write to the GBuffer from a compute shader?

[brazen locust]

Essentially I was trying to pick a random point in the varanoi uv from there I adjust various settings to get randomized circles

[meager pelican]

OK, but from what I see, it's going to do that until you quit adjusting them. Adjusting them is just picking the initial conditions of the random settings for each "thing". One set of values on each uniquely-random material. But that's how random seeds/generators work.

[meager pelican]

You should be able to map it as a texture and write rgba color to it. Does it not work? Note that Unity would have to be using a render texture as the gbuffer. I don't think you can output directly to the GPU back buffer.

[lean lotus]

hrmmmm
not sure actually...
Trying to use the rasterization pass for upscaling to get the albedo and such in a texture thats screen sized, but since my skybox isnt normal, its not included so I have to add it m yself

[brazen locust]

Thanks for the help! I'll have to mull this one over 👍

[meager pelican]

Maybe you can do a blit with a skybox shader type of thing.

Why compute shader?

[brazen locust]

Another quick q if you have the time. Is there a convention people use when using vector3 or vector2 properties to let editors know which fields wont work 👍 .

[lean lotus]

erm
custom raytracer, with precomputed mutliple atmosphic scattering allowing for a completely dynamic skybox

[brazen locust]

They are all displayed as vector4 in the inspector which is why i ask 🙂

[meager pelican]

That's a shader graph feature. IDK if you can write custom inspectors or not. Maybe someone else (@regal stag) will know...;)

[brazen locust]

#archived-shaders message

Looks like I found my answer.

Not sure which newer version of unity displays correctly though

[meager pelican]

Can't you output the result of the sky the same way you output the other stuff? Or is that naive?

[lean lotus]

its all grouped together into a single compute shader

[meager pelican]

Fine, but if your ray hits the far plane and not anything else, output the skybox result?
Or is that too naive?

[brazen locust]

For anyone interested Version 12.0.0 of shader graph is what will properly display vector2 and vector3 in inspector.

• https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@15.0/changelog/CHANGELOG.html#changed-2

[meager pelican]

You'd need the skybox for reflections anyway.

[lean lotus]

that is what I do
but I need to write that albedo to the gbuffer so my denoisers what to do with it

as well as I need to modify the depth buffer to a value that my denoiser can recognize

[meager pelican]

I'm still confused, bear with me.
How do you write the result of the big 'ole sphere in the center (assuming there is one). And update the depth?

It's been a while since I've written a ray tracer, but I recall having a skybox as part of the results if the ray didn't hit anything, otherwise the result is the accumulation of the ray bounces, which could include a reflection of the skybox in the bounce.

[lean lotus]

yes
so I use the GBuffer for when I am upscaling
If theres a sphere mesh in the center, Unity rasterizes it and uses that for the GBUFFER
meanwhile my own raytracer does its own thing and writes to its own textures(for some reason the depths dont ever match up but thats another problem)
I need to write to the GBuffer in the event that the ray misses, telling the depth buffer to write say a 0

[meager pelican]

Oh, so you're COMBINING a gbuffer rasterized result with a ray-traced result? In a compute shader?

[lean lotus]

kind of
I use the rasterized GBUFFER depth because its more reliable, and can be used in full screen passes
and its albedo when upscaling so I can get crisp textures

[meager pelican]

But is the upscale post-ray-tracer?

[modest zealot]

I am working with a metallic shader. What do I need to do to have the metallic shader use normal map data to displace it the way it does in the Standard shader?

[lean lotus]

yes(I also use it for other things that always require to be the size of the screen, but thats besides the point)

[meager pelican]

OK, I'm ignoring the upscale for now.

[lean lotus]

ok

[meager pelican]

So I suppose you could pass the existing depth buffer to the ray tracer, so you know if the skybox is occluded or not. Ray trace the sky to some output render texture, and then do a blit back to the g-buffer. That is, if you can't just assign the gbuffer directly. When unity is outputting to a render texture, you should be able to pass that texture to your shader. You may need to make sure your camera has a render texture target assigned.

[lean lotus]

hrmmm ok

Thank you!

[modest zealot]

I just cannot figure out where, in the metallic part of Standard, it gets normal map data to displace the reflection

[shadow locust]

There's a metallic texture you can place no? If not it might just use the normals from the mesh

[modest zealot]

In the Standard shader, it uses normal map data in its reflections, so the surface gets a "scattering" effect (See the left picture I posted above). That's what I'm trying to figure out

[meager pelican]

The standard shader, in metallic workflow, has a "slot" for a normal map. I don't understand your question.

[shadow locust]

wouldn't you just be calculating some lighting influence on the fragment using a specular lighting formula?

Basically if the angle of incidence of the light reflected off the surface orientation (determined by normal) orients it close or very close to the camera direction, it's brighter

[modest zealot]

My shader also has a slot for a normal map, which works fine for handling realtime light reflections, but does not change the metallic reflections.

[modest zealot]

OK, That makes sense. How do I do that?

[shadow locust]

math 👋 https://ogldev.org/www/tutorial19/tutorial19.html 👋

[meager pelican]

The realtime light reflections in metallic workfloat ARE the metallic reflections. Metallic is part of that calc.

Maybe you're missing a reflection probe?

The more metallic, the more the environmental reflections override the albedo color.

But it is all part of the PBR calc

[modest zealot]

The specular highlights are working fine with the normal map. But the metallic reflections don't:

[meager pelican]

And you're using the standard shader?

[modest zealot]

No, I'm trying to do what Standard shader does in this instance.

[meager pelican]

OK, are you using a lit shader, either a surface shader from BiRP or a lit shader graph?

[orchid wraith]

Hey all, is anyone here intimately familiar with the customlighting GetMainLight() and GetAdditionalLight() functions?

[grizzled bolt]

Aren't specular and metallic reflections the same thing

[meager pelican]

I saw that pic already, but it looks like the one on the right doesn't have the normal map applied

[modest zealot]

What do you mean? The one on the left is the one where you can see the normal map in the reflection?

[meager pelican]

A bit different in approach, Spazi, but IIRC you can even convert from one to the other.

edited left->right

[orchid wraith]

I'm working on some custom lighting shaders, and although I have everything working for the GetMainLight(), I can't seem to get any real values for shadowAttenuation on the GetAdditionalLight() function, anyone familiar with this?

[karmic hatch]

isn't the main difference just that metallic multiplies the reflection by the material color

[meager pelican]

It might be a lerp....because a full-black sphere with 1.0 metallic looks like a mirror.

The reflections are ADDITIVE IIRC.

[grizzled bolt]

I don't mean specular vs metallic workflows, rather that phong reflections and enviromental reflections are both "specular", aren't they?
Both metallic and nonmetallic surfaces would show both types of specularity with most roughness values

[meager pelican]

yes

[modest zealot]

Does this help more? Both have a normal map, but my shader doesn't take the normal map into account in the reflection; only in the specular

[meager pelican]

post your shader

[grizzled bolt]

So, in this case the environment reflections need to be offset by normal map the same way the light source reflections are

[modest zealot]

Shader: https://pastebin.com/pesMWJjL
Reflections cginc: https://pastebin.com/qVeBVriT

[modest zealot]

Yep, that's the goal. I am not sure how to do that.

[meager pelican]

Well, that explains it. You're not reading the normal map that I can see.

You have to do that manually.
You read it the same way you read _MainTex, if that helps you, generally with the same UVs but you would of course apply TRANSFORM_TEX macro to get scale and offset values if you want to use them, or you'd use the same ones as you use with _MainTex to keep them in sync.

Wait... maybe you are (it's in the include)...

Hang on.

OK, you have vert/frag shaders, and you want to do PBR lighting yourself, manually?

[modest zealot]

If there's a better way to do it I'm all ears. I have had to make a shader completely from scratch to change one thing about the Standard shader

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[meager pelican]

I seem to remember this conversation.
But you said you wanted your shader to be EXACTLY like the standard shader except you wanted to reverse some vector or something, so that would include ALL the options of the uber-shader. For all 1 million different uses.

If you have a specific use-case, you might just use a surface shader, as we discussed as another option.

[modest zealot]

I have tried that. I have to be able to get box projection data, what is what I'm doing in this shader.

I would be perfectly fine with a much simpler, specific-use-case shader, as long as it does everything I need correctly

This shader is very pared down compared to Standard. fixing this normalmap issue is, as far as I can tell, the very last thing I need.

[meager pelican]

OK, we may have had a communication problem. "Behaves exactly like the standard shader" to me is a GENERIC shader with 10,000 use cases, and a bunch of properties, options, etc. But you wanted to change a feature.

[modest zealot]

Yes, exactly.

[meager pelican]

That's different than "gives the same results for this use-case that I would get from the standard shader (except vector ABC is reversed)". Such a shader doesn't have to behave like the standard shader in all respects, nor have all the options of the standard shader, and can be pared down.

[modest zealot]

Ok. I'm sorry for not explaining it properly. I need a shader that gives the same results for this use-case that I would get from the standard shader (except the reflection probe data is reversed on the x and z axis).

[meager pelican]

No skin off my nose, I didn't just spend a week rewriting the standard shader....

😉

Use a surface shader.

Perhaps. Let's research together

And talk more, so we communicate well.

So.

The thing with surface shaders....

Is that they generate unity standard lighting (or whatever lighting model you use).

But they work with unity's "routines" for it.

And therein lies your problem.

Since it is going to use the surface normal to calculate a reflection vector

and then sample a reflection probe.

Now, you can do that all manually in a vert/frag, and not use a surface shader.

But it's hard to get all the lights and effects that way, and support multiple rendering paths and such. It is possible, but it is a pain in the butt.

[modest zealot]

Ok, so this is the shader I have currently:

I'm not sure if this shader is overkill. What I know is that it does everything I need, with the only exception being that I need to get the reflection to use normal map data to render that 'scattering' effect I posted above. Now, if this shader is somehow overkill, and there's a better way, that's fine, too

[meager pelican]

I don't care either way, I mean, it is a judgement call on your part at this point.

But we could step back a sec, and try a couple quick things.

If you use a "standard surface shader" with bump map (normal map) support, it would work EXCEPT for your reversed vector, right?

[modest zealot]

No, because it won't use box projection data.

I have to do all of the above stuff because I need to access box projection

[meager pelican]

reflection probes in build-in support box projection.

[modest zealot]

But a standard surface shader doesn't access them by default

This is the result if I try this with a standard surface shader:

compared to my shader from above:

[meager pelican]

Huh. Did you enable box project in the project settings /tiers?

[modest zealot]

Sorry, this is Standard surface shader:

Yes, box projection is enabled in both pictures

I literally took both screenshots one after another

Any ideas?

[meager pelican]

Maybe, hang on a sec

In another vert/frag I was helping someone else with, this code added environmental reflections.

// sample the default reflection cubemap, using the reflection vector
half4 skyData = UNITY_SAMPLE_TEXCUBE(unity_SpecCube0, i.ReflectionWS);
// decode cubemap data into actual color
half3 skyColor = DecodeHDR (skyData, unity_SpecCube0_HDR);```
now the reflectionVectorWS is in world-space.  And it came from a calc whereby the surface normal and view direction are used to calculate the reflection vector thus:
```o.ReflectionWS = reflect(-worldViewDir, o.NormalWS);

both those are put into world-space first.

If you have to flip z and x, do so.

But you'll need to sample the surface normal from the normal map at the right UV.

You can get a world-space normal with:

o.NormalWs = UnityObjectToWorldNormal(i.Normal);```

And note that reflection "light" is considered additive, but of course you could do some sort of lerp or whatever based on your metallic-ness calc. And that gets us back to your question today.

So how is PBR metallic flow calculating color + reflection ratio?

That may already be in your shader that you're editing, since it would call some routine (StandardPBR) passing a struct or values to do that calc. That's the best way...for you to call their routine if you can find it. Once you have all the normal data and the box-projected color result.

I don't remember off the top of my head what that is, but in the Surface Shader examples, with custom lighting functions, you can see where they call their "standard routine" that somehow deals with metallic.

I'm not sure I'm helping much.
Let me google a bit.
---EDIT---
One thing you can do, like I was starting to say above, is to use a Surface shader to GENERATE SAMPLE CODE for you to look at. It will be huge, but if you "view generated code" you will see many variants, you only need to find one of them an look at it. They populate a structre and call their standard lighting model. You can see where they apply GI too, and reflections. I'd start there, and with the code above you'll get an idea of what direction to go in.

I haven't done this "make my own PBR lighting via vert/frag" in so long I've forgotten most of it... but you should see where they apply the standard lighting and be able to compare that to what you have in your pared down shader.

[orchid wraith]

Anyone able to help me out with some CustomLighting shader questions?

I'm using some custom shader nodes to access GetMainLight() and GetAdditionalLight(), and most of it works perfect, except that I can't get GetAdditionalLight() to return any actual data for shadowAttenuation, only the mainLight

[meager pelican]

@modest zealot see ^^

[modest zealot]

Looking at it now

[bitter remnant]

Hi, I need help. I'm creating a game using HDRP, about cars, the problem is that the game has many polygons in a single car, 8 million, I can't reduce them because the HDRP shaders make it look bad and the point is to create a realistic game, so, I should leave it as is and release it for PC? I also don't think that many PC's will run it because there won't be only 8 million in the whole environment, unless it tries to reduce the polygons of the environment as much as possible?

[orchid wraith]

Hey Alvarito, I don't think that's a shader related question.

That's a... really introductory understanding of rendering and optimization kind of question/concept

[bitter remnant]

oh ok, will delete it

[orchid wraith]

and 8M triangles for any one single asset is extremely overkill even after subdivision

[bitter remnant]

i tried to reduce it on blender

and looks trash

[orchid wraith]

you need to create normal maps from it on a low poly model

[bitter remnant]

still learning how unity works

[bitter remnant]

oh okk

[orchid wraith]

make a new low poly model that kind of matches the shape of the high poly one, and bake normals... but that's a whole different category of stuff you need to research, outside of Unity

[bitter remnant]

oh ok ok

Is there something similar to ue5's "nanite" in unity?

just want to know

[orchid wraith]

no clue

[bitter remnant]

okk

thanks dude

[orchid wraith]

very unlikely

Just checking again, anyone here familiar with customlighting shaders utilizing the GetMainLight() and GetAdditionalLight() functions?

[tender marsh]

Hey all! Not sure if anyone can help but I'm trying to use the haunted psx render pipeline, however, this means my current shader graph set up won't work. Would anyone know how I could convert it to work?

Shader Graph code: https://pastebin.com/chL4LeRS

Code for minigame that works with graph: https://pastebin.com/GVrcFKRi

HPSXRP: https://github.com/pastasfuture/com.hauntedpsx.render-pipelines.psx

[kind juniper]

You really expect someone to read the autogenerated shader code?😅

Shader graph should work on any srp render pipeline. Did you even try it with the hpsxrp?

[leaden turret]

@meager pelican i might be totally wrong... but from my playing around with reflection probes it seems they might be unsuitable for my needs... it just doesnt work for an outdoor kind of scene with viewing angle from-anywhere-to-anywhere...

i think i have no choice but to go all-out planar reflection

[leaden turret]

how can i put this to actual use for my water to have Planar Reflection? https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/BoatAttack/blob/master/Packages/com.verasl.water-system/Scripts/Rendering/PlanarReflections.cs

while waiting on that;
also trying to achieve an underwater look when swimming beneath surface

i think I want pretty much just like Fog effect just a lot stronger than above surface. is it possible to make unity fog be different above/below water simultaneously ? i.e. if player camera is half underwater half over water, each looks correct for above & beneath water

i like the "seamlessness" of it, that thin line where surface meets player camera underwater, above surface rendering with above-surface effects, below surface has underwater "fog" and other effects

[wraith inlet]

check out this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/_staggart_/status/1411339746828226561

Staggart Creations (@_staggart_)

Some background on how I'm rendering the water line, because it's almost arcane 🪄 #unity3d

The key goal is figuring out if a certain pixel on the screen is above, or below water. This in turn can be used to apply effects to a specific part of the screen.

Likes

821

Retweets

143

Twitter · Jul 3, 2021, 3:03 PM

[leaden turret]

👌 thanks
for noob like me i wish there was some code / examples so i could try implementing these concepts in my own water...

[tender marsh]

I did but seems unsupported + it doesn't seem to render the material at all with the rp

[kind juniper]

Does it give any errors?

[tender marsh]

No it just isn't visible at all

I believe this render pipeline only renders things with its own shader applied so just needed help seeing if I could make my shader work with it as well

[cursive swift]

with using translation, rotation, and scale matrixes, can i combine them all into one matrix for multiplication?

just im trying to get matrix positioning, scaling and rotation in but its not really working right

[smoky bridge]

@cursive swift you should watch the order

for example if you translate first and then rotate,
it will be like orbiting around a point

[cursive swift]

should I split the matrix up into three matrices?

[smoky bridge]

translate * rotate * scale

this is probably what you want

translate * scale * rotate
would also work (if your scale is uniform)

[smoky bridge]

nope, you can combine them like this

[cursive swift]

like how?

[smoky bridge]

just multiply them?

translateMatrix * rotateMatrix * scaleMatrix

unity also has something called Matrix4x4.TRS

thats should give you something similar

gives you a transform martix from position rotation and scale

[cursive swift]

okay, im using the unity TRSMatrix, but im still encountering an issue with the transformations being incorrect.

Cause atm, rotation is scaling the texture, scaling up is scaling down the texture, and position does nothing

and in the shader im using mul() for multiplication of the current position with the transformation matrix position

oh wait

rotation is working!

okay, its not rotation around its center

`[numthreads(8,8,1)]
void CSMain (uint3 id : SV_DispatchThreadID)
{
float3 baseNormal = NormalFromHeightMap(id);
for (int i = 0; i < Count; i++){
float3 newID = mul(float3(id.xy, 1), TRSMatricies[i]);
float3 normalColor = layerMaps[float3(newID.xy, i)].xyz;

    //if(!all(normalColor))
        //normalColor = float3(0.5, 0.5, 1);

    baseNormal = BlendNormals(baseNormal, normalColor);
}
float3 finalNormal = BlendNormals(baseNormal, overlayMap[id.xy].xyz);
Result[id.xy] = float4(finalNormal, 1);

}`

is this looking good?

granted this is just a snippet

but im more concerned about if im getting the right ID from that multiplication

im definitely not getting the right id

its rotating, but also being quite buggy

ill get an image of the results soon

but in short the rotation, while working in rotating the texture, is also stretching the texture out

and the positioning does not work at all

[meager pelican]

Could be, although the system is supposed to be designed to work in large outdoor areas like that. That's why they put it all in there. But if planar reflections work for ya, cool 🙂
The challenge you're having is really performance, because you want to support lower end mobile and you want reflections, so you're going to have to find a way to "cheat like hell". Remember, it doesn't have to be accurate, it only has to look good enough to fool people most of the time.

[proud burrow]

I'm having a problem in a new project

It happens when I import the shader package to anotehr project

Does anyone know any solutions

Or how to do this

Liek copy the graph folder from another project to the current project?

[fair flare]

Using URP, is it possible to add a user defined pass to ShaderGraph graph and render that user defined pass with ScriptableRenderPass?

[amber saffron]

No

[amber saffron]

Yes, that's the idea, copy the metadata to keep the references.
You could also use the assets packages export/import

[leaden turret]

TBH the game i keep using as reference only had water reflection for Very High and Ultra High graphics settings, so i think i might also need to concede that only high end mobile devices will be able to have those reflections

having said that - i would love to figure out how to do reflection probes & blending & all that and that it actually works correctly and doesnt look horrible as i've been seeing thus far... how can i investigate further how to do them better? can I maybe send you a sample project & scene so you can also see more specifically either how horrible it ends up looking or how wrong i'm doing it?

[amber saffron]

I also volunteer to help 😉

[leaden turret]

🙏 you are very muchly thanked

preparing a minimal sample project & scene....

[orchid tusk]

Im running 2022.1.16f1 HDRP. Is the tessellation feature not working when creating a new shader, or am I missing a setting aside from checking the Tessellation box under Surface Options?

[amber saffron]

Did you set the tessellation factor to something >1 ?

[orchid tusk]

I played around with all the sliders and nothing seem to do anything.

[amber saffron]

And you did save the shadergraph, for it to compile and apply modifications ?
From what I know, it should work

[orchid tusk]

The shader compiles and I'm able to assign other textures and change sliders based on my setup. Everything else works except for the tessellation feature

[amber saffron]

Do you mind to show some screenshots ?
Graph settings + Material inspector

[orchid tusk]

I'm creating a new one in .17 and see if that version fixed it. I'll post if its still not working

[tight phoenix]

in shader code instead of in a texture (like below), is there a way to pinch both sides of a regular square UV layout into this hexagon shape?

visual to make it more clear what im asking - this but in code

I know I will have to mask off the four quadrants and then apply a transformation to them

but the specific transform is not a scale or a offset, its like a shear?

and im not sure how that's done

[amber saffron]

• To scale by the vertical center, the logic is : y = (y-0.5) * scale + 0.5
• To make it as a trapezoid, you need to modify the scale value depending on x
• To make it symetric, base your scale as if x = 0.5, scale is 1

It's mostly all about remapping values

[orchid tusk]

@amber saffron

@amber saffron It still doesnt work. I'm using Unity 2022.1.17f1 with HDRP

[amber saffron]

This is set to 1 : doesn't add more divisions to the mesh

[tight phoenix]

Something like this? (one minus only because its easier to see the shape)

[amber saffron]

Tip : you can change the preview to display in 2D, might help 🙂

[tight phoenix]

you can!?

[orchid tusk]

Oh, haha That fixed it, thanks!

[amber saffron]

Select the node, in the "node settings", set preview to "Preview2D"

[tight phoenix]

I had no idea that was a thing

this makes my life much easier

[tight phoenix]

hrm a problem, how do I return it to a range of 0-1 instead of -1 to 1 so that I can use it on a texture?
its easy to do the distortion from the center, but then how do I return it to centered bottom left?

I tried remap but that just shifts the whole thing over

I need this, but what I have is

[shadow locust]

Add 1 then divide by 2

but yeah remap should work

[tight phoenix]

to what? remap didnt work

once ive distorted it based on the center point, I need the distortions to remain exactly in those positions while moving the range back to 0 - 1, remap isnt doing that

remap is just offsetting it

this is the expected

but this is the result I have

not at all what I wanted

[shadow locust]

Sorry I need to get my brain into the right mode for thinking about this stuff

[amber saffron]

Wait a bit, I'm doing the graph

[shadow locust]

Your brain is already there 😄

[tight phoenix]

kk

yeah im no where near close to knowing what to do, I cant solve it, ill just wait

I wish I COULD solve it, its so frustrating to not be able to do anything without help

[tight phoenix]

not this either

[tight phoenix]

I would have never gotten this, setting up yours now

hrmgh

it works

but it doesnt meet my use case

I need to apply another transformation on top of that one

but if I try to do it first, it breaks the hex

and if I do it after, it breaks the hex

this is what I get if I try to transform it before shaping it into the hex

but I cant figure out how to transform it after I shape it into the hex

[karmic hatch]

what are you trying to do

[tight phoenix]

as usual this entire thing was an xy and it didnt solve my y

trying to fix these stupid distortions again

what I have

what the hex gives me

the hex might work but I cant plug my transformed UVs into it

I can use the upper or lower, there's no real difference
hex doesnt work on either though

[karmic hatch]

here it looks like you're still using the original UVs somewhere i think

[tight phoenix]

you are right of course

how do I replace that?

I tried plugging mine in but it doesnt work because that one is not in the same space as the first one

[karmic hatch]

i think after the rotate around axis, you can plug that into where the UVs would go

[tight phoenix]

that doesnt work, thats what I meant by saying I tried plugging mine in

I just remembered that mine starts centered

so I skipped the subtract 0.5 part sincei t was unneccessary

its better

but it doesnt fully fix it

you tried to tell me how to fix it in the past

[karmic hatch]

the problem was that that solution, by deforming the hexagon, just ended up splitting it into three squares; across each face the noise was nice, but since the faces weren't in contact in the new UVs, the noise had discontinuities at the edges

you implemented it fine, the problem is inherent to the solution

[tight phoenix]

Yeah

extreme example

but I think maybe the problem right now is that the falloff between shear and not shear is exponential or something

you can see how half of it is barely distorted at all

I think I need to change the range/power/exponent/log of whatever is being done to affect more of it maybe

[karmic hatch]

I think the problem is that of mapping a convex object onto a flat surface while minimally distorting it, which is not easy to do

[tight phoenix]

yeah obviously that's the most problem part - that this isnt easy

its better than it was before at least I guess

ill just drop it and move on

[karmic hatch]

you can't do it without introducing discontinuities or some distortion

there might be a way of doing it where the distortion is very hard to see but idk

[white marsh]

Hey anyone knows if this VScode extension works with unity? https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=A2K.hlsl-preview
whenever i try and open the preview i get an error telling me it cant find the UnityCG.cginc file from the #include

[mental bone]

It doesnt seem like it would work at all

[white marsh]

yeah, i had that suspicion. welp it would be nice tho if it did

[mental bone]

Would be nice if we had auto complete, navigate to definition etc etc for unity shaders in vs but no

[white marsh]

yep.. is there any IDE that has it? i havent heard of anything that does

[mental bone]

Rider has it built in but I had problems with it too so I dropped it

[white marsh]

ah, isee. im mainly not using rider since its less customizable with extensions

anyway while talking about extensions for vs code. which ones should i use for writing shaders? (just in case i've missed something)

[mental bone]

Dont use vs code

🤣

[white marsh]

i guess rider is better but im not a big fan of it

but maybe i should give it a second shot, cuz the c# extension for vscode constantly breaks for no good reason

[mental bone]

Just use visual studio

At least the c# tooling for unity works there like a charm

[white marsh]

the new 2022 one or the 2019 one?

[mental bone]

Both

But I like 2022

[white marsh]

ah, ok i'll give it a try for a couple of weeks then

[orchid wraith]

Anyone have any experience writing a texture-based input light ramp in hlsl?

[meager pelican]

And @amber saffron...
Sure, I would suggest something like a github or dropbox, and perhaps start a thread here.
I won't likely be able to get to it until this weekend though. Real Life keeps getting in the way of my virtual internet-based one. :/

[leaden turret]

The. Matrix. IS. Real. Life.

[olive hinge]

if I have an image like this, can I do anything in shadergraph to create a smooth gradient between green and pink?

[karmic hatch]

you could make a custom node to do a Gaussian blur

[little onyx]

is shader graph a good way to get the basics of shaders? or good way to learn later shader coding?

[shadow locust]

read nearby pixels, average their colors, and set your own pixel based on that average?

[shadow locust]

it's a good way to learn how to think about how shaders work and make shaders yes

[tight phoenix]

I have custom voronoi node and I just noticed it outputs in gamma space and not linear space 🤔
Looking through the code though I don't see any Pow(2.2) happening anywhere

    float2 res = float2(8.0, 8.0);
    for( int j=-1; j<=1; j++ )
    for( int i=-1; i<=1; i++ )
    {
        int2 b = int2(i, j);
        float2  r = float2(b) + voronoi_noise_randomVector(p+b, AngleOffset)-f;

        float d = dot(r,r);

        if( d < res.y )
        {
            cellUV = r;
            res.y = d;
            mr = r;
            mb = b;
        }
    }
    Distance = res.y;```

no pow here either but its more complicated so maybe some part of this is doing it?

inline float2 voronoi_noise_randomVector (float2 UV, float offset){
    float2x2 m = float2x2(15.27, 47.63, 99.41, 89.98);
    UV = frac(sin(mul(UV, m)) * 46839.32);
    return float2(sin(UV.y*+offset)*0.5+0.5, cos(UV.x*offset)*0.5+0.5);
}```

[meager pelican]

You mean like that used in toon shaders? (it's a light ramp that could be texture based)

If so, google is your friend, initially

[meager pelican]

Well, if you're convinced that it is non-linear, and you're operating on gamma corrected textures/results/output, you could if you want convert it to linear first by ADDING a pow function...doing your calcs....and then ADDING another pow function to convert back to gamma.

That's assuming you're in gamma mode (I'm not running unity right now but check Edit -> Project Settings -> Player -> Other Settings. That's where it USED TO be at least.)
https://www.kinematicsoup.com/news/2016/6/15/gamma-and-linear-space-what-they-are-how-they-differ

It's worth researching if there's macros for such, and if so use them.

[tight phoenix]

this confuses me, are you saying this image is not in Linear color space?

to the best of my knowledge, this is linear color space

and this is what gamma color space looks like, pow 2.2

am I wrong?

I'm not understanding what you are trying to say

[karmic hatch]

d = dot(r,r)

that's why it's squared

that's the square length of the vector

if you just return the square root of that instead (or swap dot(r,r) for length(r)) then it should work and be linear
(dot() is slightly faster so maybe do the square root at the end, though it probably won't make much difference)

[meager pelican]

I'm replying to this ^^.
YOU said it was gamma.
if you want it to be linear, add a pow function to the results.

But what's also important is how your unity render pipleline is set up. So if you need to convert back to gamma, apply the reciprocal power function back. See the article I linked.
Basically, I'm saying you can do it in shaders. You should be able to operate in whatever color space you want.

[meager pelican]

Those look like correct interpretation of "what is linear" and "what is gamma" to me.

What that article explains is that you can have inputs (textures or function) that are in gamma. Sometimes shaders just operate on that, with or without applying a pow() function.

But in things like PBR, you'd want linear, so you'd have to convert it manually if the function code you have is outputting gamma.

[severe galleon]

is there a way to set a pixel in 2 textures in 1 shader frag? Both textures are the same resolution and would have the same coordinate passed into the shader fragment

[tight phoenix]

Oh okay, yeah I was just confused. I did know what linear and gamma were, I thought you were telling me I had it wrong

[severe galleon]

I want to try using a second texture to keep track of where a drawing brush has drawn to make opacity work better

[meager pelican]

Research MRT (multiple render targets).

[severe galleon]

I can't get the existing color in any of the textures I'm outputting to

tried half4 col : COLOR for the main one in the frag input struct and half4 col = tex2D(_DrawTex, i.uv)

if I draw to a temporary rendertarget, half4 col = tex2D(_DrawTex, i.uv), then copy the temporary rt to the DrawTexture it works

but that would mean I'd have to create 3 extra rts

this is what I was doing with the structs```
struct v2f
{
float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
float4 vertex : SV_POSITION;
half4 col : COLOR;
};

v2f vert (appdata_full v)
{
v2f o;
o.vertex = UnityObjectToClipPos(v.vertex);
o.uv = v.texcoord;
o.col = v.color;
return o;
};

FragmentOutput frag (v2f i) : SV_Target
{
half4 col = i.col;```

also tex2D() isn't working on any of the 3 textures I'm outputting to

but it seems to work on ones I'm not drawing to

I need to get the existing color for all 3 textures

[kind juniper]

Are you actually using that col anywhere?

[severe galleon]

yes

[kind juniper]

Okay. Are you sure your mesh has vertex colors?

[severe galleon]

also I found a post on stackoverflow saying you cant read in the shader but the appdata_full does have a COLOR input so why can't I at least read the main one

also

[severe galleon]

^

just cant read from the same texture you're writing to

stackoverflow said it's intended behavior (or at least consistent)

[kind juniper]

Here you're getting the color of the vertex and transferring it to the fragment shader.

[kind juniper]

That you can't for sure. It should cause an error actually.

[severe galleon]

it's a difference of changing the first line in frag to half4 col = tex2D(_DrawTex, i.uv);

[kind juniper]

What is?

[severe galleon]

this

hmmmm wait

I wonder if appdata_full COLOR is the vertex color not the texture color

I bet it is

[kind juniper]

Okay. Then share the relevant code.😅
What kind of answer do you expect if you share the wrong code?

[kind juniper]

It's whatever you set it to. If you set it to vertex color in vertex shader, it will be vertex color.

[severe galleon]

struct v2f
{
  float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
  float4 vertex : SV_POSITION;
};

v2f vert (appdata_base v)
{
  v2f o;
  o.vertex = UnityObjectToClipPos(v.vertex);
  o.uv = v.texcoord;
  return o;
};

FragmentOutput frag (v2f i) : SV_Target
{
  half4 col = tex2D(_DrawTex, i.uv);```

[severe galleon]

for the input appdata

not something I set

[kind juniper]

Yes, the input data is always coming from the mesh. If it can map the attributes correctly.

If you want to read and write to multiple textures, I'd use a compute shader instead. Makes it way simpler.

[severe galleon]

also I didn't share the wrong code that was when I thought appdata_full.color was the texture color and was wanting to know why it wasn't working

[kind juniper]

Okay, then I misunderstood, because you were talking about one thing but your code was doing something else...

[severe galleon]

I said a couple things I tried

the code was an implementation of one

[kind juniper]

Anyways, does that solve your issue?

[severe galleon]

I'll look at compute shaders tomorrow

or maybe way later I kinda want to get this thing working in the first place and then clean it up

[leaden turret]

@meager pelican @amber saffron re. Reflection Probes for cheap water reflections
Hope you don't mind me pinging you
https://github.com/kingIZZZY/water-reflections-1

for reference - this is the effect i'm hoping/aiming towards achieving, or anything as close as possible as cheap as possible. But if not possible with cheaper tactics on lower end mobile devices - then i guess i might end up needing to do Planar Reflection supported only on higher-end mobile devices

[restive radish]

How to use the object scale node of an object marked as static? Is the only alternative to unmark the option?

The problem is that static objects are batched, so their scales are set to (1,1,1)

right now I'm just unmarking "batching static" as off, but I wonder if there is a more elegant solution

[kind juniper]

The whole point of batching is that several meshes are drawn as one(in one draw call), so they can't have individual parameters. You'll have think of something else or avoid batching that specific object.

[restive radish]

It's fine. It works well when disabling batching, and the whole point of scaling in this case is to avoid having multiple meshes

[kind juniper]

I'd argue that several different meshes with batching are better than several objects with the same mesh unbatched...

Unless memory is a concern which is unlikely.

[restive radish]

we are talking about big objects that will most likely be culled. Possibly one or two in the screen at once. It won't make much of a difference

[last loom]

Hi! Probably something very dumb. I have a SpriteRenderer with a sprite, and I add a material to it:

            var hurtFlashEffectShader = Resources.Load<Shader>("Shaders/HurtFlashEffect");
            Assert.IsNotNull(hurtFlashEffectShader);

            this.hurtFlashEffectMaterial = new Material(hurtFlashEffectShader);

            var mats = this.FlashingSpriteRenderer.materials;
            var newMats = new Material[mats.Length + 1];

            for (int i = 0; i < mats.Length; i++)
                newMats[i + 1] = mats[i];
            newMats[0] = this.hurtFlashEffectMaterial;

            this.FlashingSpriteRenderer.materials = newMats;

There is no API for it so I just reconstruct a new array of Materials.
Then I just have a shader that always outputs the color white, and this is the result (screenshots: before, after)
The white space around seems to be a clamping issue, but what bothers me most is that the original sprite conserves its color, without being overwritten by the white color returned by my fragment shader.
I'm using the blend mode Blend SrcAlpha OneMinusSrcAlpha.
Thanks in advance.

[last loom]

Nepho help

[patent plinth]

Is it normal for MeshInstancedIndirect not being captured by the profiler?.. This at least millions of grass on a Terrain... but the instance said to be 0 in the profiler..?

Any idea?

and the batces shown there are the instanced terrain, so they're not the grass

[kind juniper]

Profiler info is based on the cpu side graphics api calls and MeshInstancedIndirect is just one draw call afaik. So no wonder that it doesn't show. Also, unlike materials with instancing, it's a lower level graphics api, so I'd assume it's bypassing some of the profiler/diagnostic routine.

[patent plinth]

that makes sense! good god 😆 ... Finally I can rest assure... I thought it was a bug 👍

Many thanks dude! 👍

btw the instancedIndirect was done completely in Shadergraph! thanks to @regal stag blog post that is!

[haughty moat]

Hello, I'm probably missing something obvious but while trying to sample some noise from a texture I've noticed that const float noise = clamp(noiseTexture.SampleLevel(SampleClampPoint, texCoord,0).r,0.001,1.0); gives me lower values than expected.
I've tried writing all samples to a render texture to compare it to the original texture on the CPU. It seems the samples return something a little bit above of the square of the expected value. Is there a common mistake that could produce this result ?

[amber saffron]

Some sRGB / Linear colorspace issue ? 🙂

[haughty moat]

That was it !!!! It's been driving me mad

[amber saffron]

Classic 😉

[leaden turret]

hey @amber saffron 👋 😃 lemme know if you have a chance to peek at my use case example project 👆

[leaden turret]

as for planar reflections themselves - https://forum.unity.com/threads/urp-planar-reflections-guide-example-tutorial.1342613
any help on how to put together this PlanarReflections.cs script to get it to work would be greatly appreciated 🙏

[amber saffron]

I did not realize at all that you were using URP, would have been way more easy in HDRP 😅

[leaden turret]

ahh i see... ye i'm trying hard to target mobile support, and however much possible - even medium-low end devices, ex. i'm testing with an LG G4 with Android 6.0 which i think supports GLES 3.1 but no vulkan (i think)

[amber saffron]

I saw that Andre answered you forum post, hope it helps you setup boat attach reflection 😅

Else, I have a dumb suggestion : import your assets in the boat attack project with their water :p

[leaden turret]

trying that right now...

[leaden turret]

pros: maybe i'll get planar reflections to work. cons: 1) the boat attack water is a bit too realistic and not exactly the style i was aiming for in my particular project... 2) i feel like the boat attack water might be a bit intense performance-wise compared to a much simpler shader i had from a tutorial i was following - much fewer features & shadergraph nodes & options & settings etc... (ironically - that tutorial i was following was the water shader video from a few years back from the boat attack demo itself 😛 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRq-IdShxpU)

[ocean temple]

Not sure if this is the appropriate channel for this question, but does anyone know how I can edit a material so it doesn't have a shadow part? Ideally, I want the light to be evenly distributed, or for the material to cast its own light. Either way, I don't want it to look like this lol

[leaden turret]

turn off shadows on the model/mesh maybe? (not the material)

[ocean temple]

Ok thanks, I'll try that.

[amber saffron]

Soo ... basically, you want an unlit material ?

[turbid perch]

hi!! bit of a shader graph newbie here who needs a little help - essentially im struggling to get a gradient to smoothly transition from a to b colours when one of them is dark - it seems to get overwritten by the lighter colour? ive tried playing around with different ways to blend (blend node, gradient, lerp) but none of them are giving me the effect im looking for. the pics are of my shader graph setup, the result, and what im aiming for
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1015782621453750373/1024862767926227014/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1015782621453750373/1024862768320487565/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1015782621453750373/1024862768723132506/unknown.png

[ocean temple]

Yep. Well I'd like it to glow on its own. That way there's no light or dark part, because it's supposed to be an energy shield.

[amber saffron]

Really sounds like unlit to me

[amber saffron]

You are remapping the position.y value from -1;1 to 0;1 : what size is the mesh you are applying this shader ?

[ocean temple]

Yeah, that's probably what I'm looking for. I'm not exactly an expert on this type of stuff. 😆

[leaden turret]

@amber saffron aside from the planar reflections - can I guilt you into helping a bit with finding out if i can achieve some acceptable level of water reflection effect using reflection probes? 😛

[turbid perch]

its 4/4/4 rn but scaling it up / down doesnt seem to change anything

thats it at like 200 lol

[amber saffron]

The shader you've showed is expecting to work on a cube of size 2units, when scaled at 1,1,1

[amber saffron]

Will be hard by using only cubemap reflection probes, as they are static

[leaden turret]

right... i thought so... at least it's helpful in the sense to know conclusively (is it conclusive?) that reflection probe cubemaps -especially baked ones - won't really be a good solution for my use case

[karmic hatch]

Change the shader to unlit

[leaden turret]

@meager pelican was suggesting that there was some way to get reflection probes to work good-enough in place of planar reflection... but so far they seemed too static according to my tests to work in a large outdoor scene like my project

[amber saffron]

For low end mobiles, you can use old school hacks to fake planar reflection, like double rendering with invert scale

[leaden turret]

isn't that exactly what planar reflection is? rendering a 2nd time and applying to water render texture?

[karmic hatch]

The default unity sphere is -0.5 to 0.5, so that's what you want in your remap (instead of -1 to 1). (iirc same goes for cube and quad).

[ocean temple]

Ok thanks. I'll try and figure out how to do that.

[amber saffron]

I'm talking of rendering your islands twice, one upside down, with a transparent water in between, to fake reflection 🙂

That's how the mirror in mario 64 was done 😄 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG3Hlmi1-3A

[leaden turret]

right - i thought that's exactly what planar reflection is by definition

[karmic hatch]

i think eg reflection probes make a cubemap of the surroundings from the water's perspectives, and then sample that for reflections. Curvy surfaces look better that way

(but you can use a screen space distortion on your double render too)

[amber saffron]

Not exactly

[turbid perch]

thanks! so i tried that and it definitely helped, though the darker colour stills seems to be getting overpowered - maybe its got something to do with how im blending them? rn im just using the blend node on overwrite

[amber saffron]

To blend two colors, lerp should be enough

[leaden turret]

would love to find out how to do this & try it...

[leaden turret]

and this

[karmic hatch]

I'm not too well versed in perceptual stuff but the way your eye sees color isn't linear, so to have it blend smoothly (especially between dark and light) you would want to account for that. Maybe try just squaring the time input in the lerp?

[turbid perch]

no idea why but that works! thanks a lot lol (remy too) i think ill still have to fiddle around with it a little but that seems to have solved the blending issue

[karmic hatch]

Iirc the perceptual brightness is roughly the square root of the linear brightness; glad it worked :)

[turbid perch]

i like ur funny words magic person

cubing it makes for some cool results too

[karmic hatch]

you could also try using a smoothstep instead of a lerp

[turbid perch]

that kinda makes the colours go funky but it looks cool lol

[ocean temple]

Uh oh.

[grizzled bolt]

https://youtu.be/LKnqECcg6Gw This video explains a bit what's actually happening

[karmic hatch]

Have you ever used Shader Graph? There's a good video by Brackeys on making a shield effect

[ocean temple]

No, but I'll check it out, thanks!

[turbid perch]

tyty I'll take a look at it

[severe galleon]

I feel smart I figured out how to properly make a drawing brush shader (I've heavily edited a lot of stuff with the DrawTextureUI addon)

[karmic hatch]

When you're drawing in a straight line, does it just detect new pixels at the front so as to not keep adding alpha until it's opaque?

[severe galleon]

it uses an RHalf texture to keep track of alpha so it doesn't keep reapplying alpha and also lets it use the max alpha like if the brush isn't uniform and it uses a second texture thats the original texture before drawing at that spot for the color to blend with the brush so it doesn't keep reapplying the brush

thats what the 2 things in the top right are

basically it only samples the original texture before drawing and only applies the maximum alpha

I'm going to eventually make the extra textures only size to as big as they need to be to fit the stroke

and also look into compute shaders so I don't need 6 textures (3 temp ones so I can effectively sample and draw to the same textures)

[steel notch]

Hey so I know _MainTex is the reference id for the texture provided by SpriteRenderers.

What's the reference id for the color?

_Color?

[serene creek]

Hello, any idea why Material.HasProperty(int nameID) is returning true on the Standard shader for a property it doesn't have?
Im checking as follows:

if (mat.HasProperty(SeparateCutoutTex)) {
    Debug.Log(mat.name + "of type " + mat.shader.name + " has it");
}```
Any help is appreciated

[meager pelican]

cc: @amber saffron

So the idea was to try using unity's built-in reflections, and "cheating" by having several static baked probes.
-OR-
Trying out baking the nearest probe, really low res and maybe 1 layer only, one side per frame rather than having it static.

IDK if you can pull any of that off on lower end mobile, and you can always update them at very select times only via script.

But it seems that @leaden turret was having a problem getting them to work at all....I think even in the editor.

I have no problem with planar reflections either, conceptually.

[steel notch]

Hey uuuh anyone know what's up here?

Scene View:

Game View:

_>

Shader

If I put any shader on these textures something breaks.

They're rendered as UI elements

[serene creek]

Can't figure out why HasTexture will return true even when the material doesnt have that property, this is what the console outputs:

Code is:

 int SeparateCutoutTex = Shader.PropertyToID("_SeparateCutoutTex");
 if (mat.HasTexture(SeparateCutoutTex)) {
   Debug.Log(mat.name + "of type " + mat.shader.name + " has it");
   mat.GetTexture(SeparateCutoutTex);
 }

[amber saffron]

This looks like a bug

[serene creek]

Indeed looks like that

I also found https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/material-dot-hasproperty-returns-true-after-using-material-dot-settexture-with-named-texture-that-does-not-exist

which was closed as designed

I think that might be the case here, I think another script tried already to set that property and failed

hence the property gets registered in the material

However I dont think that should be as designed

That is confirmed

again, dont think this should be as designed

[cerulean umbra]

Hey sorry to bother, I have a question about a certain effect that I want to accomplish for a project I am working in, I want to clarify I am a gameplay programmer not an artist or technical artist by any means I am quiet dumb regarding all of that so sorry for my lack of knowledge in this just to see if anyone can lead me in the right direction

So this is a rythm game with multiple kinds of notes, the hold note the idea behind its graphic it's that it is surrounded by that shape almost like a chain of sorts with a big and a small spool, the part I have trouble with is that this shape needs to adjust according to the note, sometimes the hold note will be longer so the chain would need to get bigger, sometimes it will be smaller and also the circles change in size the closer they get to the click prompt, so a simple sprite scaling wouldn't work as if you stretch it it would stretch in all directions, ideally I would like something that can adapt to the size of the circles and the distance between them, any idea how I could achieve this? I am pretty sure I need to use a shader but again I am so bad with shader and the sort

Any help is appreciated, being banging my head a couple of days searching for a way to simulate this but I am so bad with graphics

[regal stag]

Shadergraph doesn't have proper support for UI yet, iirc it tries to render all the passes the shader generates, which might be why it looks like that (Frame Debugger window can probably confirm)

I think it works better if the UI is set to Screenspace - Camera rather than Overlay mode.

[steel notch]

https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/ui-image-with-shader-graph-material-doesnt-work-when-canvas-render-mode-is-set-to-overlay

That's pretty insane ngl.

[regal stag]

I think it's through Vertex Color

[stable flare]

im struggling with this big time, is there a way for unity to lay shaders on objects overally, not on their uvs?

they just look weird

[shadow locust]

look into triplanar shaders perhaps?

not 100% sure what you're highlighting and what your desired look is here though

[stable flare]

look at the dots on the 3 parts of the mesh

they are all messed up, the density should be persistent

[leaden turret]

i guess the only "problem" would be whether planar reflections is less performant than any of the probes solutions you described

[leaden turret]

i might not have tried these techniques yet... i basically just tried setting up probes around the scene and baking them and seeing how they look with blending. does it make sense that that in itself just wont do because reflection probes like that are too "static" for the effect i'm hoping to achieve? are the techniques you're describing a bit more "dynamically adjusting based on any viewing angle player might be moving around from" ?

[serene creek]

Seems you are looking for a screen space effect instead

[tight phoenix]

working with noise question, what would be a good method to 'smudge' a noise so that the peaks / valley in gradients are less linear? A lot of the noise nodes are some form of light->dark gradient, I want to distort those gradients

ive tried various blends or math algebra but I havent been able to move the peaks /valleys around in a more smudgey way, it keeps ending up soft gradients like this

[grizzled bolt]

Without blurring I suppose simply decreasing contrast might be the best bet

[karmic hatch]

i think it would probably be easiest to just have a linerenderer with points marking the chain, and then run through the points as necessary to change the shape (maybe that could be sped up with a compute shader but there is some overhead associated with that so it might not be worth it.

Alternatively you can look into combining some distance functions (Inigo Quilez has a page full of them) and then drawing if the distance is between two values.

[stable flare]

well that would be the case tho the problem lies when an object that also has that shader is far away

i do have an option for that and i tested it, but it doesnt looks that good because of distances

the camera can be up close or more distant to the player and the density shown on the model will differ

ill try it again tho, been a minute

[karmic hatch]

you could try distorting it with some more noise (uv -> uv + (noise1, noise2) -> final noise) and then based on how far you distort it, you do what Spazi suggested and change the contrast as well

so it's like the more you smudge it, the lower the contrast

[tight phoenix]

I'm a little unsure how to use contrast in this situation - lower contrast brings all the values closer to grey, but that won't move the position of the peaks and valleys to my understanding, wouldnt that just make the difference in values shallower?

[karmic hatch]

if you distort it and lower the contrast where it's distorted i feel like it'd look like it was smudged

[ornate atlas]

dxc doesn’t as of yet seem to support hlsl 2021

[sturdy nymph]

I have 2 assetbundles, one with my character and one with my shaders
im loading both and instantiating the character, but the shader appears fully black for some reason
help

[tight phoenix]

can you clarify what you mean by contrast? I am trying to follow your instructions but my result is just foggier, its not smudged at all

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/996979168304697384/1024784673806745620/unknown.png

im trying to produce this appearance

but its not just 'noise' its a VERY specific shape

not just any shit added together makes this exact look

it looks that way because the dye is folding over itself as it gets poured into the mold that made it

distorting the UVs isnt producing smudge because it distorts the UVs, the resulting noise itself is still unchanged gentle slopes and valleys linearly spreading out

no matter how messy the edges get

lol the automod bot deleted my message

I guess smudge is too racy?

oh its the picture

https://imgur.com/a/VrX8pst

the bot wont let me post this picture

[gritty steeple]

Changing the Rendering Path from Forward to Deferred somewhat fixes this but it results in no lights working on the map. Only emissive.

[tight phoenix]

those colors look like UVW channels

no idea why they'd be rendering over top of your world though

[gritty steeple]

Me neither. I figured it might be some sort of shading issue but I thought it might of been per-object. Not globally.

I ticked off the 'Strip Unused' from the Renderer to see if that does anything. Building it is taking some time.

[tight phoenix]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/996979168304697384/1025243994378207242/unknown.png
I am not getting anywhere without help, without instruction
Every attempt I make builds up more and more complex, using more and more layers of noise
it becomes completely rigid, I cant change anything, I cant do anything

its just a huge piece of shit that looks nothing like what I want, and no matter what variables I tweak, no matter how many more layers I add on top, it never fucking works

and its so completely rigidly paralyzed that I just have to delete everything and start over because its so completely fucked I can no longer see the forest for the trees

[dim yoke]

Seems more like some debug/visualization type of mode is enabled

[gritty steeple]

This is on a built version though.

You'd think this would show up in the Scene Editor/Game.

Nothing really special enabled in here.

[dim yoke]

I know. There are most likely similiar options available for build too

[gritty steeple]

I reset the Player Settings completely and that didn't do anything at all. 😦

And again with forward rendering this happens. With deferred rendering, point lights seem to be completely broke across the scene.

[sturdy nymph]

anyone know a fix?

[tranquil jackal]

If you use Addressables, the webgl build includes all possible shaders variants into your memory. Normaly you can select shaders you want with shaders collection and strip everything else on build. But it seems terrain does not work the same way, so I thought maybe anyone knows some tips about that.

[steel notch]

Hey question. If I made a material and want this material to have a slightly different setting on 1 specific gameobject/prefab (like color for example), do I need to make a whole new material just with this setting?

[meager pelican]

Reflection probes can blend. But dynamic objects....move...and won't be in the baked images, of course.

So you know what I would do if I were you? I'd go make an empty scene or even new project, and put some reflection probes around, and some "fluff" scenery, and create a material and put it on a ground plane....black albedo and 1.0 metallic reflective. No special water shader, just reflection, with the standard shader.

Bake the probes, and see how they work/blend. See how it performs on mobile with 100% baked probes. Maybe try it with just a simple-specular shader too, see if the stock shader supports probe blending. And test on lower end mobile.

Once I had an idea of how it all works and what performance is like on the targets you're after....THEN...I'd go see if a custom shader is much much faster than stock stuff.

That's not to say you won't still need your water shader. But you're basically asking questions about "how Unity works" and rather than me telling you (and maybe being wrong or under estimated the performance costs) you should try it out "stock" and see if you even like the effects. Read the docs on reflection probes too.

I have to get to work, so I apologize for being brief, I just have limited time right now.

[amber saffron]

and @leaden turret
Unless you are in HDRP, reflection probes don't blend per pixel, but per objects.

[grizzled bolt]

MaterialPropertyBlocks can be used to override material properties per instance (SRP batching won't support it but also it shrugs off extra materials)
You can also have a shader that can change its appearance with different UV coordinates and vertex colors which can be different per mesh

[steel notch]

Is this something that can be done from the inspector?

I understand that you can create new instances of materials and modify them from scripts no problem.

[grizzled bolt]

No, MaterialPropertyBlocks are modified through scripts, similarly how you would create or modify material instances

[steel notch]

Oof. So no way to define specific material settings for certain gameobjects in the inspector?

I literally have to make a new material just to change some simple thing like color?

[grizzled bolt]

No

[grizzled bolt]

With material instances yes, with material property blocks no

[white pivot]

hey guys do you know how to use IOR in shader Graph

?

[amber saffron]

Set the material to transparent, with refraction enabled, and assign a IoR value

[amber saffron]

The names are very confusing :/
"IOR" is for the eye shading model, "Index Of Refraction" is for transparent with refraction

[white pivot]

ahha i see i think IOR is Index of Refraction at first.

[tardy solar]

How I can make dotted outline with shader graph? Like there but only in contour : https://lindenreidblog.com/2017/12/24/animated-dotted-outline-shader-in-unity/

I using Quick Outline asset and want to rewrite it a bit for dotted style

But seems like it's not appropriate for this : ```cs
Shader "Custom/Outline Fill" {
Properties {
[Enum(UnityEngine.Rendering.CompareFunction)] _ZTest("ZTest", Float) = 0

_OutlineColor("Outline Color", Color) = (1, 1, 1, 1)
_OutlineWidth("Outline Width", Range(0, 10)) = 2

}

SubShader {
Tags {
"Queue" = "Transparent+110"
"RenderType" = "Transparent"
"DisableBatching" = "True"
}

Pass {
  Name "Fill"
  Cull Off
  ZTest [_ZTest]
  ZWrite Off
  Blend SrcAlpha OneMinusSrcAlpha
  ColorMask RGB

  Stencil {
    Ref 1
    Comp NotEqual
  }

  CGPROGRAM
  #include "UnityCG.cginc"

  #pragma vertex vert
  #pragma fragment frag

  struct appdata {
    float4 vertex : POSITION;
    float3 normal : NORMAL;
    float3 smoothNormal : TEXCOORD3;
    UNITY_VERTEX_INPUT_INSTANCE_ID
  };

  struct v2f {
    float4 position : SV_POSITION;
    fixed4 color : COLOR;
    UNITY_VERTEX_OUTPUT_STEREO
  };

  uniform fixed4 _OutlineColor;
  uniform float _OutlineWidth;

  v2f vert(appdata input) {
    v2f output;

    UNITY_SETUP_INSTANCE_ID(input);
    UNITY_INITIALIZE_VERTEX_OUTPUT_STEREO(output);

    float3 normal = any(input.smoothNormal) ? input.smoothNormal : input.normal;
    float3 viewPosition = UnityObjectToViewPos(input.vertex);
    float3 viewNormal = normalize(mul((float3x3)UNITY_MATRIX_IT_MV, normal));

    output.position = UnityViewToClipPos(viewPosition + viewNormal * -viewPosition.z * _OutlineWidth / 1000.0);
    output.color = _OutlineColor;

    return output;
  }

  fixed4 frag(v2f input) : SV_Target {
    return input.color;
  }
  ENDCG
}

}
}```

[amber saffron]

The image you showed is basically an outline with screen space scrolling lines.
So, taking the shader you showed, add some scrolling diagonal lines in the fragment stage and it should be good to go

[swift loom]

is it possible to make one pixel draw in another pixel using hlsl or are all the pixels entirely self contained

[celest steppe]

Hey I need some help. Does someone know why I get this weird black lines at the sides? I guess its coming from the Alpha but my Alpha should be working correctly. I use Shader graphs

[kind juniper]

You can't for a few reasons.

1. It could cause a race condition
2. The pixel of a fragment shader thread is decided from the mesh triangles projected to the screen. If you want to change that, you'll need to hack the GPU rendering workflow(which is probably only possible with physically altering it)

[swift loom]

yeah i was 99% sure it wasn't possible but i had painted myself into a corner so had to check 😂

thanks tho

[kind juniper]

What are you trying to do though?

[swift loom]

it's too complicated to tell my shader is like 1600 lines long. basically i wanted to draw a line on a tile above but the earlier stages of the code make me only able to draw within the current tile. but i can work around it.

[kind juniper]

Are you mixing in a texture somewhere?

[karmic hatch]

can you post a larger image of your graph?

[celest steppe]

Sure here is a picture of my full graph

[karmic hatch]

For some reason, it's smaller so the text is unreadable

[celest steppe]

I dont think so. Only multiply

[celest steppe]

This should be better I hope

[karmic hatch]

yes it is, thanks :)

Try putting it through a saturate or abs node before it goes into each of the power nodes

Powers don't like negative numbers and may act up there

[kind juniper]

Or just after splitting the uv sampling should be enough perhaps🤔

[celest steppe]

Works! Great thanks a lot guys 🙂