archived-shaders

[lyric vortex]

Ok I have checked the _CameraOpaqueTexture, it seems correct. It is updated correctly. So why my scene color node returns the value of the first frame ?

[obtuse basin]

so i have a really newbie question about shaders. i don't know the first thing about programming them yet but i picked up a shader asset that lets me palette swap my sprites by changing the material. i got it working just fine in a 2d urp project but now im' trying to use it on a spriterenderer in a 3d urp project and it's not changing the colors with material. i'm pretty sure i set it up right, do some 2d shaders not work in 3d even on 2d assets like spriterenderers?

[lyric vortex]

@regal stag I can reproduce my refraction problem on a simple 3D URP project. I have only one plane with the refraction shader, and the skybox shader on the scene.

[regal stag]

Are you sure the shader/material is set to Transparent?

[lyric vortex]

Unfortunately Yes...

[regal stag]

Probably depends on the asset, but yes some shaders if they're written with the 2D Renderer in mind, won't necessarily work correctly in 3D (even on sprites)

If they're lit for example the 2D and 3D lighting systems are completely different.

[lyric vortex]

Material & Shader

[regal stag]

Are you sure what you're seeing is the refraction/scene color? With the material being specular it might be the environmental reflections cubemap, which is indeed baked.

A way around that might be to use a Realtime Reflection Probe, though that might not perform well?

[obtuse basin]

thank you, i was afraid of that

[lyric vortex]

My skybox shader and my refraction shader (named WaterNew)
Here, in this test project, my skybox is a simple cubemap but in my main project, I can move it dynamically.

How can it be backed if it can dynamically move ?

[regal stag]

If the skybox isn't moving here how do you know there's a problem?

[lyric vortex]

I press play in editor and I change the cubemap texture of the skybox. The skybox is updated but the refraction not. The previous cubemap is refracted

[regal stag]

Can you show a screenshot?

[lyric vortex]

Editor scene before play:

Game playing:

[regal stag]

That's not the refraction, that's reflection.

[lyric vortex]

Game playing cubemap changed:

Ah ok sorry because it's named refraction in the unity water shader example.

[regal stag]

The material looks grey, which also means the Opaque Texture is disabled on the URP asset

[lyric vortex]

it's enabled on the main project, I try to enable on the test project too

[regal stag]

The problem isn't the refraction / Scene Color, it's the reflection cubemap sampled by the Lit Graph - visible when the Smoothness is larger than 0.

[lyric vortex]

Is there a way to solve that ?

[regal stag]

Placing a Reflection Probe in the scene set to Realtime could work. If you just want the skybox in it, remove all layers from Culling Mask.

[lyric vortex]

I need to run on very low performance devices, is it ok to use reflexion probes ? In fact i'm trying to create a water shader and I have several water spots in the scene.

[regal stag]

Idk, might be expensive there. Could also set the probe to custom and bake from script every so often, but not every frame. Might perform better.
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ReflectionProbe.RenderProbe.html

[lyric vortex]

mmh well thank you very much for your time. I have a last question, I have other objects in the scene and they are not reflected by the plane. When you talk about " it's the reflection cubemap sampled by the Lit Graph", you talked about the shader applied on the plane material ?

Which shader backed something ? The skybox shader or the plane shader ?

[steady nexus]

Hey

I don't know if it's the right chat

But...

Someone know how can I export shading nodes from Blender to unity or compact nodes into an image/file .png?

.
I tried something called "baking" but it turns my glass texture into a non-transparent texture with very bad color instead of the original.

At the same time I found another video where they use a Blender extension called "nodes exporter" which copy and paste the nodes as they are from Blender to Unity, but I can't find it online to download it

[grand jolt]

Hey, I've been trying to work on recreating t3ssel8r's famous pixel art style in unity 3d. I created a pixelation effect but it doesn't look nearly as good.
``
Shader "Hidden/NewImageEffectShader"
{
Properties
{
_MainTex ("Texture", 2D) = "white" {}
_pixels("Resolution", int) = 512
_pw("Pixel Width", float) = 64
_ph("Pixel Height", float) = 64
}
SubShader
{
// No culling or depth
Cull Off ZWrite Off ZTest Always

    Pass
    {
        CGPROGRAM
        #pragma vertex vert
        #pragma fragment frag

        #include "UnityCG.cginc"

        struct appdata
        {
            float4 vertex : POSITION;
            float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
        };

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

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

        float _pixels;
        float _pw;
        float _ph;

        sampler2D _MainTex;

        fixed4 frag (v2f i) : SV_Target
        {
            float _dx = _pw * (1 / _pixels);
            float _dy = _ph * (1 / _pixels);
            float2 coord = float2(_dx * floor(i.uv.x / _dx), _dy * floor(i.uv.y / _dy));

            fixed4 col = tex2D(_MainTex, coord);
            return col;
        }
        ENDCG
    }
}

}
``

Does anyone know how i can create his shader?

[lunar valley]

I do not know such an extension, you cannot bake glass into a texture because its transparent and it refracts and reflects and does other things with your lighting. I would just remake the glass shader in unity

[lunar valley]

I do not know how yours looks like so its hard to say what to improve uppon

You could also try to progressivelly down and then upscale your renderTexture, but make sure you do it with point filtering

[cosmic sphinx]

I think t3ssel8er doesn't decrease the resolution with shader - he just decreases the real game resolution. You can see in his editor window that the selected resolution is just small (e.g. 640x360 or 960x540). In shaders, he mostly adjusts the color so the color palette is reduced to a small number of choices. He is either rounding those up to certain thresholds or using some kind of look-up-table.

[steady nexus]

Is there a way to work with nodes on unity as well?

[lunar valley]

yeah shader graf

[steady nexus]

Is a plugin that I need to install, or is it something that is already on unity?

[rare wren]

If you use urp or hdrp it's already installed as a package

BiRP can be used, but not all features might work iirc

[steady nexus]

Ok

[buoyant geyser]

Can’t speak for his methods but I’ve had some success in this way:
-Sample the region of pixels you’re going to downscale to a single pixel
-Calculate the average color in the region
-Paint in the closest sampled color to the average

It’s heavier than traditional downsampling but it has a lot of benefits in clarity

You’ll get a similar level of smoothness to bilinear filtering while retaining an accurate color palette like you would in point filtering

[lyric vortex]

What is the fastest/most efficient way to create a water with reflection shader ?

[lunar valley]

there is none, you will need to specify your needs so that we can answer properly, these are the ways you can do reflections tho: reflection probe, planar reflection, screen space reflections, raytracing

[lyric vortex]

I'm trying to render as best as possible water spots (drawn using a water shader on a plane) in a golf terrain. Constraint, this must run on mobile devices. If reflection is possible without eating all the gpu then I will use that. Currently I'm using the Scene color node in my shader, the problem is that the reflected image is not dynamic (you can see my previous discussion, yesterday with @regal stag)

[lunar valley]

I would really not do reflections for a mobile game even on low end pc devices the mirrors are often dirty or not reflecting. I would rather go with something stylized with simple lighting and do refraction only. But if you want to have reflection the probably cheapest way is parallax corrected reflection probes(cubemaps)

[lyric vortex]

Ok @lunar valley thanks for your help 🙂

[near karma]

[numthreads(10,10,10)]
void NoiseMain (uint3 id : SV_DispatchThreadID)
{    
    Density[ id.x, id.y, id.z] = 5;
}

This shader creates an array of floats, but only the very bottom layer is '5' the rest are '0'. I don't understand, the buffer is sized correctly. I don't see any reason for this to be happening, although I'm new to compute shaders.

[low lichen]

This can happen when numthreads and the thread counts used in the Dispatch call aren't valid together.

[near karma]

They're both 10x10x10

Is there a thread limit?

I didn't imagine it would be this easy to hit

But it still sets some values so...

[low lichen]

If numthread is 10x10x10 and the dispatch count is 10x10x10, that means the thread count will be 100x100x100, since they are multiplied together. Is Density 100x100x100?

[near karma]

no, lol

I'll look into .Dispatch and numthreads promptly

Huh...

I changed the dispatch threads to 1x1x1 and now I only get a single row of 5s along the x axis.

[near karma]

This is very confusing

densityShader.Dispatch(noiseKernel, 1, 1, 1);

[numthreads(10, 10, 10)]
void NoiseMain (uint3 id : SV_DispatchThreadID)
{
    Density[ id.x, id.y, id.z] = 5;
}

Really not sure what else to share, it's outputting a row of 5s on the x axis among many 0s, but it was outputting a whole plane of them when dispatched with 10 x 10 x 10.

Now it only does the x axis row, even if I change it back

I've been fiddling with dispatch and numthreads and I see no rhyme nor reason to what make what work how. I've gotten a bunch of solid planes to render again, but I still can't get a solid cube

[lunar valley]

I couldn't really say with only the numthreads and dispatch count in mind. I am not sure what Density is doing.

[near karma]

I just made the kernel a single dimension

[lunar valley]

so its fixed now?

[near karma]

Practically, yes. Optimally? probably not.

[outer lake]

I want to use vertex weights in my shadergraph but idk how, what's the input called?

[buoyant geyser]

I'm writing a transparent fog shader, the shader needs to be in a non-transparent render queue so that i can receive shadows

The issue is that when i enable any sort of alpha blending in the shader, the render order is broken and the fog renders behind everything else

alpha blending on

alpha blending off

all i changed between the two screenshots was this:

before: #pragma surface surf BackFace keepalpha decal:blend
after: #pragma surface surf BackFace keepalpha //decal:blend

what could be causing this, and is there any way around it?

the tilesets in the image are in the geometry queue, the fog is in the alphatest queue

interestingly the fog does blend over the character model, the rest of the environment is (tilemap) sprite renderers and the fog itself is a quad mesh renderer

the sprite renderers here have a custom shader that's setting them to be in the geometry queue, though

turns out i had manually set the sorting layer of my tilemap shader in the material, it was ignoring the shader

though it seems im still unable to make the shader recieve shadows

the renderers are set to recieve shadows, the object im using to create those shadows is in the light's culling mask, and the light is set to hard shadows but im getting nothing

even if i disable the alpha blending on the fog shader, still nothing

is there something specific i'd need to do with this shader to make it recieve shadows?

https://pastebin.com/Xi307wVk

the relevant shader code

[shrewd spoke]

Have you tried increasing your shadow distance in your Project Settings?

[buoyant geyser]

yes! thank you this worked

[lunar valley]

somewhere in the internet, maybe...

[indigo citrus]

what is the PBR graph in URP?

[broken vigil]

So, let's say I want characters in my game to have faces, which is a bit of a radical idea, but I've got a vision.

What's a good practice for making animated 2D faces on 3D models? Right now, my ideas are to have a texture which has all the different face sprites on it, and swap between them using UVs, but I'm torn between using Decals to project it directly onto the model, or using an invisible copy of the head, which has the face rendered onto it.

I don't want the faces to be a part of the skin texture/material itself, since that feels like it would make it harder to edit freely, and wouldn't let me have the faces be transparent as easily.

Is there some resources I can look into for this kind of "2D face on a 3D model" thing?

[full void]

I have a quick question on texture arrays. Is it possible to tile the textures in a grid? What I'm trying to achieve is a shader that let's me move around a grid of images generated by loading many tiles into a texture array but I'm having serious difficulties with the second axis. Right now I'm able to do this

but what i'm trying to achieve is this

                {

                    v2f o;

                    
                    o.vertex = UnityObjectToClipPos(vertex);

                    o.uv.xy = ((vertex.xy) * 8 + float2(_UVOffsetX,_UVOffsetY)) * _UVScale;

                    o.uv.z = ((floor(vertex.x*8) + _UVOffsetX )*_UVScale) + 3.5;

                    return o;
                } ```

with this code

has anyone else had experience with this? thanks in advance

[broken vigil]

Is there a way to access unity's SSAO Texture in a custom renderer feature, or access the texture in an HLSL file for use in shadergraph?

or make a custom one from the depth texture or whatnot

[indigo citrus]

hey

I was following this tutorial to have an energy shield

his results are like this

but this is my result...

I have an almost 1 to 1 shader graph, but we use different unity versions so I can't copy exactly

for some reason the color is not being applied

[amber saffron]

You probably want to set the alpha clip value to 0 or a very small value like 0.0001

What is the emission color value ?

[indigo citrus]

check it idk what's wrong

it's like this now

I think emissions are disabled in my scene... because I tried adding fire from particle pack and it looked very bland

[amber saffron]

What if you just disable alpha clip ?

[shadow kraken]

The example you shared uses bloom in addition to emission

[warm rapids]

I've got this project to make an outdoor scene with a set amount of deliverables. One of the deliverables is 3 Shaders/Materials made within Unity. I've been working on one that will let me add moving grass to the scene, but I am not sure what I could do for the other two. If anyone has any suggestions or resources for any shaders I could use to enhance this scene, that would be great.

[shadow kraken]

Maybe a clouds shader and a pulse shader emitting from the artefact?

[indigo citrus]

how do I add bloom only to the object in question, I am kinda stuck even after looking online

it's either all bloom or no bloom

[shadow kraken]

That's correct

[indigo citrus]

how do I make only the object emit then?

[shadow kraken]

You can see here there is bloom on the beams in the back as well

[warm rapids]

So for a clouds shader, I would make the clouds material in shadergraph and then apply that to a skybox right?

[shadow kraken]

You can use the bloom threshold to limit it

[indigo citrus]

right

so I can make the world have a limited amount, but the object have a lot?

[cosmic prairie]

you need bloom post processing to look like that

oh nv

[shadow kraken]

Yeah for example, there are different ways to do it from simple to advanced. But you should be able to find a tutorial for it :)

[cosmic prairie]

m

[indigo citrus]

yeah but I only want my object to glow, not the rest

[cosmic prairie]

the stronger the emission the stronger the bloom

enable hdr in camera

give your object a lot of emission

and crank up the threshold

[amber saffron]

@indigo citrus Like I said, what does it look like if you disable alpha clip on the material ?
I'm not sure but it looks like emission is ignoring alpha.

One other option would be to use unlit transparent, with additive blending

[indigo citrus]

without clipping

[cosmic prairie]

looks like the alpha is ignored

[indigo citrus]

not sure why

[cosmic prairie]

multiply emission with the value u use for alpha

[tacit parcel]

I think the shader itself still has some problem
There's no gradient from the edge of the sphere to center, and the sphere doesnt seem to react/intersect with the level
Maybe you need to activate some depth buffer or something

[cosmic prairie]

it does work for him

alpha clip shows that it uses the depth buffer correctly

[indigo citrus]

at least it glows now

[cosmic prairie]

do this @indigo citrus

[indigo citrus]

1 sec

[amber saffron]

Because you are only using emission and don't care about the surface color, I'd really recommand giving a try to the unlit method

[indigo citrus]

same thing

[cosmic prairie]

eh

[indigo citrus]

unlit graph you mean?

[amber saffron]

Yes

For example, unlit with alpha blend, and plug what is currently emission into the color output

[indigo citrus]

forgot to disable alpha clipping lol

sorry about that

[indigo citrus]

well it works now, so I won't complain, thanks anyways

[amber saffron]

You could leave alpha cliping, but set the clip value to 0 or very low

[indigo citrus]

what does it do excatly?

not really sure

[amber saffron]

It will not render pixels where alpha is bellow the clip value, reducing a bit the cost of the shader

[indigo citrus]

I see

[indigo citrus]

how do I make the power of the fresnel go from 4 to 6 and back over time

also I want to be able to increase the power property by code

[cosmic prairie]

does it actually reduce the cost? only ever saw people complaining about clipping opaque objects messing with optimization decreasing performace, never saw the opposite said for transparents

[amber saffron]

If you want to control it from code, use the Material.SetFloat api

[indigo citrus]

yeah but I want a breathing animation in the shader itself, where the intensity can be scaled by code

[amber saffron]

The performance of clipping is very dependent of the use case :/

[cosmic prairie]

let's say I have a fullscreen quad, rendered in the transparent queue, half of it is clipped, does the clipped half cost less? If I were to dither the clipping to the whole quad so it's still half, but every second pixel is clipped the performance will be less?

[amber saffron]

Then for example, instead of the power input, use an other time sin, remapped from -1;1 to minPower;maxPower

[amber saffron]

Theorically, if the clipping operation is done before the shading, it will indeed cost less.
Now, if you clip half the pixels dithered, I think that the shading operation is still done for discarded pixels, because visible and discarded ones are still in the same thread group

[cosmic prairie]

so per thread group it can sometimes optimize? is this gpu / graphics api dependent?

[indigo citrus]

I don't get it

[amber saffron]

When talking of opaques, for example in HDRP there is a depth prepass, and opaque objects are rendered afterwards with a equal depth test.
So the clipping is done early on in the depth only pass, and cost is reduced but the ztest in the subsequent passes

[proud hinge]

Can someone help me with a small code🥹

[amber saffron]

no, use the remap node

time.sin -> in
-1 ; 1 -> range in
power min ; power max -> range out

[amber saffron]

Ask your question, don't ask for permission 🙂

[indigo citrus]

I'm lost

I started doing this 3 hours ago I really don't know any of that

[amber saffron]

Remap node

It will do exactly what it sounds like, remap a value from an input range to an output range

[indigo citrus]

this doesn't breathe in

oh wait

actually it does

it's my editor lagging

[proud hinge]

Im not able to do this as asked in my assignment

[amber saffron]

This is script, for #archived-code-general , not shader code

[proud hinge]

Okay

[indigo citrus]

thanks remy

[buoyant geyser]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/497873729578336276/1111461759543418941/2023-05-25_20-56-38.mp4

Is there a way that I can apply a Gaussian blur effect to the lighting and shadows applied to a surface shader?

Trying to get a pseudo volumetric lighting sort of effect, but the hard shadows being cast on the fog doesn’t look great

[minor pewter]

Then you shouldn't be in that class or should have started learning it when you had time

[indigo citrus]

the texture is not being emitted

(I'm using URP)

I want the orb to have a texture with the provided pattern

[lunar valley]

put it into the base color then instead of the alpha

[indigo citrus]

then it's not transparent, and the pattern is still not there

I want the pattern on the energy sphere

[lunar valley]

look why are you multiplying your texture with a color when alpha is a float and not a vector that makes no sense

[indigo citrus]

look I started this 4 hours ago

never touched it before

[vague sinew]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiOGWZXBg4Y&t=896s

[regal stag]

Is the texture assigned on the Material?

[indigo citrus]

how do I check that

ah

got it

[regal stag]

Would be the material asset assigned to your sphere. Will be listed under the MeshRenderer component.

[indigo citrus]

works now

thanks

I thought I only needed to assign the texture once

[cosmic prairie]

if the material with the shader on it exists before you assign a texture as default in shader graph it won't be overwritten automatically

[indigo citrus]

I see

[regal stag]

Be aware that as Let'sBlend is hinting at, using a Vector4->Alpha will take the red component so this will only work provided the Color has some red values.
I tend to keep Color and Alpha calculations with separate chains as it makes things clearer.

[indigo citrus]

yeah I see

[regal stag]

Would probably multiply these ports instead

[indigo citrus]

yeah I see

[grand jolt]

So I have a simple parallax shader using shader graph, and I have artifacts at the corner that I don't know how to handle

[amber saffron]

You can't do anything "easy" to fix this, it's just how parallax occlusion mapping works

[grand jolt]

Got it, I was looking at research articles on POM, and everything was way over my head 😅

[vocal narwhal]

A common way to work with it is to use a trim, literally covering it with another mesh 😆

[amber saffron]

Yes, indeed, because you usually apply POM to flat surface, you can hide the end of it with a mesh 🙂

[grand jolt]

Got it lol

[grand jolt]

Out of curiosity, what are some techniques that people use?

Is this effect basically why Parallax isn't used in games very frequently?

[amber saffron]

It's also because it's a bit costly, and works only for flat-ish surfaces

[amber saffron]

I didn't find proper explanations on how it's done, but the method is named "silhouette correction" or "silhouette parallax occlusion mapping".
So, same a POM but you need to find a way to also pass the geometry shape to the POM loop and check if the raytrace goes out of it to discard pixels.

[grand jolt]

That makes sense, thanks for the explanation!

[grand jolt]

Yeah... That's complicated lol
I would have to rewrite this using a shader, not a shadergraph, and the research papers AMD released years ago are gone, so that's unfortunate

The Tatarchuk paper on POM i mean

The only implementation I found is in the unity core HDRP shaders and a forum post & video from 2009

I might try my hand at tessellation as well, that seems quite useful

[amber saffron]

It's here : https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiehs29kpP_AhVhVaQEHfVhDqsQFnoECAgQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fadvances.realtimerendering.com%2Fs2006%2FTatarchuk-POM.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0lRPtKbbFabWSytQ3KNo4Y

You don't need to do a full hand written shader, you can do it with a custom function node in shadergraph

[amber saffron]

HDRP implements the depth offset for POM, which allows to accomodate with mesh intersections and shadowing, but not silhouette.

[grand jolt]

My bad, it wasn't HDRP, its here:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/blob/c6ae7599b33ca48852eddd592b3e40f33f2dd982/com.unity.render-pipelines.core/ShaderLibrary/PerPixelDisplacement.hlsl

At least I think thats what it is doing

[grand jolt]

Oh yeah! I forgot about those!

Also, thanks for finding it! I was searching all over google at couldn't find it

[glass coyote]

hello! is there a good terrain shader for webGL?

that usees splatmaps or paintable layers

[glass coyote]

never mind

[toxic flume]

Can I have a cut out shader for sprites? I mean with sprite renderer with sort order like standard sprites

[grizzled bolt]

Sprite renderers by themselves don't have to use transparent shaders, opaque cutout will work too
Sprite graphs in the 2D URP specifically don't expose that option, though

[toxic flume]

I see z-fighting when they are overlapped

They both have sprite renderer with sprite and a cutout shader

Solved, I should have added

 ZTest Always
 ZWrite Off

 Properties
    {
        [PerRenderData]
        _MainTex ("Texture", 2D) = "white" {}
        _CutoutValue("Cutout Value",Float) = 0.5
    }
    SubShader
    {
        Tags
        {
            "RenderType" = "TransparentCutout" "Queue" = "AlphaTest"
        }
        LOD 100
        Cull OFF
        ZTest Always
        ZWrite Off

[grizzled bolt]

In my experience opaques must be sorted by position or with render queue

Does ztest always actually work? I'm not sure if I understand what it does but it seems to make it ambiguous which one is drawn first

[silk wharf]

Hello there, How can I make a specular lighting effect into a sprite shadergraph ? I though of using the dot product between the world position and directional light but it doesnt show the result, also I noticed that using a standard Vector3 instead of ligh direction still does get displayed into my sprite, what could I be doing wrong?

Here is how my graph looks

[grizzled bolt]

You'd want to use normal direction, not geometry position

[silk wharf]

Thanks for your response, sadly it still doesnt work

Is this how the graph should look like based on what you said?

[grizzled bolt]

Looks right
Are you using the 2D renderer? That one doesn't support any of the usual light functions

[silk wharf]

Yeah, Im using it, so if it doesnt work on 2D renderer, I guess I will use an external script for getting light dir.

But the thing here is that this still does not work even by using a standard Vector3

Is the normal vector inside the functions 2D renderer doesnt support?

I noticed that by setting the Z value of my vector to be 1 instead of 0, now I get color on my material, but it covers the whole sprite

like it goes from gray to black on the whole sprite

this is the current result

[grizzled bolt]

Zero vectors don't have a direction so dot product doesn't work with them

[silk wharf]

Ohh, okay

[grizzled bolt]

That's expected with "N dot L" lighting *and flat quad geometry, but I assume that's not what you want after all

Maybe "fragment distance to light position" is more what you're after

[silk wharf]

Yeah, what I need in this case is to simulate a highligh over a sprite, I guess the problem right now is that I am not controlling the "size" of the highlight

[grizzled bolt]

Unclear what "highlight" means exactly

[silk wharf]

Pretty much a specular over my sprite; My goal is to make a metallic shader for my sprite, toon looking and not reflective but rather can simulate the specular / shining of the metal

Something like the white spots here for example

[grizzled bolt]

You'll need also a normal map for that

[silk wharf]

I'm using one but certainly there is a very weird behaviour with it and my scene

I am using shadows with a shape light and the normal seems to be projected onto the background of my scene as I move

I assume I need to ignore background to receive shadows somehow to fix that

[grizzled bolt]

You'd have to implement normal mapping manually to your custom lighting

[grizzled bolt]

Not sure what kind of issue this is but it sounds like a separate one, related to 2D lighting / shadow casting

[silk wharf]

Is this the correct channel for that? or is it #archived-lighting ?

[grizzled bolt]

#🖼️┃2d-tools is most likely to have people familiar with 2D renderer's lighting

[silk wharf]

Alright, thanks I will ask for that there

But I still need to figure this highlight thingy out, I thought of another solution but not sure on how to implement it

I don't need my specular to be highly accurate or realistic, I just need some sort of visual indicator of the metal shining, it can be a simple shape over the sprite

I thought of using a sphere mask and map it over the sprite, and set its offset based on the direction of the light / a specified vector

Does that sound suitable? or is it an overly complicated idea?

[grizzled bolt]

I can't quite visualize that in my mind
Metallic and specular looks are quite easy to get wrong when you can't rely on 3D shading, I recommend doing a lot testing

[silk wharf]

Alright, I will give it a try then, thanks for your time

[frozen dawn]

how do i increase shadows render distance

[lunar valley]

in the project settings (in the quality tab I think)

[frozen dawn]

yeah there is something but how do i use the tier that i want and choose the shadow render distance

[rare wren]

quality, not graphics

[frozen dawn]

i dont understand this

oh iam stupid sorry

[scenic ice]

Hey guys. I'm working on a 2D over-world map that needs to have Fog of War on it to hide the areas of the map that haven't been explored. What I'm thinking as of now is to have the map as a seperate Layer under the fog then having a shader where I can define coordinates where the fog shows through. I'm not really well versed in shaders so anyone who can give me some advice on this would be appreciated.

I would like to make fog of war like this.

[solid scaffold]

Hello guys, any idea how I can avoid this on my line renderer :

[latent mirage]

have you tried FXAA ,https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/fxaa-fast-approximate-anti-aliasing-3590

[buoyant geyser]

Is there any feasible way to apply blur to a shader's lighting model? I'd like to soften the lighting and shadows on my fog shader, but it doesn't seem like unity supports this in any way with the built in render pipeline

{
    half NdotL = abs(dot(s.Normal, lightDir));
    half4 color;

    color.rgb = s.Albedo * _LightColor0.rgb * (NdotL * atten);
    color.a = s.Alpha;

    return color;
}``` This is the current lighting model im using for this, but it doesn't seem like theres any way to sample neighboring positions to average the lighting or whatever

if this isn't feasible, could it be done in the finalcolor function?

[grand jolt]

Okay, how can I blur the background and foreground in my shader graph?

This is making me lose my fucking mind, I cannot figure it out, the edges are to hard, and I know there is a node I can use

[buoyant geyser]

can't speak for shader graph but in a traditional shader you'd either implement a guassian blur function or just sample neighboring texcoords and average the color

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Xltfzj

if nothing else i'd imagine you can make a custom node that implements this or something

[grand jolt]

yeah, feels a bit overkill though since I just need to soften the edges on a rgb

[buoyant geyser]

fundamentally that's how blurring works, you average to nearby colors

there might be some fancy edge softening thing im not aware of

[remote nexus]

Filled Font Shader?

[lunar valley]

there is wrap diffuse gives a softer lighting cs float wrap_diffuse = saturate((dot(L, N) + wrap) / (1 + wrap));

[pale python]

hi,
is it possible to make a sample2D from float3 or float4/fixed4 ?
I mean can we reverse this
float3 color = tex2D(_tex, uv); ... instead of outputting float3 from tex2D , we output tex2D from a float3 , is it possible ?

[low lichen]

On the face of it, your question makes no sense. Do you mean you want to write to a texture from a shader?

[pale python]

well, let me put it this way.
i have a complex shader, that does what its supposed to do , I need to convert it to sample2D for the next step

[low lichen]

A shader cannot create anything. You can create a RenderTexture from script and pass it to the shader so it can write to it, or just render directly to the texture so whatever the shader returns gets written to it.

This can be done with a Blit.

[pale python]

fixed4 main(v2f i) : SV_Target
{
    // Sample the main texture.
    fixed4 color = tex2D(_MainTex, i.uv);
    
    //  some other code that changes the value of "color" and makes it a completely different thing   
    ....

    // for this step , I need the sample2D from the final value of "color" ( if possible ) to be able to move on the next step

    // Return the final color.
    return color;
}

@low lichen that is what i meant 😄 , I think its gonna be expensive to go bk to c# then shader again

[low lichen]

But why do you need to convert it to a sample2D if you already have the modified color right there? Is it because you need to sample colors from different pixels than the current one?

[pale python]

yea , i need sample the current value of "color" to be able to use it in the next step, is that possible ?

[low lichen]

But what do you mean by "current" value? You already have code that is modifying color. You already have color. Why do you want to put it in a texture just so you can sample it again and get the same color?

[pale python]

not the same color, i have other functions that uses the sample of the current state and make it right

[low lichen]

Still doesn't make sense to me. Are you going to sample it with a different UV value?

Are you going to sample it multiple times to calculate some average?

[pale python]

is it possible to extract the sample from color ?

[low lichen]

What you're saying makes no sense. sampler2D represents a texture object, with a resolution, texture format, filtering options. What kind of texture would you expect if I tried to convert a float4(0, 0, 0, 0) to a sampler2D? What would its resolution be?

[pale python]

i dont know , we can convert sample2D to float4 , how come we cant reverse the function somehow using uv or something else , to get the current updated sample values ?

tex2D(sample2D,uv) ===> float4

[low lichen]

That function is the equivalent of saying readTexture(texture, uv) => color

[pale python]

yea I dont know what is happening there but I think maybe we could somehow reverse it

im new to shader so I dont know

or how would anyone sample the updated color value ?

[low lichen]

A 2D texture is a grid of pixels, where each pixel has a color. tex2D lets you read from that grid of pixels. You're not sampling a color, you're sampling a texture.

Maybe it's best if you explain from a high level what you're trying to do.

And disregard how you were planning to do it for now

[pale python]

honestly dont know , im still learning and I think i am gonna waste ur time 😄 , but thanks for explaining what tex2D does , coz I didnt think of it that way at all , this makes a lot of sense.

[mental fern]

Is it possible to make a shader that only lets the game display colors from a color palette of my choosing? I'm making a game using graphics based on the NES and I'd like to limit the game to only display the colors from the NES palette.

[buoyant geyser]

This sounds perfect, can’t believe i missed this in the surface shader examples doc, thanks

[meager pelican]

It might be simplest to just use a LUT. See "LUT" in the article linked below:
https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/PPU_palettes#LUT_approach

[grizzled bolt]

You can use your color texture as the UV of your gradient's sample texture

A LUT works for the whole screen but it's got its own quirks

[tropic badger]

- Can i iterate through a passed texture to get every pixel's value? My texture is 1xN, where N is defined at runtime. Every pixel represents a world-space position, and i need to retrieve this data from the texture

[prime shale]

I suppose if you wanted to reconvert a float4 to a texture2d you can look into blitting

@low lichen

Thats peobably the closest you might get

[pale python]

Thanks a lot 🙂
but let me ask you this before I jump into something new

in this example , i used uv coord as 0.7,1

[prime shale]

one thing I notice with your problems is that you seem to treat the GPU almost like another CPU in that you play hot potato with data all the time

lmao

going back and fourth constantly

anyways

[prime shale]

my first question with this though

[pale python]

i really dont know the difference , iam really new

[prime shale]

whats the frame of referneces?

in the sense that I'm assuming with the screen

you want to get the final values from a shader right

you can only do that "blit" operation on the CPU

so my question is

do you want to know what the value of the pixel is on the CPU side? or the GPU side?

[pale python]

gpu side

[prime shale]

my advice, I would treat the GPU almost like a fire and forget, its meant to perform a task that you give it in BULK

[pale python]

i actually know the value on both

[prime shale]

what do you mean?

like the pixel coordinate?

[pale python]

yes

[prime shale]

or the color itself?

ah

[pale python]

like i know the x value would be 0.7 and y is 1

[prime shale]

well for the sake of simplicity, because your problems tend to be very confusing

say you wanted to display the exact value at a certain pixel coordinate

[pale python]

it will be something like that , cpu and gpu will have the same data

[prime shale]

on the shader side

so you have a texture2D that you are sampling that has your final colors within it

and to display the specific value on that texture2D across all pixels

or effectively get the color value from that single pixel

its as simple as

[pale python]

yeah but that wont work tex2D(_MainTex, i.uv)

[prime shale]

tex2D(myFinalTexWithColorSampler, float2(0.7, 1))

[pale python]

how do i get myFinalTexWithColorSampler ?

[prime shale]

not in that case if i.uv is defined like it normally is, because normally i.uv would have a different value per pixel

but in my code snippet

you instead input a CONSTANT

and thats how you have consistency

[prime shale]

myFinalTexWithColorSampler is just another texture2D sampler

do you mean how would you get your final color from a shader onto a texture2D?

[pale python]

no , that is actually what i was asking about lol

i was trying to reverse tex2D(_MainTex, i.uv) ==> float3 to float3 ==> tex

but I learned that tex2D only reads pixel from MainTex , it's not really converting

[prime shale]

true

its a texture sampler

it only samples from a texture

a texture which is made up of a bunch of float4s in an array

its only reading though, it doesn't convert

if you want to convert that is a different story, and that goes back to what I suggested earlier which is that if you wanted to sort of do something like reconverting, you will need to use a Graphic.Blit

which is a bit involved

[prime shale]

tex2D also doesn't read just from MainTex, it reads from any texture that you feed it

[pale python]

thanks for explaining that , so u are suggesting that i create texture using graphic.blit then read from it using tex2D ?

[prime shale]

yes

so say that you have a shader pass

that computes like a crazy rainbow that changes across many pixels

and you want to convert basically that float4 into a texture2D

yes? @pale python

reading back above looks like @low lichen was on the money with suggesting blit, but you confused the hell out of him

so whoops

looks like you disapeared for a bit @pale python but I'll continue with the explanation

[prime shale]

but like I said, you have a pass that does this in a shader

and you want to convert that into a texture2D, in that case you would use a blit

so in the C# side

you have to write a section of code that creates a render texture at a set resolution

so you can use something like rendertexture.gettemporary

then use
Graphics.Blit(sourceRT, myTempRT, myMaterialObject, 0);

so sourceRT is the original texture that your screen is currently seeing basically

myTempRT is the render texture that will obtain the colors

myMaterialObject is a material that has your shader on it

and then 0 is the pass index, for the pass that you want to compute the color from

after that blit operation, myTempRT is the texture that you are looking for

and in the next pass (or another shader), you can create another sampler2D _MyTexture field, and on the C# side you'll have to use Material.SetTexture("_MyTexture", myTempRT)

and then of course you would use tex2D(_MyTexture, i.uv) or tex2D(_MyTexture, float2(0.7, 1) to sample colors from it

and that is how you would effectively convert a
float4 > tex2D

this is also a core concept used in post processing effects, since often they are multipass and need to retain computed color values from previous passes

[pale python]

thank you so much , yes, my connection is currently unstable ,but I managed to read everything ❤️ ❤️ thank you

[prime shale]

I think its also important to mention honestly that if you are doing this, but only care about a single pixel then your probably best doing all of this on the CPU

and it'd likely be faster and much easier

but other than that I have no idea why you'd want to be converting it back into a texture

[opaque timber]

anybody use shader graph that knows why this could be happening or how to fix it? i'm using urp and i changed a few values on the shader graph but now it's just flickering between the old version and the new one. i couldnt find anything online after a quick google

i can post my graph if necessary

[rustic peak]

Hi All

Any tips for updating a shader I created in ShaderGraph in 2019 to 2021 Unity? Half of the windows are 'greyed out' and I don't know where to start...

I followed a tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvvvzupH18s&t=1491s) but now I'm guessing I'll have to learn about shaders to build it again from scratch. Any starting points you can recommend to help me learn this simple transition shader I created? 🙏

[grizzled bolt]

They are greyed out because SpriteColor is not used
Instead, plug your W component into Alpha and the remaining vector3 into BaseColor

[tropic badger]

- I've passed a texture to a shader. Its dimension is Nx1. Now i need to iterate through this texture and get every pixel's XY values. Is there any alternative to the c# method GetPixel()? I use integer coordinates for this, which are constant 0 for Y and 0-N for X

[meager pelican]

I don't understand.
Its an Nx1 texture. Each pixel's position is (x, .05) if you want the pixel center on the Y axis. Where x = the pixel offset divided by N-1.
If you want it in UV coordinates.

[tropic badger]

- I didn't even think about converting integer coordinates into uv ones

[meager pelican]

Well, in the shader, sure.
In C# probably not. Not sure what you're doing.

[tropic badger]

- It's in cg, yes. What i'm doing is just passing data to the shader. I was told to use textures for this, since there are no arrays or collections in general

[meager pelican]

But samplers work with UV's which are % of the width/height. This makes them resolution agnostic.
And given the various sampler states that can average out samples....you get sampling by %.

You CAN pass an array to a shader. But may not want to. What is the use-case?

[tropic badger]

- I have a player that may fly near obstacles. When it gets closer to them than a certain threshold, it starts blending with the obstacle's color. This would have never been a problem if i had only one obstacle, but player will almost always be near at least 2 of them

[meager pelican]

How many of them on screen at one time (max)?

[tropic badger]

- Defined at runtime

- From 20 to possible infinity

[meager pelican]

100, 1000, 10000?

Oh, ok

You probably don't want a texture for that.

[tropic badger]

- But i will cull those that are further away than this "certain threshold" anyway. So i think it won't get higher than 50 in the worst scenario

- because when there are 50 obstacles around the player, they're 99% dead

[meager pelican]

You probably want an acceleration structure around this scene data, and a radius to search. Iterating through that many scene items, even once, might be impractical per frame. If you have several 100 K of them.

Although that sounds a bit unweildly. I mean, 100K of them? Really?

Besides, human perception is probably not going to notice the difference if you have a "lag" time for the color change of a few frames.

If you're at, say, 30 fps.

[tropic badger]

- Just as i mentioned, i don't throw all obstacles into the shader. Only those near enough. I've already taken care of this bottleneck

[meager pelican]

well, OK, I was going to say more, but nm.
Can you support structured buffers on all your target platforms?

[tropic badger]

- I'm afraid i don't even know what it is. You can call it my first "real" experience with shaders

[meager pelican]

Are you targeting older mobile?

[tropic badger]

- I may sacrifice them if absolutely necessary, but preferably yes

[meager pelican]

A structured buffer would work well.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3dhlsl/sm5-object-structuredbuffer
You need SM 5 support/DX11 (or I guess on some cards, DX11 running on 10 level hardware, sm 4.5).

But you could also pass two arrays, one for positions, one for colors

You'd set them each frame

[tropic badger]

- Will look into it, thank you. Can i ask you for an "in a nutshell" version of what it is and how it works?

[meager pelican]

A StructuredBuffer is similar to an array, but it has elements that are a struct. So for the relevant data types that are common across C# and shaders, you can use a struct to hold the data and access the elements of the struct at each array element. An array of structs, basically.

So you can define

    float4 WSlocation;
    float4 Color;
}```
And create a structured buffer in C# (they're called compute buffers in Unity, but are not limited to compute shaders only).
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ComputeBuffer-ctor.html

I used float4 rather than float3 because GPU's like things aligned on a float4 boundary.  And you can use the .w component to pass additional data if you wish.   But you could also break that out into a float3 followed by a float, but you may as well read all 4 floats at once for efficiency.

You can then access elements by index. In the shader you define the buffer
StructuredBuffer<MyObsitcle> obsticles;
and then you'd access them in the vertex shader I'd suppose (faster than per pixel).

if (obsticles[i].location - myLocation) > threshold) {
   accumulate color change, blah, blah
}
end loop stuff```

And you'd pass that accumulated color change to the fragment stage in an interpolator perhaps.

[tropic badger]

- I see. Awesome, thank you a whole bunch

[meager pelican]

One more thought.

If you need the color changes per pixel or per polygon, what we discussed makes sense.

But if you want it per-mesh, you'd only have to pass the net-color change to the object, since you're passing the entire dataset in C# anyway.

In that case, no reason to burden the shader with the overhead.

[tropic badger]

- It's per pixel for sprites. I originally thought to pass colors to vertices and let the interpolators do the job, but as more and more implementation details appeared i decided to go with fragments instead

[meager pelican]

Up to you. It's similar to pixel-lighting vs vertex lighting, I'd suppose.

Vertex would be faster if you can pull it off

And yet...another thought....just for fun. 😉
So there is a possible implementation difference between arrays and structured buffers in that you probably get better cache coherence by breaking out the positions into their own array (packs all the locations together in memory)...and having another array to just hold the color or whatever else. @tropic badger I doubt it will make much difference in your implementation since you have one player object that you need to do this for. But if you were shading everything in the scene this way, having the location accessed faster in your conditional would be an advantage.

[severe flint]

hi, in the newest unity version there isn't a PBR graph option when creating a shader anymore, what is the equivalent now?

[meager pelican]

You mean like "lit graph"?

[severe flint]

yes

[meager pelican]

You're not the first. See post #5, and really the whole post
https://forum.unity.com/threads/pbr-shader-doesnt-show-up-in-the-shader-graph.1030996/

[severe flint]

ok thanks

[waxen raft]

Could anyone tell me why my triplanar shader does this when i input object space into the position node?

its like it works on surfaces that are horizontal, but not vertical

[regal stag]

Triplanar mapping works by projecting the texture from each axis, blending based on the normal vectors. You'd need to set that Normal Vector to object space as well so it blends correctly.

[rustic peak]

Thanks for this 🙂

[rustic peak]

I did notice that now in order to get this shader compatible, I had to change the Canvas to Screen Space - Camera and drag my main camera in. Thing is, I switch cameras using this transition and now its acting a bit weird...

Is there a way to use this shader with Screen Space - Overlay istead of Screen Space - Camera like I could in 2019 Unity?

[grizzled bolt]

It's a UI shader? I don't know anything about how those need to be made but they're not as straightforward as other shaders apparently

[waxen raft]

Thanks now I understand! What would be the best way to do that? 🤔

[rustic peak]

Ah fair enough...Might just need to figure out how to change the camera at the precise time then. Thanks though

[waxen raft]

Nevermind I figured it out, thanks!

[opaque timber]

okay i think it's because of the fact that i'm using an outside variable as a seed for the random number generator. is this related to using urp or the math i'm doing on the seed? does anybody know a workaround for this or how possibly to fix it at all?

here's my graph and you can see the texture flickering still in the preview

[tropic badger]

@meager pelican hey, may i borrow you if you still recall the problem of mine?

- I did the buffer thing and double checked that the data is passed correctly (see screenshot), so the fault must be on the shader's side. In a nutshell, i define a float4 that defaults to the player color, and in case distance from the fragment's world position to any value in the buffer is less than something, i set the float4 value to the obstacle color. The code is below

- Setting world position of a fragment

o.worldPos = mul (unity_ObjectToWorld, v.vertex);

- And the actual code

// sample the texture
float4 col = _PlayerColor;
int width = buffer[0].x; // 0th element contains the buffer's length

for (int index = 0; index < width; index++)
{
    float dist = distance(i.worldPos.xy, buffer[index + 1]);

    if (dist <= _BlendignRadius)
    {
        col = _ObstacleColor;
        break;
    }
}

return col;

- OMG. All this it was a tiny typo in "_BlendingRadius"

- I hate it

- But now it does the opposite. As if the player is always near an obstacle

- Turned out to be another type, damn it. Fixed, sorry for disturbing

[onyx jungle]

Hello! anyone familiar with this kernel error: "unity kernel keyehistogramclear error"

occurred when I switched build platform to WebGL 2.0

From my understanding its probably an incompatible post processing effect but no Idea how to fix

[tropic badger]

- I've got a blending problem. On the screenshot, you can see "lines" between the circles which i want to avoid. I don't know why do they appear. My shader algorithm is as follows:

Before drawing a blended color, check if distance from this fragment to the new circle's center is lower than distance to the last circle's center;
Upon drawing, return a lerped color and update the last distance info;

- On paper it should work, but in reality it doesn't. How else can i blend these circles, or change in the current approach to make it work?

[tropic badger]

- Afaik webgl 2 doesn't support compute shaders. Does your game use any?

[buoyant geyser]

I have a toggle in my shader, [Toggle(DO_REFLECTIONS)] _DoReflections("Enable Surface Reflections", int) = 0 and it's included in my shader_feature pragma, #pragma shader_feature _PALTYPE_NONE _PALTYPE_INDEX _PALTYPE_MAP DO_REFLECTIONS

despite this, toggling this on and off has no effect on my shader,

#ifdef DO_REFLECTIONS

    float2 morph = tan(pow(o.Normal, 5)) * 0.1;

    float2 reflUV = _ScreenParams.xy * _ReflTex_TexelSize.xy * (IN.screenPos.xy / IN.screenPos.w);
    float2 bgUV = _ScreenParams.xy * _ReflBG_TexelSize.xy * (IN.screenPos.xy / IN.screenPos.w);

    float2 reflOffset = _ReflTex_TexelSize.xy;
    float2 bgOffset = _WorldSpaceCameraPos.xy * _ReflScroll * _ReflBG_TexelSize.xy;

    reflUV = reflUV + reflOffset + morph;
    bgUV = bgUV + bgOffset + morph;

    fixed4 refl = (tex2D(_ReflTex, reflUV ) + tex2D(_ReflBG, bgUV )) * tex2D(_ReflMap, IN.uv_MainTex).a;
    o.Albedo += refl;

#endif

this code never runs regardless of if the property is toggled

any idea why this could be happening? Something im overlooking maybe?

[amber saffron]

Maybe not the fix, but you should use a float property with the Toggle drawer : https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/MaterialPropertyDrawer.html

[buoyant geyser]

tried switching back between float and int with no difference

ill leave it back on float though

[amber saffron]

Have you tried with #pragma multi_compile __ DO_REFLECTIONS ?

[buoyant geyser]

that fixed it, perfect

mind if i ask what that does exactly? Does it compile a second shader for the reflections on/off, and the toggle just changes between them?

[regal stag]

Basically yeah

I'd guess that it didn't work before with multiple keywords being specified (_PALTYPE_NONE _PALTYPE_INDEX _PALTYPE_MAP) as one of those might have been enabled, so took priority over DO_REFLECTIONS maybe

[amber saffron]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-MultipleProgramVariants.html

shader_feature is to declare "sets" of keywords, that are mutually exclusive (only one is enabled at the same time)
multi_compile is to compile the shader once for each of the keywords in the list

[buoyant geyser]

right, i have an enum type with some logic running before the reflection check to change the way the colors are processed

[buoyant geyser]

i see, so should i remove the toggle from the shader_feature pragma and just leave it on multi compile?

[regal stag]

There's also a [KeywordEnum] drawer which might work better with multiple keywords on the shader_feature. It's in that same docs page Remy linked

[buoyant geyser]

yup, that's what im using for the palette property

i just needed a seperate toggle for reflections

[amber saffron]

You could also use a dedicated line for #pragma shader_feature __ DO_REFLECTIONS

[regal stag]

Ah okay. If you need each of those palette shader variants to include the option to toggle the reflection it would need to be specified under a different shader_feature/multi_compile

[buoyant geyser]

so every seperate property would need it's own line for that, i get it

[amber saffron]

#pragma shader_feature DO_REFLECTIONS should even be enough

The biggest difference is that shader_feature will compile only the required variants (depending on the materials that are rendering), when multi_compile will compile all possible combinations

[regal stag]

Basically use shader_feature wherever possible except if you need to adjust keywords at runtime, then use multi_compile

[amber saffron]

Hey @regal stag , while you're around, I'm a bit curious.
Have you worked a bit with shadergraph and the built-in pipeline ?

The scene color node doesn't work there, and I kind of need it.
The workaround I have in mind would be to use a commandbuffer on the cameras to copy the backbuffer to a RT and assign it to the _cameraOpaqueTexture shader variable.

What do you think ?

[regal stag]

I've mostly stuck to URP, but am aware the SceneColor doesn't work in built-in. Afaik the code sampling _CameraOpaqueTexture is still there, so if you can generate the texture through the command buffer it should work

[amber saffron]

I guess try and see XD

[regal stag]

Yea, guess it's just a cmd.Blit and cmd.SetGlobalTexture right?

[amber saffron]

That's the idea yes. Maybe with some more optimisations accomodate multiple camera and share a common texture between the blits.

[tropic badger]

Bump

[amber saffron]

Could you paste here your code ?
I'm a bit confused by the text explanation 🤔

[tropic badger]

- The entire shader file or just the blending part?

[amber saffron]

Maybe just the blending part to start with

[tropic badger]

- Sure, let me turn on my laptop. Will laste it here in a minute

[regal stag]

The result here looks similar voronoi/worley noise. I guess you could instead calculate the circles w/ falloff then combine them by taking the maximum, or add & saturate?

[tropic badger]

float4 col = _PlayerColor;

// this buffer contains red circles positions
// 0th element contains the buffer's length
int width = buffer[0].x; 

// anything closer than _BlendingRadius is solid _ObstacleColor
// anything between upperBlendingRadius and _BlendingRadius is lerped 
float upperBlendingRadius = _BlendingRadius + _BlendingLength;
float lastDist = upperBlendingRadius + 1;

for (int index = 0; index < width; index++)
{
    int i2 = index + 1;

    float dist = distance(i.worldPos.xy, buffer[i2]);

    if (dist <= _BlendingRadius)
    {
        col = _ObstacleColor; // solid color
        break;
    }

    if (dist <= upperBlendingRadius && dist < lastDist)
    {
        float blend = (dist \- _BlendingRadius) / (upperBlendingRadius \- _BlendingRadius);

        col = lerp(_ObstacleColor, _PlayerColor, blend);
        lastDist = dist;
    }
}

[tropic badger]

- This is basically what i'm doing. But i can't take max/min of color, so i take it by the distance. You can see it in the code above as lastDist

[amber saffron]

Just loop for all elements with
lastDist = min(lastDist, dist)
And calculate the color after the loop ?

[tropic badger]

- Isn't it just a shorter version of my messy code? I also pick the smallest dist and do the calculations only after the smallest one is found

[amber saffron]

blind coding :

for (int index = 1 ; index < width ; index++)
{
    float dist = distance(i.worldPos.xy, buffer[index]);
    lastDist = min(lastDist, dist);
}

float blend = ( lastDist - _BlendingRadius ) / (upperBlendingRadius - _BlendingRadius );
blend = saturate(blend);
col = lerp(_ObstacleColor, _PlayerColor, blend);

[amber saffron]

You are always blending with dist I don't see any usage of lastDist here.

[regal stag]

If min works the same, could maybe try the opSmoothUnion function from IQ's distance fields page - https://iquilezles.org/articles/distfunctions/#:~:text=float-,opSmoothUnion,-(%20float%20d1

[tropic badger]

- I read dist only when it's less than lastDist, so they're equal here. Now that i moved it outside the loop, it suddenly stopped working at all. And rider complains about not being able to undo

[tropic badger]

- This actually worked like a charm lol. But just as i was guessing, it's completely identical. Circles are still visually separated

[amber saffron]

Im starting to think it's some perceptual contrast brain issue ^^

[tropic badger]

- Is k a 0-1 value, as in lerp? I didn't find any explanation after a cursory review

[amber saffron]

iirc, it can go out of this range, in that case the operation will extrapolate the values

Can you try to output
col = frac(blend*10);

just for couriosity

[tropic badger]

- Sure

[amber saffron]

The values seem correct, so I'm really thinking that the issue is from how our brain percieves gradients

[regal stag]

I'm not sure what the range is exactly. Likely controls how smooth the result is but you'll have to test some values.

[tropic badger]

- Alr then how do i fix people's brains

[amber saffron]

Oh sh*** I've that quesiton to fast and though k with the last lerp argument 😅

[amber saffron]

I have some ideas, but they are not ethically accepted.

[tropic badger]

- I need them

- Wait, can it be filtering mode?

- Like bileniar or what is it by default

[amber saffron]

No, you're not doing any texture sampling here

I wonder if some gamma correction might help.
like doing
blend = pow(blend, 2.2)
or
blend = pow(blend, 0.4545)

(one is linear to gamma, the other is gamma to linear, and I can't for the sake of me remember which is which)

[tropic badger]

- Will try this and cyan's suggestion right after i finish eating. Sry

[tropic badger]

- Unfortunately neither removed this separation. pow 2.2 seemed to make things better, but didn't help much. Thank you for your effort anyway

[cosmic sphinx]

Technically you could blend those colors additively, but I suppose it would miss the point of the shader. 🤔 Alternatively, you could blend the whole texture again.

Our brain sees it like this mostly because our perception is based on contrasts. When going away from the center of the circle the color becomes weaker and weaker, and then BOOM, it's increasing again. It creates an illusion of some concave gap.

[tropic badger]

- I doubt that it's an illusion, because i clearly can shot it wiht whatever screenshot tool, pick colors and make sure that they differ. And they do

- But as i zoom in, it disappears. Okay, it is

[cosmic sphinx]

Well, the edge definitely exists. But our brains kinda exaggerate about it. It could be seen as 2 circles cut on the edges and placed next to each other, but our brain interprets the edge as some sort of whitish line.

[silk wharf]

Hello there, I am using full screen shadergraphs for the first time, and I am wondering how can I tile a texture according to the screen width and height so It doesn`t streetch irrregularly?

[drowsy fiber]

Does anyone know how to get the UV center in shader graph when working with sprite atlases? I've looked online and cant seem to find a solution besides passing metadata through a custom property.

[lunar valley]

you need to tile the x and y components the same so that it doesn't stretch

[lunar valley]

the uvs center is always 0.5, 0.5

[cosmic prairie]

what if you change the colorspace of the texture from linear?

just as an idea

[tropic badger]

- I don't have any, i guess. It's a default sprite with default square

[cosmic prairie]

oh I thought you were rendering to a render texture, maybe try switching to gamma colorspace in the project, but that wrecks every color

[clever lynx]

Is there any way to render a Shadergraph always behind another shadergraph?
They are both set to opaque at the moment.
I have tried adjusting the Render Queue on the materials but it does not seem to change anything.
Any idea?

[lunar valley]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-ZTest.html

Render Queue is something completely else

[pale python]

hi ,
how do I save shader with frag function like this on a png file ?

 fixed4 frag(v2f i) : SV_Target
 {
                half4 color = half4(i.uv, 0, 1); 
                return color;
}

[lunar valley]

Do you want to have it outside of unity?

[pale python]

I want to save it in the asset / save , directory

but I dont know how to tell c# to capture the entire output of the shader , its not a texture

[lunar valley]

then you should use a renderTexture

[pale python]

could you please give me a code example ?

[lunar valley]

its exactly what you have above but the output is not the object but a renderTexture instead

[pale python]

I havent uesed renderTexture before , is it something like that ?

 fixed4 frag(v2f i) : SV_Target
 {
                half4 color = half4(i.uv, 0, 1); 
                return renderTexture (color);
}

[lunar valley]

no

[pale python]

it seems to be part of c# rather than shader
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/RenderTexture.Create.html

[lunar valley]

well yes also I guess, but there he is only creating a render texture not writing to one. You can create a renderTexture in the project tab or inside of c#, but then to write to a renderTexture I would use a compute shader

[pale python]

its weird, not sure how to connect both words together , how do i even mention the created renderTexture in compute shader ? , i will keep googleing for an example coz I cant quite understand how connectiong between those two works

[lunar valley]

Here watch this, here he is writing to a renderTexture inside of a compute shader. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrZ4pWwkpto&t=253s

[hollow orchid]

i created grass in unity . this grass has shader in it just for texture rendering. i placed the grass over terrain with unity terrain trees. But when i run the game fps drops from 300 to 10 fps. the grass has lod system and doesnt take much tris or verts. i think the shader running all at once overiding the culling from lod system. what to do

[lunar valley]

how much grass in it, is it bilboard grass or individual grass? How many vertecies does each grass blade have.

are you painting your grass on unitys terrain?

[hollow orchid]

placed around 100000 grass using mass place trees. grass is billboard and have around 6 verts.

[clever lynx]

The object is not actually behind in 3D space, so that's why I want to force it to be rendered behind, regardless of depth. I have tried all depth test settings, I can't get the result I'm looking for

[lunar valley]

you shouldn't use that for grass

Grass should be painted in the details tab

[hollow orchid]

even when i painted grass using trees tab . the perfomance reduce

[lunar valley]

not tree, details tab

[hollow orchid]

wow. its worked . very much thanks. thank you

[pale python]

thanks a lot , but is it possible to do the same in fragment shader ?

im still learning , i still dont know the difference

i didnt even know that there are types

[drowsy fiber]

When using a sprite atlas UVs don't use the full 0-1 range for individual sprites, so the center is different

[lunar valley]

compute shader would be most efficient and would give you most control.. maybe you could also do it with graphics.blit but with that you are copying a texture to another as well, so not sure how you could do it properly and as well as with a compute shader

[pale python]

yeha i tried with graphics.blit the other day but I couldnt as the output is just a color, mainTex is always null, i didnt know how I could convert the whole to texture and save it somewhere so i can copy it

[mint copper]

Alright... managed to make a basic water shader...

[cosmic prairie]

a shader by default does not really output a texture. if you supply the gpu with a 3d model, a target texture, a shader, and resources for the shader (such as textures, matrices etc..) it will first transform the model into camera space then rasterize it. when the gpu rasterizes a certain amount of pixels will be calculated and written to target depending on the triangles size and position. You are assuming the gpu just magically spits out pixels from a fragment shader into a texture without any or minimal input data

so, when you are writing a fragment shader you are not outputting pixels or their position, only calculating their color depending on the already assigned pixel position when the fragment function starts executing

what Graphics.Blit does, is it renders a fullscreen quad 3d model with the shader you supply, thats how you get the texture

when you create the RenderTexture or Texture you need to assign the size of it, the gpu cannot change the width and height

also remember to copy your render texture to a texture2d if u r using that, and also call ReadPixels on Texture2d to copy back to cpu memory from gpu memory (so you can save it as a file, the gpu and it's memory is fast but you can't do IO things there)

[stable nexus]

I have made a shader but the shader dosnt run in editor mode, only when i play the shader runs

how do i make sure it always runs

[lunar valley]

it usually always runs please be more specific what have you done?

[lunar valley]

its a nice start

[cosmic prairie]

https://answers.unity.com/questions/1177720/animated-shader-preview-in-scene.html

[stable nexus]

its not animating

[cosmic prairie]

it won't animate by default

you have to turn it on, there's an answer in what I linked

[stable nexus]

yeah thanks got it

[cosmic prairie]

btw if u end up with the compute shader route I have a full blown image editor using Unity and compute shaders, you can steal code from there if u want https://github.com/Peter226/HueHades

[lunar valley]

Just wanted to add since it is a fullscreen qaud some
transformation matrecies are skipped, so its a allready transformed clip space quad.

[pale python]

Awesome , thanks a lot 🙂

[regal stag]

Technically it depends on the shader. I believe Graphics.Blit overrides the model/view/projection matrices (to identity matrices), so any shader that uses the object->clip transformation still works.
But ideally yes, you'd use a shader that outputs the vertex positions directly to clip space though to avoid those unnecessary calculations. Newer blitting functions also require that.

[past beacon]

Can someone please help me why I can not put Out from Branch node into Alpha clip threshold node and how to fix this?

[regal stag]

Vertex ID can only be used in the vertex stage. Perhaps you want to pass the result through a Custom Interpolator block first?

(This shows how to set one up if you aren't familiar : https://www.cyanilux.com/tutorials/intro-to-shader-graph/#custom-interpolators)

[past beacon]

Thank you, I will have a look at it now

[sweet burrow]

Did they ever add Stencil to shadergraph URP?

[past beacon]

thank you very much, it really helped me

[woeful narwhal]

how do i randomly generate a number from 1 and 0, in shader graph

[regal stag]

There is a Random Range node, but you'll need something to use as the seed, depending on if you want a random value per vertex, fragment/pixel (such as Position or UV), or just a random value for the entire object (i.e. float property, or based on pivot position from Object node)

[woeful narwhal]

yeah ive seen that but never figured out the seed thing. i just need something that changes to a one or a zero with a random interval

[grizzled bolt]

Sounds like you want to use time as the seed, and map that to 0 and 1

[fickle fable]

How can I get a shader to change the colors of different parts of the surface? I want to be able to apply this effect but not just between objects, but between each pixel of every object.

Sorry, I bet it would help if they were the same color and I exaggerated the effect

[quaint grotto]

is it possible to include a hlsl file from a package

i can't seem to correctly get the right directive location

[lunar valley]

How should that even look like then? Like stripes?

[fickle fable]

EXACTLY

YES YES

ANY IDEA HOW I'D DO THAT

[lunar valley]

and the colors should change depending on the world space position of you player?

[fickle fable]

Not really. The colors in the video are changing because of the player's closing velocity towards those objects.

[lunar valley]

I mean this is gonna give you your stripes: ```cs
float stripe = (1+(sin(i.uv.x)) / 2;

[fickle fable]

How would I apply that? This is just a single float, so do I apply that to whichever section in the shader's _BaseColor's RGB?

[lunar valley]

You can apply it however you want to

[fickle fable]

Right, but I don't understand what exactly I'm supposed to do with it

[lunar valley]

well I am still a bit unsure what exactly you want to do. So just put it into the base color, see what happens and then do the adjustments you need to make.

[fickle fable]

Ok. Thank you very much, I'll see

[fickle fable]

Sorry, I should have specified that I'm using the Universal Render Pipeline, so there is no i.uv in there.

[lunar valley]

That was just a code snipped/example adjust it to work for any pipeline you are working with

[fickle fable]

If UV's are the positions of textures, then what is i? The mesh?

[lunar valley]

How are you making your shader hlsl or shadergraf?

[fickle fable]

I'm using the Universal Render Pipeline, so I'm editing it by adding the _BaseColor to a percentage to get the effect in that video. So, I think I'm using hlsl.

rend.material.SetVector("_BaseColor", new Vector4(originalColor.x + redShift, originalColor.y, originalColor.z - redShift, originalColor.w))

[woeful narwhal]

thanks

[spare snow]

can anyone help with the shader graph thingy? so basically i wanted to recreate this reflection effect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym1K3of3pys and in minute 6:15 he talks about the "sprite unlit master"... now where the hell is the sprite unlit master?

and whats the difference between lit and unlit, and should i use lit because i use light in my game?

[lunar valley]

you just said it yourself lit has built in lighting unlit doesn't

[spare snow]

alright

[spare snow]

but then where is the sprite unlit master or in case it exists i assume there is also a sprite lit master

where is it?

[lunar valley]

are you refering to that node? When you create a shader graf shader it will automatically have an output node.

[spare snow]

its not there

[lunar valley]

yes it is

it might just be called a bit differently

[spare snow]

what i get is this in unlit

and this in lit

[lunar valley]

yeah thats your output node, they have changed it up a bit, in the past it looked like above in the video but now it looks like this, but it is the exact same thing

[spare snow]

but it doesnt do the same thing

[lunar valley]

yes it does

[spare snow]

but according to the video this should give me a mirrored thing

this is in lit

i can try it out in unlit too just to see if im just horribly stupid xD

[lunar valley]

you need to put it into the base color not the sprite mask

[spare snow]

wait...

no it doesnt work

[lunar valley]

well thats how he is doing it and I do not have more info than what you have provided me

[spare snow]

yeah i dont know, i did it exactly like he did, but for me its not even showing in the preview

[lunar valley]

Does your object have uvs, does your renderTexture actually have content, what is showing just a simple white quad or?

[spare snow]

aaah i got it

the problem was acually the difference between unlit and lit

i suck T-T

lmao but thank you for the help

but now its still not showing the thing in the editor, it just shows the thing in the prebview

[waxen ridge]

hello, i am new to shader graph.
I have a grass patch that I want to color with a gradient, which I do via lerp, working fine. I have the vertex color going from 0 to 1 at the top, which I use to interpolate. I also want to add some manual AO / specular highlights, by defining a threshold percentage for each. If AO is set to 15%, I would like to multiplicatively add some color to all pixels that have a vertex color of < 0.15. How would I achieve this?

[finite tree]

(custom lighting)
how would i turn on shadows for point/spot/... lights? (shadows for main directional light work, but for the rest they dont)
shouldnt the selected pragma do that?

[regal stag]

You also need to use a function which calculates the shadows.
GetAdditionalLight(uint i, float3 positionWS, half4 shadowMask) rather than the version without the shadowMask parameter. If you don't need to actually support the ShadowMask baked GI mode, can just use half4(1,1,1,1) for that param.

And obviously make sure you're using light.shadowAttenuation in your calculations.

[finite tree]

yes i am doing that in a loop of GetAdditionalLightsCount()

okay i uncommented the main lighting so everything is there

[regal stag]

Would probably involve a Comparison & Branch node

[finite tree]

i use the same function for main as for additional, so i use their attenuations too, but there arent shadows in additional lights

[waxen ridge]

thank you so much, i just needed a nudge in the right direction, which is all i needed. thabnks again!

[regal stag]

Is shadows for additional lights enabled on the URP Asset? Do you get shadows with the regular URP/Lit or SimpleLit shaders?

[finite tree]

okay i got it

[finite tree]

yes they are enabled and visible

oh, but the light gameobjects themselves didnt have shadows on (didnt know each light needs shadows turned on, thought that would be on by default)

works now, thanks!

[spare snow]

i want my reflection to keep looping all the time, but its not doing that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym1K3of3pys in this tutorial in about 17:30 minutes in he does a water ripple effect. but for him the texture keeps looping but for me it doesnt

[regal stag]

Do you mean the texture needs to repeat? You can set the Wrap Mode in the texture import settings to Repeat rather than Clamp.

[spare snow]

excuse me where are those texture import settings?

a+#

got it

[regal stag]

In the Inspector when the texture asset is selected

[spare snow]

thank you very much

[spare snow]

is there a node that i can use to make the reflection darker than the thing that is being reflected?

[buoyant geyser]

Offset the effect by the UV coordinates

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@8.2/manual/writing-shaders-urp-unlit-texture.html

[worthy marsh]

does anyone know where i can learn shader code from?

(not talking about shadergraph)

[prime shale]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCkC5e_Pkz4&list=PLX2vGYjWbI0RS_lkb68ApE2YPcZMC4Ohz

[worthy marsh]

i am actually watching this rn lol

was checking if there was a better way to learn

[prime shale]

someone else might have some more resources but as far as I know there isn't really too much

[worthy marsh]

thanks

[prime shale]

I would suggest though

learning some tutorials perhaps from places like open GL or places that might teach GLSL

sure a bit different shading languages, but they aren't too different and all of the concepts are the same

http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/beginners-tutorials/tutorial-8-basic-shading/

for example this is an open GL tutorial that teaches you about doing basic shading

[lunar valley]

If you are a beginner I can recommend you freya holmier for writting shader in hlsl, or ben cloward if you are writting shaders with shadergraf

[worthy marsh]

you mean the 4 hour video from freya?

[lunar valley]

yeah

[worthy marsh]

i was watching it before i started watching the current tutorial (the one provided by unity)

problem was that i didn't know that i should tackle introductions to shaders like that

i didn't want to get stuck in tutorial hell

again

[lunar valley]

if you don't want to get stuck you need to learn how shaders work and not how to write specific things, which I think she does quite nicely

[severe hollow]

Hi! Is there a road map for shadergraph URP? Quite a lot of basics are still missing and would like to know when to expect them 😁

[worthy marsh]

does anyone know how i can "unpack" a float4 ?

[regal stag]

See links in pinned messages

[worthy marsh]

like i wanna get the individual float values of a float4

[regal stag]

You can reference them with .x, .y, .z and .w (or r,g,b,a)

I think [index] (0-3) also works (but only for reading, can't set that way?)

[worthy marsh]

that is what i am trying the whole time

wait

nvm

i had the wrong variable name this whole time

capitalization mistake

sorry xD

[tidal nymph]

anyone know why my material's variable is not changing at runtime>?

    void Start()
    {
        Renderer renderer = GetComponent<Renderer>();
        crossHairMaterial = Instantiate(renderer.sharedMaterial);
        renderer.material = crossHairMaterial;
    }

    void Update()
    {
        Debug.Log(crossHairMaterial.HasFloat(this.outlineThicknessUniformName));
        Debug.Log(crossHairMaterial.GetFloat(this.outlineThicknessUniformName));

        crossHairMaterial.SetFloat(outlineThicknessUniformName, outLineThickness);
    }

so like i think i am changing the uniform of some shader but i am not sure its the exact on attached to object? idk

[regal stag]

Maybe because you are setting renderer.material rather than renderer.sharedMaterial. Not sure.
But you shouldn't need to clone the material, just accessing renderer.material will create a instance of that material for you.

[tender edge]

i've made my own vertex color blending shader. now i want to control the alpha through script. is there something i need to add to that shader to make it work?

[regal stag]

The alpha of the vertex colours? Or the whole material?

[tender edge]

here an example of what im trying to do, i can hide floors by enabling/ disabling the mesh. but it does not play nice with the tiles ive already hidden. so my idea is to lower the alpha instead. so i guess for the material

[tender edge]

forgot to tag

[tidal nymph]

hmm didnt work but thanks for the suggestion anway :p

[glossy verge]

if I want to do a shader that goes from invisible to red to invisible for damage, should I just create the shader and add it to a material and use that material on the enemy that already has a material?

[lunar valley]

you will need to reaplace the previous material to the material which uses the shader

[quaint grotto]

am i dumb or is this wrong

im trying to flip it so the bottom half is black top half is white

but one minus seems to make most of it white

[regal stag]

Looks correct to me. But that's the linear interpretation of the colours. Perhaps you expect a gamma corrected one, could put it through a Colorspace Conversion node with Linear/RGB inputs. or use a Power node.

[quaint grotto]

are you sure that looks correct

i was expecting a mirror image

why does it look so different by simplying inverting it

[regal stag]

Perhaps you want a Negate then before the Saturate, not One Minus

[quaint grotto]

what do you mean ?

saturate(1-dot) ?

[regal stag]

As in Dot Product -> Negate -> Saturate

[quaint grotto]

doesnt work for me you can still see it showing on the dark side of the sphere

trying to get that backside much darker because its too blue from the atmosphere so was applying dot product as part of the alpha

weird

[quaint grotto]

shader graph really needs to show us the rgba values when we mouse over pixels in the preview windows

that would be a god send for debugging

this is my alpha input

and this is what i get

i don't get it

it should be only half a sphere

[regal stag]

What blend mode is being used?

[quaint grotto]

unlit transparent and alpha blending

[regal stag]

Can you show the whole graph?

[quaint grotto]

here you go

ignore the min opacity node its not connected atm

[regal stag]

What result do you get if you disconnect the alpha and put the Saturate result into the Base Color?

[quaint grotto]

that doesnt look the same as the preview of saturate node

which is odd

[regal stag]

If you rotate around the object, is half of it white pointing in the main light direction?

Is there even a directional light in the scene?

[quaint grotto]

ok it looks more correct rotating the camera

yeh its got a dir light

oh there we go it is working

seems the camera was in a weird position that was tricking my eyes

i thought it was perpendicular to light direction

@regal stag works now, thanks 🙂

[heady pewter]

how would you set a shader to work specifically for a camera?

like

i have some overlay effects on my 2d game, so things like water makes the background wavey and stuff.

but now that im trying to put together splitscreen, those shader effects will only show only on one screen, and all other screens will still show the same first screen, instead of their own individual screen

[prime shale]

do you mean post processing?

because that is what your describing pretty much

[heady pewter]

yeah, sorry, i'm not too familiar with the terminology 😅

but yeah, was hoping to get post processing effects to be different between the splitscreen camera.
i think because of it, the other players will get the same exact render as the 1st screen. so it ends up not looking through the other camera

at least, that's what i suspect

[amber cradle]

Hiya!

I want to make an uber shader for my game. I want to use this shader for every single material in my game and I only have two necessities other than PBR rendering: emissive fresnel and dither-based transparency (material is opaque, alpha cutoff on dither)

I know how to implement the entire shader but I'm wondering- is it better to use keywords to disable dither transparency and fresnel emission (but lose SRP batching due to keywords) or keep it all enabled all the time and gain full SRP batching?

[prime shale]

I think someone will have an answer but I say do some experiments to test it

I would think the SRP batching would be important to keep, but enabling all of the keywords can and might lead to performance degredation down the line with features that you might not be using but are enabled anyway

[amber cradle]

Gotcha.

I'll prep the uber shader and start replacing the shader in my materials in the meantime.

[prime shale]

but yeah, I would experiment and see what works best

to verify

[drowsy fiber]

Sorry for bringing this up again, but I still haven't found a solution. Does anyone know how to deal with sprite atlas UVs?

[heady pewter]

sorry, i don't know

[amber cradle]

i think i might have something from a previous project, gimme a tic

[drowsy fiber]

Any luck?

[cosmic prairie]

you multiply by -1 lol, if you do oneminus 1 - (-1)=2

[cosmic prairie]

oh nvm

[quaint grotto]

if you saturate to 0-1 then one minus you get 1-0 which is surely the same

i got it working in the end anyway

[cosmic prairie]

how is "1-clamp01(x)" and "-x" the same?

[quaint grotto]

i didnt say they were you didnt read what i said

i cant have negatives so i have to saturate

negative alpha has no meaning

[cosmic prairie]

I don't feel any irony

[quaint grotto]

what?

saturating first as suppose to second makes no difference

order of operations wont change much

[cosmic prairie]

but then you misread what I wrote

[quaint grotto]

what you wrote was not relevant to the conversation your comparisons are not equal

[cosmic prairie]

you were trying to flip this with 1-x

which is not just flipping it but adding one

[cosmic prairie]

I wrote nvm when I saw cyan recommended -x too instead of 1-x

[quaint grotto]

saturate then one minus vs one minus then saturate is the same is what im trying to say

[cosmic prairie]

but how is that relevant? did I say that's not it? you wanted to achieve this by your description

I don't understand you

[quaint grotto]

but -x is just flipping things how does that fix the problem

i can do that just by swapping the dot product inputs

[cosmic prairie]

"im trying to flip it so the bottom half is black top half is white"

literally what you said

[quaint grotto]

yes which means 0 and 1 not -1 and 1

[cosmic prairie]

Okay I'm just giving this conversation up, no point

[quaint grotto]

its not hard to udnerstand that one minus maps -1,1 to 0,1

-x doesnt change anything

[lunar valley]

substract by -.5 and then flip it with -

[meager pelican]

OK, so a sprite atlas is "just" rectangles within a rectangle.
So compute the size of the single-sprite triangle. Then, to get UV's for it, figure out the % thru that you want for that range. In either direction. So if the sprite ranges from pixel/% of (0.5 - 0.75, .5. - 0.75) of the sheet, you can compute a UV by taking the range of values (0.75-0.5 = 0.25) in X and Y and then deciding how to map that to your 0 - 1 range you want for a logical-UV. Or vice versa.

[meager pelican]

Like @prime shalewisely said, bench-marking is the way to go here. I mean you're making a decision early on that will impact all shader calls in your game, so testing is paramount.

That said, if your "switches" are uniform, you probably won't have many problems. There are some tricks. Try to avoid shrouding texture reads inside an IF (but definitely benchmark this both ways) usually you'd put them as close to the "top" as possible.
The switch IFs will be uniform if they're even needed, so it should cause no to little divergence in the execution path of ALL threads on that mesh, so there won't be much performance hit as compared to divergent paths.
Use the [branch] attribute, although modern compilers probably ignore it in most cases.
Best to test on a range of platforms, not all shader compilers/platforms handle things the same way, particularly between desktop and mobile.

I would think you want SRP batching. In your case, though, you'd only have two switches and 4 variants, If F is fresnel and D is dither, you only have F-D-, F+D-, F-D+ and F+D+, maybe not too much of a maintenance nightmare, particularly if you use includes. You can then swap the shader in and object/material at runtime. No ifs or switches necessary, and you'd keep batching of the 4 groups at least.

Or, it might work out that you don't need any IFs at all!!!!! Just let "the math" do it, and calc all attributes but in some cases the fresnel % will be 0 and the alpha will be 1 so solid dither. The real trick isn't the fresnel, it's the dither, since you MIGHT use a dither texture. But in reality you should be using an array to hold the dither cut offs, not a texture. That reduces sampler needs too, and avoids any dependent texture reads. This gives you the math at all pixels, but these days simple math might not be too bad.
/ramble
-2cents-

[tacit parcel]

You can just use remap node if you are using shadergraph

[warm rapids]

where can enable this option for Mask Mode on local volumetric fog? I'm watching a video where it's visible in the inspector, but not in mine

[cosmic prairie]

Maybe it's a newer version? check if you have any updates for hdrp, in the documentation it mentions the feature starting from the 14.x.x versions https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@14.0/manual/Local-Volumetric-Fog.html

[warm rapids]

oh yeah that'll be it

would something similar be possible in a previous version? i'm not sure how practical changing versions would be currently

[cosmic prairie]

You could use a 3D render texture and render something to it using a compute shader, but that requires scripts and HLSL code

But I'd say create a backup of the project, test out the newest available version, and see if everything works

That would be the easiest and probably the best thing to do as you are getting other new features and improvements

[cosmic prairie]

Actually I was just wondering how the material is rendered in 3D, and found a 3D Blit function, you could use this to render the mask material to a 3d render texture https://answers.unity.com/questions/1431871/graphicsblit-with-a-3d-texture.html

I guess it's just rendering a quad for each layer

you need to do this every frame, as that's how the material mask type is done too

[lone cave]

i recently switched from standard RP to HDRP and i'm trying to update my shaders, but no matter what i can't seem to refrence HDRP at all
for example i'm getting an error that looks like this: Couldn't open include file 'Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition/Runtime/RenderPipeline/ShaderPass/ShaderPass.hlsl'. at line 24
does anyone know if they changed or what is happening because ive tried every possible pathway

[amber saffron]

Coudl it be ShaderPass.cs.hlsl ? https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/blob/master/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition/Runtime/RenderPipeline/ShaderPass/ShaderPass.cs.hlsl

[pale python]

hi , quick question
how do I add header on the variable like in c# ?

// [Header("title")] <======================== ??? 
_MainTex ("mainTex", 2D) = "blue" {}

[low lichen]

All the attributes you can add are listed here:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-Properties.html
ShaderLab doesn't have an attribute like Header.

Sorry, that's wrong. There is one, but not listed on that page.
[Header(A group of things)] _Prop1 ("Prop1", Float) = 0

It's listed here, alongside [Space]:
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/MaterialPropertyDrawer.html

[pale python]

Thank you ❤️ ❤️

[digital anchor]

Hey guys, I need help with a water shader here.

This block is meant to move a normal map along the sprite to simulate light movement

However when I change Normal direction in the editor the texture gets all streched out

[radiant charm]

So I got confirmation that the new Adaptive Probe Volume system was integrated into the "Baked GI" node in shader graph, but if I do a simple passthrough of the Baked GI node to the emissive value of the right sphere, its clearly not showing any APV data unlike the generic sphere on the left. They said its in versions 2022+, and I'm on the latest 2023 release.

[amber saffron]

Is the normal texture set to clamp maybe ?

[amber saffron]

Also, to controll the normal influence, use the "normal strength" node instead of multiply

[digital anchor]

Well that's just nice. Now's fixed thx

[distant bloom]

Is it possible to let a triplanar worldspace texture drive vertex displacement? I would like to create an array of cubes that change their height depending on a worldspace texture.

[shadow locust]

sample the texture with the vertex position as input

[distant bloom]

Not sure if I understand. The Triplanar node provides the texture in world space. But I cannot drag the color values into the vertex position input. Unity doesn't allow that.

[shadow locust]

Oh I was thinking of using world position as input to this:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@16.0/manual/Sample-Texture-2D-LOD-Node.html
Or this:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@16.0/manual/Sample-Texture-3D-Node.html

the first one I know is in the vertex stage

I think the triplanar node might only operate in the fragment stage

[shadow locust]

Can you plug the output of this into the triplanar node?
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@16.0/manual/Sample-Texture-2D-LOD-Node.html

not sure how the triplanar node works exactly

[past beacon]

Hello, I am trying to Lerp vertex position from TapPosition to the origin vertex position over time(TimeElapsed updated in code). TapPosition is initialized in code to the tap.transform.position. I don't understand why during runtime(and preview) starting position of the Lerp is not where Tap is. I have tried different space options Object/World configs but it didn't help. Any idea?

[distant bloom]

That doesn't seem to work. The Triplanar node only outputs a color.

I would have to get some sort of "world space UV" for the Sample Texture2D LOD node.

[shadow locust]

Yeah it outputs a color but I'm saying using the sample texture2d lod node as the sampler input for it

[regal stag]

If you only need the heights of the cubes (y axis) to change you should be able to use the Position node (World) -> Swizzle "xz" into the UV port on the Sample Texture 2D LOD.
Triplanar is only needed if you need to project the texture from each axis.

[distant bloom]

Just to clarify what I want. I'd like to create a Pin Art effect.

[shadow locust]

the point of Sample Texture2D lod is it samples a texture in the vertex stage

[shadow locust]

there's no actual difference between "colors" and "positions/directions" btw

they're all just numbers

the issue is whether the various nodes are allowed to live in the vertex stage or not

[regal stag]

tap.transform.position would be in World space not Object. Either use the Transform node to convert it, or convert it in C# first.

[distant bloom]

I'm going to try this.

[past beacon]

Thank you, it helped ❤️

[distant bloom]

Thank you! That worked!

Here's the graph. For some reason I cannot use the same Texture as input for vertex and color.

[past beacon]

Could you please suggest how to Interpolate it so it is fully interpolated after e.g. 1 second? So the timer works separately for each vertex

[coral otter]

Hello there,
I got this problem, when I upgraded my universal render pipeline, all my UI components with the shader UniversalRenderPipeline/Particles/Lit literally disappeared from my camera due to the distance.
It's like now there is a distance component in the shader that fade away the particles with this built in shader.
So here is an example with the scene camera next to a star made of this shader on my UI.
And there is at the bottom the game camera that i'm dragging forward. We can see that when it's very very close the particle effect appear again.
However I need this camera very far, and it worked properly before.

Do you have any idea of what URP broke in the shader and how to make it work properly again ?

https://gyazo.com/3feac539b1698127f17ffdbfcc03a308

Nevermind, got it, I had to deactivate the fog in Lighting/Environment

[dim yoke]

You can but you have to use the LOD version of the sample texture node for the vertex stage because partial derivatives wont work there meaning they cannot be used to figure out the LOD level automatically I think

[quaint grotto]

how do you make one specific object in the scene glow in post processing

[grizzled bolt]

#💥┃post-processing ?

[prime shale]

use bloom

[quaint grotto]

right but bloom applies to the whole scene

so wasnt sure if there was another way without post processing

[prime shale]

you can make an object with a material that has a high emissive intensity (and a bloom with a high threshold, and that object can exceed that threshold intensity wise)

beyond that you'll have to look into a more custom way

[grand jolt]

Hey everyone 2D sprites arent affected by lighting in the URP. Im not very familar with shader graph/code if theres anything out there that could help... please point me to it.It would be much appreciated

[quaint grotto]

hm i see ill look into it

[radiant charm]

anyone got any ideas on this?

[pale python]

hi,
i wonder if it's bad to have 20-30 [Toggle(KEYWORD)] in one shader , isnt it better than if - else ?

[prime shale]

it can be bad

and yes it would be better than if else

because if-else is dynamic branching

keywords are static

but

with those keywords you are effectively forcing unity to compile MANY variants of that same shader

I would first ask, what the hell are you doing if you need to have 20 - 30 togglable keywords? @pale python

with the math I think its like to calculate permutations it would be 2^(amount of togglable keywords that you are compiling)

so i.e. you have 30 shader keywords compiled

2^30 = 1,073,741,824 variants

or

2^20 = 1,048,576 variants

[pale python]

well , its a shader but with lots and lots of options , each option gives a completely different result and really creative but im concerned about the performance of the shader after using 30 keywards

[prime shale]

that doesn't really answer my question though, what shader is this?

like I said, with all of those keywords if your compiling them using the shader_feature_local pragma is a ton of variants

surely with whatever you are doing you can cut down on those variants

[pale python]

oh , i dont really know the difference but the example i saw online was #pragma so i used it

[prime shale]

well either way it needs to create a variant

it will bog down your build times and have a memory cost (if I recall?)

[pale python]

#pragma shader_feature_local NAME

oh , but not to much i suppose , right ?
also if it's not bogging down the runtime performance , i guess that is ok , correct ?

[prime shale]

ehhh I wish I knew the numbers but I have a feeling it would also incurr a potential runtime cost as well

because a different shader variant is basically a completely different shader, which I think can increase draw calls

but again, what shader is this that would require this large amount of keywords?

surely whatever the heck your trying to achieve there are plenty of ways one can optimize and cut down on the amount of variants you would need to compile

from the unity docs

[pale python]

well , it's a shader with lots of options , like it can achieve results like gas, liquid solid and even tentacle , but i guess i could use it as a drawing tool than a shader and as soon as i make my decisions for the shader , i could just duplicat it and delete all the extra keywords and all other if-else statements.

[prime shale]

https://docs.unity3d.com/2019.4/Documentation/Manual/shader-conditionals.html

I've mentioned this before when we talked about variants

[pale python]

yup!

[prime shale]

double checking myself with the docs I geuss yes runtime costs will be minimal - none with the keywords, but you will increase memory usage and loading times having to load all of those MANY shader variants

I would try to break up your shader perhaps in different shader types to reduce the amount of variants

for example with whatever the heck you are doing, you could have a "gas" shader that is specific to rendering this gas and has features specific to it

and same for the other kinds

rather than one massive "ubershader"

[pale python]

i love the fact that i can change some values and make a much different results but now I understand the cost of that
I will take ur advice , but I'll keep all the keywords in the original shader only just to help me imagine and duplicate and clean up the shader as I make a decsition

[prime shale]

sure yeah, but for the final results I'd advise you to avoid going crazy with the amount of keywords and features you can toggle because it will come back to bite you

[pale python]

Thank you so much !! ❤️ ❤️

[lunar valley]

I think that _LightColor0 gives you the light color premultuplied with the intensity.

or if not you can get it through c# and then pass it over to you shader manually

I think so

[fathom cypress]

im new to shadergraphs and wanted to apply a dither to my character. I have it working but how come the docs say its commonly applied to the Alpha Clip Threshold?
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@6.9/manual/Dither-Node.html
I plugged it into the alpha before reading the docs and it seemed to work fine. Is this just a performance difference?

[lunar valley]

if you use alpha clip your object doesn't need to be transparent type.

this is useful if you want your object to write to depth

[cedar hull]

When using a custom shader for instanced rendering, is it possible to not pass a list of matrices, but instead calculate the matrices in the vertex shader (using positions etc)?

Thanks in advance guys

[lunar valley]

are you using drawmeshInstanced? also why?

[cedar hull]

1. Yes
2. I need to calculate 10's of thousands of them, and I would do a prepass in a compute shader, but it needs to run on the web (as far as I know Unity WebGL does not support compute)
   @lunar valley

[fathom cypress]

hm i dont fully understand, because my object is set to opaque and it works when its in alpha or when its alpha clip threshhold

[lunar valley]

Does webgl support compute buffers? Because in any case I would recommend you using DrawMeshInstancedIndirekt since it is a lot faster.

[cedar hull]

Not sure, would that make a difference?

[lunar valley]

yeah it would be wrong putting it into the alpha clip threshold this should simply be a parameter that you can define freely

[lunar valley]

well instead of matrecies positions would be stored inside of computebuffers

• its like way faster so

[regal stag]

For an opaque graph, should be fine putting it in either. Clipping is done if the alpha is below the threshold, so something like alpha - dither < threshold and alpha > threshold + dither should be equivalent.
With a transparent graph, having it in alpha would also affect the alpha blending, so more common to have it in the threshold port.

[fathom cypress]

i actually am learning all this because setting the alpha on a transparent material was causing weird rendering issues. I posted it in #archived-urp but yea i dont see a difference in game by putting it in either

[cedar hull]

@lunar valley You mean instead of in a texture or what?
And my problem right now is to get the data in the buffer itself, without compute

[lunar valley]

when was I talking about textures? Also in c# you can use computeBuffer.SetData to feed it an array. This way you don't need a compute shader

[cedar hull]

You werent, I was just confused what else I would use to feed the data.
I know I can set buffer data from the CPU, however I need to do this in real time for a lot of matrices, so that is not really an option

[lunar valley]

so the matrecies need to be updated? Well if so and you can't use a compute shader I have bad news for you.

[cedar hull]

haha I know, that is why i asked if I could do this in the vertex shader using a positional buffer. So without passing the matrices into the function call

[lunar valley]

what exactly do you want to do, what do you mean with this

[regal stag]

If the platform doesn't support compute shaders, I don't think it'll support compute buffers either, those come under the same target. But you can probably use arrays instead (though limited to 1023 elements per call? DrawMeshInstanced has the same limit anyway)

[cedar hull]

Okay, so lets say I have a buffer with positions and I need to calculate a list of transformation matrices from those positions in order to use it for instance rendering.
So I cannot use compute shaders since it is not supported on the web.
Now, my plan was to calculate the matrices itself in the vertex shader (since the matrices are not needed before the vertex stage in the pipeline), and that way still do it on the GPU

[lunar valley]

to make a full transformation matrix you also need rotation and scale position is not enougth

[cedar hull]

I know... However that is not my question. I do not care about scale and rotation for now

[lunar valley]

I see, the matrecies you use with DrawMeshInstanced cannot be updated on the gpu(vertex shader) do you want these objects move in the vertex shader?

[cedar hull]

That could work, if I just pass in identity matrices to the Instanced call and then move them in the vertex shader

[lunar valley]

I was actually asking if you want these instanced objects to move around over time

[cedar hull]

yes, they need to update in real time

[low lichen]

If you don't need to pass in matrices from script, there are instanced draw methods that don't need them

[cedar hull]

really? Can you link them?

[low lichen]

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.DrawMeshInstancedProcedural.html

Or the newer https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.RenderMeshPrimitives.html

Both do the same thing, the latter is just newer and recommended

[cedar hull]

thank you

[lunar valley]

I thought you specifically needed matrecies

[arctic wagon]

hello there, i added block node but it seems inactive guys can you help please

[regal stag]

Enable "Alpha Clipping" under the Graph Settings (tab of Graph Inspector window, toggled with button in top right of the shadergraph window)

[arctic wagon]

oh thank you mate

I am grateful

[finite tree]

hello, changing an exposed variable changes all of the materials with the same material as well (the variable has override enabled and hybrid per instance)
so i found out that gameobjects need to have it as an (Instance) like this

but how do i do that? for now i made a workaround script that turns a material into an instance so it can have its own local variables, but im sure i should do that trough the editor somehow

[finite tree]

why are your node holes all over the place?

[regal stag]

Pretty sure it's just bugged though I've never seen it myself.

[regal stag]

You can create/duplicate the Material asset, but not really possible to create an instance from the editor - that usually only happens at runtime.

[finite tree]

oh okay, well i will stick to 1 material and this for gameobjects i want to change separately

[regal stag]

I'm pretty sure this will only work until the scene is reloaded (then it'll have no material reference). The problem is that those material instances aren't serialised anywhere.

[finite tree]

hm makes sense, i will choose a different approach later, for now i just have one scene while prototyping, but thanks!

[regal stag]

I mean that even if you reload the project those materials should be lost. It's not just a problem when switching scenes.

[finite tree]

tried closing and reopening unity, they stayed instanced (2021.3.25f1)

[regal stag]

Hm okay, maybe they are being saved with the scene 🤔

[finite tree]

That would be cool if its the case