archived-shaders

[waxen ridge]

hello. i am using unity 2022 with urp. i don't understand someting: in my shader graph I explicitly transmit a custom color to the fragment shader. all is well, the gameobject is rendered with said color, but the light affects the final color of the pixels. why is that? shouldn't the fragment shader have the last say regarding the pixel colors?

[lunar valley]

well if you are using a lit shader you are using unity lighting system which in the background inside of the shader is going to have light and ligthing color affect the color of your gameObject

[waxen ridge]

thanks a lot!

[leaden shadow]

I'm super stumped. I cannot get Unity to consistently provide reflection probe values. It seems to simply provide black at some camera positions/directions. In fact, the only time I can get the reflections to work consistently is with the editor camera; any enabled cameras during playmode result in objects sometimes receiving black reflections. Code, with all details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/13xrdsa/unity_does_not_consistently_provide_reflection/

I would appreciate any help from any shader wizards out there!

[grand jolt]

I have this simple dithering transparent shader (using shader graph) but it obviously results in overlapping with itself, kinda breaking the illusion. I've looked for possible solutions but they're either from 2012 or don't work whatsoever

[dim yoke]

Is it lit or unlit shader graph? I dont think dithering transparency should suffer with overlappings generally…

[grand jolt]

unlit

dithering is applied to alpha channel with a threshold to make it less of a gradient color

[dim yoke]

Is that transparent or opaque/cutout tho?

[grand jolt]

transparent

[dim yoke]

Why would you use transparent with dithering?

[grand jolt]

...because I use dithering to apply alpha instead of hiding certain pixels?

[dim yoke]

So is the dithering used just to make it look cooler or what?

[grand jolt]

yes

while it works fine with the shader being set to opaque (albeit becoming far brighter as expected), doing so breaks render ontop feature

I am using it to display player's controller position in case if the distance between them and the physical hand objects becomes too large

[dim yoke]

In that case its just the transparent object ordering issue, nothing to do with dithering exactly. The only way to prevent it in this case that I know of would be to first render the hand only to the depth buffer and then render it again with the regular ztesting or something like that so only the top most faces of the hand will be drawn

[regal stag]

I would assume it "breaks" it because the graph is now opaque but the feature is set to Filter->Queue for Transparent. Change that to Opaque too.

[grand jolt]

ah, damn

[dim yoke]

Ah, I think I didnt understand what you meant bt render on top feature

[grand jolt]

yeah I also thought of that but I'm not experienced enough with shader graph or unity's shader system in general to know how to do that

alright, I'll stick to opaque for now then

[dim yoke]

I think with urp and sjader graph youd need to make two shaders/materials for the hand and apply both in sequence

[grand jolt]

I guess increasing alpha threshold can make it paler

[dim yoke]

But yeah, Id definitely go for the alpha cutout strategy in case it doesnt completely ruin the visual appearance (I mean it can look bit scuffed but at the same time can make a cool effect)

[quaint grotto]

any one know why i get this error

my function uses a paramter float time

but thats not the same as _Time

so i am kinda confused

[scarlet crater]

how might you achieve soft outlines like this through post process?

my thinking right now is create a mask by running a blur algorithm over the stencil buffer but like

idk if that would work / be the best way to do it

[quaint grotto]

thats a bloom but you would need some kinda exponential fall off

[scarlet crater]

yeah i guess what im struggling with is obtaining a mask of certain objects on the screen

is it possible to visualize the stencil buffer in a fragment shader?

[half thicket]

How do I deal with the Time node becoming more and more inaccurate over time? It's a float, so after a few dozen hours the precision loss is actually so high that the shaders are getting all messed up and stutter. And at some point they just completely stop working. I think it's extremely common that games run for 100+ hours, because you can just suspend them on consoles. But I've never seen a game's shaders just break after a while

[meager pelican]

Well, you can view what passes thru the stencil test. And of course set the stencil test to what you want to view.
And just return, say, red for whatever passes.

Stencil operation is a test/filter. The frag() won't be called if the test fails. IDK if you can even map it as a texture; I think of it as an internal hardware buffer that we don't have access to but can set filter parameters for.

[meager pelican]

You'd pass in your own timer value. But what aspect of the time node? The time should be coming from the system clock. So how will you get a more accurate time to pass in?

[scarlet crater]

someone gave me a smart idea of using alpha values to mask objects, but now im having the issue of my comparisons not passing when they theorhetically should be the same value?
like if i write an obj with an alpha val of lets say 128, and then create a mask in the post process shader that returns 1 if the screen textures alpha is == 128. I don't know why thats not working

im sure its something simple but its 4am and my brain no worky

it was absolutely something stupid nvm

thanks floats

[warm rapids]

is there a way to generate seamless noise textures in the shader graph?

i'm using simple noise for this cloud material but because it doesn't tile it's causing visible seams like this to appear

I thought I would be able to use photoshop to generate some noise textures that do tile and then use a Sample Texture 2D, but these don't seem to be compatible with the float variables I have that determine the scale of the noise

[stone fox]

I hate baked lightings

[low lichen]

It lets me get nice lighting on low tier devices, so I like it.

[stone fox]

but it bake my PC

so I use low quality lightings

like default direct light

oh and how to make the player start with quality select option

[regal stag]

You'd put the float variable into the Tiling of a Tiling And Offset node for the UV port of the texture sample

[warm rapids]

brilliant, thanks

[stark forge]

So I started making a game using models in blender. It was a bit to late when i realized blender textures/shaders don't transfer to unity. Does anyone got recommendations for what tutorials to learn to learn unity shading?

[scarlet crater]

https://streamable.com/wwflvt
https://streamable.com/u2xov3
got it figured out!
took a lot longer than i hoped but it looks neat if i do say so myself

the blur algo is from here https://www.ronja-tutorials.com/post/023-postprocessing-blur/

[tender tusk]

I made a shader graph to dissolve a 2D sprite, but I want to make it so that it starts dissolving from the top of the sprite going down and I tried adding this (basically I multiply the alpha of the resulting image with a step function that takes in account the Y position of the pixel as you can see), but the result is.. nothing.. Like I can't see the sprite anymore

[regal stag]

Object space isn't really a thing with sprites due to the way they batch. Assuming it's not rotated, could use the vertical axis of the UV instead of the Position node.
If it is in an atlas, you'd also need min/max Y coords so you can remap back into the 0-1 range to compare against the percentage property.

[tender tusk]

Oh ok thanks, I'll try

[vocal narwhal]

Huh... neat

[ashen linden]

Can I apply a normal and depth map to a unlit shader?

[rare wren]

With a custom shader sure, but you gotta process the maps yourself

[ashen linden]

there is any tutorial in how to apply the depth texture?

[rare wren]

Is it not just a normal map with extra steps?
Maybe you can use the vertex shader to pull out the details more?

[ashen linden]

gonna try

thanks for the help

[regal stag]

Do you mean a height map? If so, that's usually applied with parallax mapping - used to offset the uv coordinates when sampling other textures (such as albedo, normals,etc).
A depth texture is something different, i.e. stores distances from camera. Might be used for post process stuff.

[regal stag]

You also wouldn't need a normal map, unless you're actually using the normals in the unlit shader calculations (perhaps custom lighting?)

[ashen linden]

Im planning on adding a normal map as well, and yep, custom Lighting

[past beacon]

How can I color vertices of mesh in shader graph according to current color input, so the color is saved after I switch the color?

[lunar valley]

you can use vertex colors

[past beacon]

yep but how can I preserve vertex colors if the current color is changed? I have tried modifying vertex color in script, but because this is Probuilder bezier curve - I can not set UV Mode to auto so I can not impact vertex colour in code.

[buoyant geyser]

Anybody here familiar with compute shaders? I'm trying to write a super basic compute shader that blurs a render texture over time, but running into a lot of issues

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

// Create a RenderTexture with enableRandomWrite flag and set it
// with cs.SetTexture
RWTexture2D<float4> _RippleTex;
float _BlurDist;
float _BlurRate;
float _Fadeout;
float _DT;

[numthreads(1,1,1)]
void CSMain (uint3 id : SV_DispatchThreadID)
{
    float4 colIn = float4(0, 0, 0, 0);
    float4 col;
    float range = _BlurDist;

    for (float dist = 0.0; dist < range; dist++)
    {
        col = _RippleTex[int2(clamp(id.x + dist, 0, 1999), id.y)];
        colIn += (col.r + col.g) * float4(1, 0, 0, 1);

        col = _RippleTex[int2(clamp(id.x - dist, 0, 1999), id.y)];
        colIn += (col.r + col.g) * float4(0, 1, 0, 1);
    }

    float4 colOut = colIn / (_BlurDist * 2) - _Fadeout;

    _RippleTex[id.xy] = colOut;
}

this runs once per frame, and it just averages colors based on a blur distance value, but for some reason after a few frames it always reaches an equilibrium and stops blurring

for instance, with a blur distance of 2 it reaches this point and never gets any further

[prisma cloud]

how do I fix this shader

its pink

[echo lily]

Given a distance from a given point to the camera center, how can I reconstruct clipSpace.z and clipSpace.w from that?

[half thicket]

But shaders work in 32 bit, so this wouldn't change anything. The issue is that after a certain amount of time you'll have less and less decimal places, because floats just cannot hold that many. At some point you'll have exactly 0 decimal places, which will completely break everything

[meager pelican]

Then pass TWO variables. One for number of hours, and another for total seconds after the hours. And use them accordingly, Maybe use a double if you need to. Maybe you need a date too. IDK.
But why do you need that large of a range? Can't you "just" reset it at some interval? What are you doing?

That's you programming, and solving problems. Maybe make a custom function and use some shader globals.

There's nothing that Unity Tech can do about the resolution of a 32 bit float.

[obtuse basin]

hey so i'm finding myself in the awkward position of not knowing any shader code but needing to make minor edits to shader assets i've already bought and downloaded. specifically i'm trying to add a simple 3d skew effect like shown here in this shadergraph shader to two .shader shader assets. one is a palette swapper that should mostly or entirely be a fragment shader and the other is just one of the Unity standard shaders with shadows enabled. can you point me towards any learning materials that will help me figure out how to accomplish that?

[grizzled bolt]

What render pipeline would the shaders be for ultimately?

[obtuse basin]

built in

i already got one working actually but the other doesn't seem to have a vertex function????

oh it might be in an #include

yeah it includes UnitySprites.cginc which has a vertex shader.

[obtuse basin]

does that mean I need to remove the include and replace it with any function definitions that the shader calls? or is it more complicated than that?

[severe hollow]

not sure if this has been reported yet. However Shadergraph in 2022LTS URP is half broken. Can't copy/paste properly

[regal stag]

I'd keep the include in case there's other functions in there that need to be referenced, but copy the vertex shader specifically to your code, change it's name slightly and update the vertex pragma to match. Then you can edit it.

[sour flint]

Hey does anyone know why my camera cant see my performantive renderer here?

weirdly deleting this automatically selected performantive renderer for me.

[fierce ether]

Does I really need HDRP just to get access for ray tracing?
(I am willing to try URP but HDRP sounds a bit to much for me)

But I really would like to have a raytracing option for my game...
also, DLSS 2 or higher would be cool to support, because it can increase the players FPS..

[sour flint]

HDRP has more features so yes it seems HDRP is needed

[fierce ether]

damn, because even if, some assets I use are only build-in and URP compatible.

[sour flint]

Depends what you are trying to do and what the trade off is

[fierce ether]

but what exactly is the issue with shaders?
can I not just use every shader while also adding ray tracing?

[sour flint]

I am not 100% sure myself

Do you 100% understand what ray tracing is?

its for higher end consoles and the latests graphics cards

[fierce ether]

its the "lite" version of that, what blender calls "cicrles rendering"-

casting many invisible rays of light instead of faking it like "Eevee" in blender does.

[sour flint]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@14.0/manual/Ray-Tracing-Getting-Started.html

theres 100s of graphics card

and it only a small percentage of thewm

actually support it

its up to you but personally if this is a personal game i am making

Its just not needed

but if you're really wanting to try out ray tracing

i recommend making a new project

and messing around with it

[fierce ether]

I have a 3060 Ti, so it should not be an issue. and I want to make it as toggle option in the settings for the game, so if the game see it have supported hardware, the option for it is interactable and not greyed-out.

[sour flint]

understandable but if your whole game is in URP

either start working on the whole game being in HDRP

or give it a miss

[fierce ether]

its not made yet. not this game I am planning now. but I made some earlier games before that used build-in.

I want to start until Unity 2023LTS is out, as soon I plan what assets I need to buy and I test some mechanics in lower versions of Unity, because I really want to support Windows arm.

[teal hornet]

Alright so I'm sampling 3 different gradient files, how can I combine them all into 1 gradient file and sample the correct gradient?

Like a top, middle, bottom structure basically

[sour flint]

Would a subgraph work?

[fierce ether]

so, what is the reason why everyone is feared to use HDRP if they are not a really big studio with 100+ programmers?
(Because I am alone)

how bad would it be, if I only use build in and URP textures and shaders?

And does OpenXR work with it, if I use ray tracing?

[sour flint]

what do you mean by feared to use?

Its just how the game engine is built the High Definition Render Pipeline has more features that can be used within this pipeline

[fierce ether]

its compared to a big: "OHH HELLL NOOO!" if someone says he wants to use HDRP.
explained with, that its made for only high end graphics what only makes sence if you are a big studio with many developers on your boat.

[sour flint]

No ones feared

its just more

majority of users using unity like you said

arent massive companies

so they already may have projects setup with other pipelines

[fierce ether]

does the performance be worse if you use HDRP instead of URP or build-in? or why are not more peoples using it?
And I am still able to make the game OpenXR compatible?

its like buying a RTX 4090 just to watch youtube videos with it all the time.
Even if you have the money for this one-time purchase, the energy-costs would be still higher compared to a PC with just a APU.

(And using HDRP feels like buying a 4090 for Youtube videos...)

[sour flint]

This just entirely depends on what features you're trying to use

Its just not worth it for many people atm

as many people can't even run the high end features

[fierce ether]

features that mostly would be filled with build-in or URP...
Only this Ray tracing and DLSS thing seems to need that high level pipeline.

and I dont even know if I truely need URP?
atleast some videos means it would cause a way higher framerate than build-in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn8h_ryomIY

[fierce ether]

It would be great if I could support everything like publishing for the plattforms:
Windows x64 / arm64, Linux x64 and Mac (Intel & Apple Silicon).

• Ray tracing + OpenXR.

[obtuse basin]

okay so it looks like i didn't think this shader all the way through, big surprise there lol.

on the right is a tree simply angled 45° so it faces the camera. on the left is a vertical tree going through a shader that skews like this;

            {
                // Apply the world space coordinate skew
                v.vertex.z += v.vertex.y;

                v.vertex = UnityFlipSprite(v.vertex, _Flip);

                #if defined(PIXELSNAP_ON)
                v.vertex = UnityPixelSnap(v.vertex);
                #endif

                
                UNITY_INITIALIZE_OUTPUT(Input, o);
                o.color = v.color * _Color * _RendererColor;
            }```

as you can see the rotation looks perfect and the skew looks bad and stretched on 2d sprites. but the environment is also skewed in a similar way and looks fine. and i need the sprites to go through a similar shader as the environment or else the z positions will not align properly if y != 0. i think i'm on the right track though. just need a slightly smarter vertex shader, right? one that angles but doesn't stretch.

huh also my shadows seem to be gone

[ember wigeon]

For enemies that die in my game (a 2d survivors-like) I'm currently using a dissolve shader that works with a cloud texture. I'm looking for more sprite shaders to use on dying enemies. I've tried shadertoy but without success. Can someone recommend another site?

Here's a gameplay video that shows the effect https://youtu.be/TLSC0ua4RiI

I want different effects for enemies dying from different types of damage.

[lunar valley]

if I understand correctly, you want to rotate the trees to be facing the camera, for that just use a matrix multiplication which contains the cameras transforms

[obtuse basin]

thank you that gives me something to google. but it's not enough to rotate or i would do that in the inspector. the world coordinates need to be changed too or else there will be problems interacting with large environmental objects because of the Z offset

[lunar valley]

I guess you can just once you rotated your sprites offset the vertecies on the forward direction some amount

[obtuse basin]

yeah i'm going to have to make some diagrams or something to work this out, spatial reasoning is not my strong poiny

[obtuse basin]

okay so i figured out how to unstretch the sprites using basic trig. turned out to be very simple:

v.vertex.z += v.vertex.y;```

but i think i'm doing my transform in object space instead of world space because my objects still don't align properly in the z axis if they are on a raised or lowered elevation. i took a quick video to demonstrate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB1NJZAlm3I

see how things mostly work (except for the culling on the tree) when on the ground, but once i go up the ramp my z offset doesn't match the environment?

[grizzled meadow]

is there a way i could "blend" materials? like in the terrain editor where they fade into eachother

[vale estuary]

How would I go about/is there already, a shader that if the object moves the texture stays in place? Like I want a disc at the players feet for that has the ground texture. I want the disc to move with the player looking like the ground is moving bellow them(while really the disc is moving with and the ground texture is staying relative to global/panning).

[unique raven]

In Shadergraph, how do I get a vertex's local position(just need the y) before any transforms (rotation/scale)?

[quaint grotto]

maybe combine render textures together but thats expensive

[dim yoke]

Not really you can blend colors etc. in shaders but blending materials isnt really possible in any reasonable way

[vale estuary]

https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/advanced-rendering/triplanar-mapping/

Or you would feed in a color map, split it so specific colors are specific alphas, and then apply the color for each alpha/combine them back together.

Performance would be a huge consideration, but yes other games do it and it is posible.

[lunar valley]

you just need to sample the texture with world space coordinates and make sure your texture has tilling enabled

[lunar valley]

the position node gives you such I think and then just use a split bode to get you y position

[vale estuary]

Ah yeah thanks. I got it working in shaderGraph. Also had to rotate the World position so it projects down.

[round plume]

assigning a material with custom shader to sprite makes it unselectable in editor window

while everything else act's as it should, can still select it in hierarchy

using any shader than custom also lets me select it in 2d window

hm, it's caused when flip x is enabled

so i guess it makes backface unselectable?

[regal stag]

Maybe need Cull Off is in the SubShader then?

[round plume]

it's not subshader

and there's no cull off

[regal stag]

Oh it's a graph. Is it using one of the Sprite types? I would assume they'd handle this 😦

[round plume]

2d sprite

so it's hardcoded?

[meager pelican]

The term to search for is "Camera facing billboard"
https://gamedevbeginner.com/billboards-in-unity-and-how-to-make-your-own/

[toxic flume]

Hey, I would like to know my way is standard and OK or not.
In a voxel/tile game, each voxel has a texture.
Now, I would like to consider textures of neighbors for each voxel in the edges kinda blending instead of rectangular shape.
For example, a voxel has texture grass and 4 neighbors are rock, sea, soil and sand.
I have created a sample mask for it. For each vertex, these data (4 texture ids for each neighbor + main texture id) are sent to the shader.
Then, the shader samples the mask texture and get the index and then the respective texture id and finally sample it.

[obtuse basin]

thank you but that's not my problem. i have the camera at a fixed angle so billboarding is as simple as angling the sprites the same amount.

my problem is...well, i have a couple problems now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llr-aYVLmsk

everything in this scene is drawn with 3d skew shaders but they aren't working together well. notice how the trees jump in and out of position or disappear entirely and sometimes don't properly cast shadows. also at about 0:12 you can see the problem i was trying to explain, where the character appears to fall through the floor because the skewing effect offsets the position of the upper level. then at about 0:27 i show the opposite where you can walk on what appears to be thin air because of the z offset on the upper level. i need objects at a higher y to draw at a higher z than their actual location if they will properly line up with the environment.

[buoyant geyser]

I'm getting a kernal error when trying to index a StructuredBuffer, any ideas?

struct Ripple 
{
    int offset;
    float rad;
    float mult;
};

StructuredBuffer<Ripple> _Ripples[16];
...

float offset;
float val;
float4 rippleCol = float4(0, 0, 0, 1);

for (int i = 0; i < 16; i++) 
{
  offset = _Ripples[i].offset;... //Error occurs here

replacing _Ripples[i].offset with any other arbitrary int does not cause any errors

[tropic badger]

- Hello. My problem must be trivial. I use a custom shader in trail renderer component, and i can't seem to make the color property from its inspector affect my shader. I've used the color semantics, but it works only for sprite renderers sadly. How can i make it work with trail renderers as well?

[low lichen]

Structured buffers are not meant to have a hard coded length, like arrays. It should just be defined as: StructuredBuffer<Ripple> _Ripples;

[buoyant geyser]

it's probably vertex color

how can i read the length that i'm passing in then?

[low lichen]

If you know it's always going to be 16 from the C# side, you can continue to use 16 in the for loop. Otherwise, you can pass the length as a parameter, or use GetDimensions: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3dhlsl/sm5-object-structuredbuffer-getdimensions

[buoyant geyser]

i see, perfect thank you

[tropic badger]

- I do read values from vertices and pass them straight to fragments, it doesn't work. For specifically trail renderer, sprite renderer's property does affect my output

- No, wait, i've been wrong all this time. Color does work, but not alpha. I guess it's because my shader is in default opaque queue, right?

[low lichen]

Specifying a blending mode is the first thing you need for transparency, but order is also important.

[tropic badger]

- Hopefully next time i will remember this. Thank you

[meager pelican]

Will this help?
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/adding-some-perspective-to-your-unity-2d-game-
note that it's not a total-shader solution, but rather, getting the camera projections to work for you in this style (if that's even the same style you're after).
You should clarify that you're in Unity 2D or 3D and that you're trying for either a lot of billboarding to to emulate that look of 2.5D or whatever. I'm sorry to be dense, but "3D skew shader" isn't specific enough for me, but I'm not an expert in sprite stuff.

[grave vortex]

Is it possible to use Material.SetFloat or any of those other functions to set a variable in shader code within a command buffer?

I blit several times with the same shader, and need different values each time

[meager pelican]

Not really: https://forum.unity.com/threads/command-buffers-settexture-setfloat-for-materials-instead-of-global.1185514/

BUT... you might be able to emulate it. If your blit passes "know" their index, perhaps you can use a structured buffer that has a structure containing all the variables for one pass, and each instance in the buffer is the pass index (0 is first blit, 1 is 2nd blit, etc.). You could set them up before hand, and then set that structured buffer as a global or something that's just on all relevant materials.

@grave vortex

[grave vortex]

Interesting, I wonder why that functionality doesn't exist. Your solution seems pretty handy for some applications, but in my case, I call the same shader pass several times, and don't know how I would have the shader choose which set of values to use

(If they were separate passes each time, it would be really trivial to hard code it)

[meager pelican]

There IS a way to set a global value from a command buffer. Maybe you can set that before each call?

[grave vortex]

Looks like it's gonna have to be that for the time being

I tried to use those global shader functions a while ago, but it didn't work, do I need to do anything specific with the variables in the shader for it to work? (like put them in properties or something?)

[meager pelican]

NO, that might even mess it up. Not sure, but a material property might override the global. It should be defined in the shader, and the engine should "just" set its value automagically, IIRC.

[grave vortex]

Got it, thanks for the help!

[haughty siren]

i can't wrap my head around this, i legit set the xyz of the return value to 1 at the end of frag, why are the corners rendering as black? i tried different blending modes but nothing seemed to help. help??

here's the blend method just in case it's relevant

[icy nymph]

So if i have the following shadergraph, how can I use the top black and white part as an alpha mask for the bottom?

[dim yoke]

I mean do you just get the r, b and g from the bottom and a from the upper one?

[icy nymph]

that's what i thought i could do but it doesn't sem to work, the upper alpha seems to have no effect

[dim yoke]

Show how you tried that

[icy nymph]

I split the bottom, then did a combine where i used the top for the a channel, and the bottom did the rgb

Sorry I have something else going right now

This is what i have now, I thought a simple add would put these two together

[meager pelican]

It's the alpha.

[icy nymph]

What i am trying to do it highlight the center color, while leaving the outside alone

[haughty siren]

shouldnt it be white tho

[meager pelican]

No, you only set col.rgb = 1

your col.a is the result of that expression above. The one with 1/sqrt(.....

You can set col.xyzw = 1 (or col.rgba = 1) to see the diff.

xyzw and rgba are the same, but usually with colors you'd use rgba not xyzw. Just for clarity. The compiler doesn't care.

And of course it depends on what you're blending it onto. You're apparently blending it onto something black. @haughty siren

[haughty siren]

i figured it out, alpha is -1 to 1, not 0 to 1. those black corners has negative alpha and therefore inverted the colors? i fixed it by applying an if statemtn to all alpha pixels that have value < 0 and setting those to 0

[meager pelican]

FYI - There's a built-in cg keyword for that called Saturate. Probably faster than an if. It will clamp values to 0-1 range. And there's a node for it too, of course.

[terse flicker]

Is there a way to disable (frustum) culling?

I have around 2000 objects that are all always visible on the screen, but it seems like Unity still spends 2-3ms per frame culling them

[dim yoke]

No afaik, try to ask on #💻┃unity-talk

[terse flicker]

Thanks, seems like you beat me to it

[icy nymph]

how do these 2 things add up to make what it does?

[dim yoke]

Only way I think thats possible is so that the black color is not just (0, 0, 0) but actually negative for some of the channels. If you saturate the nodes before adding, you should get the expected result

[icy nymph]

let me give that a try

@dim yoke It worked! Thanks!

[radiant charm]

Still stuck on this with no answers on why its happening. Tried every variable in the book but I'm getting 0 APV data

[heavy stirrup]

any good VS2022 extensions for .shader files? HLSL Tools for Windows seems to give random red underlines for .shader Unity files

[haughty siren]

thanks

[cosmic prairie]

so one multiple is black next is white? multiply color by 255, modulo it with 2, then floor the value

should work

[meager pelican]

Emissive? Why not base color multiplier?
IDK, there IS a debugger for APV, but I haven't used the system at all. IDK if it's a node problem or a baking problem.
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/blob/2021.2/staging/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition/Documentation~/Probe-Volumes.md
https://forum.unity.com/threads/adaptive-probe-volumes-apvs-experimental-release-for-hdrp-in-2021-2.1238824/
And I assume you're in HDRP.

[radiant charm]

I've used the debugger and the probes are baked, thats how the left sphere is entirely being lit with right now. Also I'm not multiplying by base color because that's then just overlayed with the shading, emissive confirms nothing is passing through besides the blue hue.
I'm using URP for my project, which as far as I've seen has basically the same features. There's no documentation on the Shader Graph use anyways so any disclaimers wouldn't be visible. A mod in the Unity forum confirmed its been a feature for over a year so it should be working

[amber saffron]

float doubleOutline = ( v.color.x < 0.01953125 && v.color.x > 0.00390625 )? 1 : 0;

Maybe ? 🙂

Looks like random hardcoded magic numbers though 😅

[low lichen]

It depends on the platform and the screen resolution. For mobile GPUs, post processing costs way more than on desktop GPU, due to the differences in GPU architecture making it more expensive to read the screen texture back.

[cosmic prairie]

in shader? check out geometry shaders. May be easier to just have an extra mesh tho, depending on what you need

what are you trying to achieve?

but which part of your outline needs a new mesh?

usually it's the same mesh with the culling inverted

ah, but wouldn't a texture map be better for that purpose?

allright, but I'm not sure how would you render that on the edges

without an extra mesh

how do you determine where to place those extra faces?

oh wait, do you mean where the normal is sharp?

like.. the geometry is not smooth, but a sudden cutoff

this will be mobile, right?

I'm not sure if geo shaders are properly supported there

oh geo shaders are supported

may be still better than geo shaders

[fast lark]

I am new to shaders and i've been following a basic tutorial and i don't know why but the shader will only work if the render queue is set to Transparent

[regal stag]

Is only working in the transparent queue a problem? What is the shader doing? Maybe link the tutorial

[fast lark]

if is set to From Render as it should it shows like this

[cosmic prairie]

not sure how costly exactly, theres a discussion over this https://community.khronos.org/t/does-the-use-of-geometric-shaders-significantly-reduce-performance/106326

[fast lark]

From Shader*

[regal stag]

Is this in URP? With a shader written from code (not graph)?

[fast lark]

Is in URP yes

exacly

[regal stag]

Then it's likely related to depth priming. The shader might technically be working, but the skybox is drawing over it as the object doesn't have a DepthOnly pass so isn't priming the depth buffer.
See here for info : https://www.cyanilux.com/faq/#urp-depth-priming

[cosmic prairie]

maybe you could use the same pass just displace the mesh at the edge outwards

[regal stag]

@grand jolt Haven't been following this convo entirely, but really seems like you should just have an extra mesh for the hull outline. That way you have full control over the faces. Extra passes or geometry shaders will likely be more expensive than that.

[fast lark]

It seems to work thx

[cosmic prairie]

where the mesh ends extend it there

[cosmic prairie]

kindof

[haughty siren]

light is visible in scene view but not in game mode? i draw that light with a shader using Blend Zero SrcColor. as u can see it works in the scene mode as it should but in game view it disappears. this problem is present only with Blend Zero SrcColor, for example if i set the blend mode to one one it fills both screen white. tried googling but didn't find anything. help??

[regal stag]

Depends on the pipeline, but if it's URP/HDRP and a MeshRenderer they use the SRP batcher, so different materials using the same shader (and shader variant, so same keywords) are batched together.
They're still technically separate draw calls, but the SRP batcher optimises it. (Though just 5 draw calls probably isn't enough to matter really)

For built-in RP you typically want to use the same materials where possible, yes

[regal stag]

I would assume that HDR isn't enabled, so the values in the shader are clamped to 1 before blending, resulting in 1 * dst so doesn't really alter the destination.

[haughty siren]

scene view renders with hdr on but game view doesn't?

[regal stag]

Maybe HDR is disabled in the Project Settings->Graphics / Quality levels, or URP asset. That would cause the game view to not render with a HDR target. I guess the scene view always does.

[haughty siren]

damnaight let's see

[haughty siren]

it worked omg

thanks bro u saved me

i could not have figured that out myself lol

[surreal locust]

Hi, i'm trying to enable gpu instancing on my shader

these groups are by 2 or 3 objects

but they should be on the same group

what am I failing?

[low lichen]

It says "Why this draw call can't be batched with the previous one": "Non-instanced properties set for instanced shader".

So there are one or more non-instanced properties that are different between those groups.

[surreal locust]

mmm, i think they are the same....

[low lichen]

For GPU instancing, you must use the same material and change the instanced properties using MaterialPropertyBlock in script. I can't see from your screenshot if these properties are being affected by a material property block or not.

[storm cloud]

I'm moving this plane's vertices using noise, why does these weird errors happen? They only happen when the shader (unlit) is set to transparent

[surreal locust]

yes, I do

[low lichen]

The shader is drawing on top of itself. When z writing is disabled, like for transparency, then the order of the triangles determines which are drawn on top of which.

[storm cloud]

I think i see what you mean, but its a bit strange how "striped" the effect is and how its mostly just visible from one angle. Is there a way to fix it?

[surreal locust]

not all these properties are affected by materialpropertyblock, but all the properties highlighted that are values different from the default value in material are changed through MaterialPropertyBlock

this is a problem?

[low lichen]

Yes, it must be the same material or Unity's batching will split them.

[low lichen]

You will need to enable z writing, or have another pass just before this one that only writes to the depth buffer.

[storm cloud]

thank you! got it working:)

[surreal locust]

Ho can I debug which property is the guilty?

[low lichen]

Even if all the non-instanced properties are identical, Unity will still split batches if it's not the same material instance. Unless you mean you may have non-instanced properties that you are changing in the MaterialPropertyBlock.

[surreal locust]

i mean:

• all objects comes from the same prefab duplicated multiple times with Ctrl+D (so they have the same material)
• all instanced properties are changed through the MaterialPropertyObject Pattern
• the non instanced properties are not changed

still have batching of only 2 or 3 instances instead of 16

[surreal locust]

Ok, I found the bug

when i moved one property from non instanced to instaced i changed it from float to vecotr, but the code that changes the property block was still setfloat

[waxen ridge]

hello. i am building my grass, and for that i'm using mesh clumps that i place via the cpu, and i color / move the grass with the wind via an unlit shader. is there a good and simple way to achieve grass displacement (for when the player walks over the grass), but for several objects? (perhaps even ~10 at some point)?

[tidal wind]

Will shaders work in default pipeline

The other programmer says he used shaders once in the project but doesnt remember setting up HDRP or URP

[lunar valley]

no if its for hdrp or urp it won't work on built in stimply just out of the box

[lunar valley]

yeah just pass over the 10 positions to the shader and then loop over those and then do your grass curving calculations

[tidal wind]

Will the shader graph work, I will make shader idc

[waxen ridge]

is there a more elegant / scalable solution? let's say i have 50 objects

[lunar valley]

well the shader graf file won't work but you can just copy and paste the nodes to one that works on the pipeline so yeah thats ususally possible

[tidal wind]

Means I need to get a shader that works on that pipeline and then I could copy urp shader noodes to it and make it work?

[lunar valley]

look where do these possitions lie? exactly on the cpu, so you will need to bring them over to the gpu, if you update these positions on the cpu you will need to pass them over to the gpu again because it doesn't have the changes. If you update those on the gpu and never on the cpu but I doubt that because you mentioned player and etc, you wouldn't need the transfering data to the gpu every frame but could only do it once. And if you have 50 objects you need to do it for each object if you want to do it for each object, if the objects are static or would have the same movement all the time which could be baked in (but I doubt because you said player) then there could be other solutions

[waxen ridge]

ok, so no obvious alternatives as far as i can tell from your response. good to know. thanks for the help!

[lunar valley]

well you can just right click on your project settings and create a shader graf if you have that package installed from the package manager and then simply copy the nodes from the other urp shader graf to that new one

[tidal wind]

Alr thanks

I actually want to make shader just wanted to confirm if I could use shadsr graph as idk how to do it otherwise

[lunar valley]

you can also code shaders in hlsl

[glossy verge]

Why the boolean is not working as intended? Dont know much about shaders but this should work right I think

if i put it in false its red anyways

instead of the other color

it turns out that this kind of bools doesnt work with branch

[tender sorrel]

Hello I'm new to shaders and suppose my problem is something quite trivial! I'm writing a shaderlab shader and I'm getting inconsistent results between different mobile devices(iOS/android). I'm just trying to make a circle. But there are strange artifacts that I don't even know the names of so I don't even know what to google. I'm creating a RenderTarget with a RenderTextureFormat.ARGBFloat and using Graphics.Blit(texture, renderTexture, material) to render the texture to a renderTexture. It's strange as it works perfectly fine in the editor and most mobile devices I tested on. I want to create a texture to a circular by setting the alpha to zero on the edges to create a circle with the original texture. I'm going to share my shader as well and a screenshot of the strange artifacts I'm getting. - https://pastebin.com/r2z5ACUt
Thanks in advance for any suggestions as to what might be the problem.

[regal stag]

This looks okay to me? The boolean should be exposed to the material where it can be toggled (or via script with SetFloat/Integer using same _Boolean reference and a value of 1 or 0)

[glossy verge]

looks like the shader graph is bugged when using custom booleans, i restarted unity and started to use a different color than those 2

cant really use this

[tacit parcel]

boolean in shadergraph is just a wrapper for float, so I think for color, you can simply use lerp
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@14.0/manual/Boolean-Node.html

[quaint grotto]

does shader graph have some kinda portal thing so i dont have lines literally everywhere

where i can duplicate a node and it will just be a reference

and then link it to other stuff

[civic onyx]

Hi Guys

I want to write a unity shader code for procedural wireframing texture on mesh through vertex positions

i asked Chatgpt to write this code for me, i am sharing it here, i am 3d artist and has no experience of code.

this code doesnt work on mesh btw

this is what i want to create, but in Unity without using Textures

[lunar valley]

if i unserstand you correctly, no lines is how shader graf works l

https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/advanced-rendering/flat-and-wireframe-shading/

[lunar valley]

here this tutorial shows you how to do that

flip the normals when they are still in world space and then just transform them to clip. Or transform them back to world invert and then transform back to clip if they are in clip space by default or something

[haughty siren]

that worked for me but now the lights in game view are less bright than the ones in scene view, fix??

[civic onyx]

is it possible to fine a compiled code somewhere?

[lunar valley]

somewhere maybe

[civic onyx]

yeah found one on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr5QmPo-HxY&ab_channel=Firnox

[umbral hemlock]

The good news is that’s pretty easy to do! You just use Mesh.SetIndices(Toplogy.Lines) or something like that. The important part is using Topology.Lines.

[civic onyx]

actually i dont have any knowledge of coding, so i just downloaded the code and using it as it is, now i want to add the emission feature in it, but i dont know what to add in the code lol

[umbral hemlock]

I’m working on a modeler so I had to do that same thing. If you want to render the wireframe over a mesh efficiently, you can reuse the same vertices. Just figure out the indices of which vertices you want and set them.

[umbral hemlock]

Oh I see. Well I’m not sure how to do it without coding sorry 😅

[civic onyx]

thats what i wanted to do, because blender does it with just one single node, but in unity i have to download a whole coding script for it

[civic onyx]

no problem, what u saying is same as he does or is it something different?

right now there is 168 lines of code, if ur method shrink it, then i will use it happily lol

[waxen ridge]

hello, noob question: i have grass that uses my custom lit shader in URP. objects can cast shadows on it, but i hate the way it interacts with light. I would like to keep it displaying shadows (cast on it by other objects; the grass itself doesnt cast shadows), but would like not to have it reflect light. how do I achieve this? do i need to use an unlit shader and handle shadows / light myself?

[lunar valley]

what do you mean it shouldn't reflect light like it should not be shaded? or should it not be specular? or..

[regal stag]

Not built-in, but... https://github.com/Cyanilux/ShaderGraphVariables

[quaint grotto]

Perfect thanks

Any perf costs?

[warm rapids]

I'm having some trouble with this shader graph. The current state it's in works (it's a cloud skybox) but I want to replace the non-tiling simple noise with custom noise textures that do tile. However, it seems the Texture 2D nodes are causing some issues further into the graph, because I am unable to connect the Power node (circled in blue) to the Multiply node above (presumably due to conflicting input and output types). Does anyone know a workaround that would allow me to implement my tiling textures into this material?

[regal stag]

No, it shouldnt affect performance at all. It's actually just using two empty subgraphs and hiding the connection between them.

I mean, there might be some editor overhead idk

[regal stag]

It won't let you connect because the noise is used in the Vertex stage. That requires you to use a Sample Texture2D LOD node, not the regular one.

[warm rapids]

oh

so if i just use that instead, it should be fine?

anything else I might need to know about the LOD node?

[regal stag]

It means it samples a specific mipmap of the texture rather than having automatic mipmaps

[regal stag]

You could also duplicate that part of the graph and separate the vertex and fragment stages completely. Use the LOD node in vertex and regular sample in fragment.

[warm rapids]

awesome, thanks

[waxen ridge]

sorry for my poor explanation. i meant it should not be specular

[lunar valley]

then just set it to 0 on your material or shader if you are using a surface shader and the property isn't exposed

[wise igloo]

Hey im trying to recreate this kind of shape in a shader for vfx graph. How would i go about doing this? Is this easier to do with a hand drawn texture or can i do this procedurally?

[ebon basin]

That's very stylistic and would be harder to generate something completely like that without some actual drawing.

[low lichen]

This could be a cone-like mesh with a transparent texture on it.

[ebon basin]

Oh, I'm blind. Didn't see the arrows, yeah a cone sounds like a good idea actually

Especially if you want to 'animate' it in a sense

[craggy dune]

hi guys is there a channel for helping ?

[wise igloo]

Ok so my plan is that i will take half sphere mesh and draw a texture(recreating the shapes from the example image) for that mesh. Then in shadergraph i would just push the alpha values outwards to make it feel like it is moving.

[ebon basin]

Yeah, that sounds like the idea if you're going to throw it into the vfx graph after

then throw a curve node on it

Another idea is the use of the tiling and offset node and just let the texture loop around

[wise igloo]

yeah tried it with the whole texture applied to the mesh didnt look good

[surreal locust]

does skinnedmeshrenderer support multi instancing?

[low lichen]

No. Instancing works by rendering the same mesh multiple times. SkinnedMeshRenderer generate unique meshes for each renderer.

But with a custom implementation, it could be done. Only the vertex positions, normals and tangents need to be skinned, so you would just need to feed those to the shader in one big combined buffer, and use the instance ID to sample the right part of it for each instance.

Skinning can also be performed directly in the vertex shader if you feed in the bone data. But most cases I've seen of GPU instanced skinned meshes use baked vertex animations encoded into textures, instead of true rig based skinning.

[ebon basin]

vfxgraph can override the locality of particles, so make sure you're setting the particles in the correct space inside of it

also #✨┃vfx-and-particles

[wise igloo]

sorry ill move it

[haughty siren]

watchu need help with

[craggy dune]

i've followed code monkey tutoiral for outline on 2d sprite and its work but i have black background not in transprent and i don't rly know shader and don't find any things on that

[haughty siren]

hop in my dms i can help u wit that in a sec

[smoky widget]

Hi
could anyone explain to me how the ddx and ddy on tex2D method affects the sampling of a texture in unity?
And how could I include those two variables to affect it similarly when doing UNITY_SAMPLE_TEX2DARRAY

[lunar valley]

do you mean depth texture?

no it isn't a post processing shader is also just a quad in front of the screen

how you sample it might be different, but the texture itself is the same

what should be cheaper than what?

if you are not declaring a _CameraDepthTexture anywhere unity is not going to render the depth of the objects to a texture in a seperate pass, if you do, unity is going to do that, its worth to note that this is not the actuall depth buffer unity uses for its pixel sorting. This is a texture where unity renders the objects to a texture on a different pass prior to the pixel sorting if you declare it in one of the shaders(built in)

[lunar valley]

I think this is a pretty good explenation/tutorial of ddx: https://www.ronja-tutorials.com/post/046-fwidth/

[cloud orchid]

Im working on a skybox shader for a top down view game.
I dont like the way that the skybox follows the camera position, it looks weird since the camera doesn't rotate like in a fps game.
Is there a way to add some sort of parallax to my shader to fake a sense of depth?
I know that creating a inverted sphere around the playable area would do the trick but I'm curious if it could be done directly in the shader.

[smoky widget]

Neat thanks!

I have some other problem however, for some reason, it seems that UNITY_SAMPLE_TEX2DARRAY, even when the texturemode is clamped, is not clamping it

Not sure why it would wrap around like that

Even if the texture wrap mode is on clamp, it acts like it was on repeat

My bad, i need to set the settings on the texture array 2d too

[quaint grotto]

@regal stagany chance i can pick your brain about some confusing shader math you seem to be quite knowledged on advanced stuff

[regal stag]

Would be better if you phrased questions to everyone. But I might help out if I have time & feel confident I can help.

[quaint grotto]

well basically im generating a noise on my sphere mesh and then im using the height map to normal node and plugging that into the normal in tangent space, it works, except when the light is becoming more shallow angled to the mesh then suddenly i get this annoying bright pixels:

i dunno why its happening or how to fix it

the lighting calculations is all unity's doing so i presume thats not the issue but rather its an issue with my normals

[slender wren]

Does anyone know how to render outlines using the edge detection filter?

I am attempting really hard to use whatever I have on youtube

but creating a custom render pass is an extreme pain and I can't seem to be able to go through with it

[hollow wolf]

hi, i found this weird error when trying to use costume function node

the weird part is the error was come from "Name" so for example if i change the name to b, the error would be undeclared idintifier B

[slender wren]

change the function name to GaussianBlur_float

[hollow wolf]

tried that too

someone say it's bcs the precision didnt match up, but after i change all of the precision, it's still error

[slender wren]

have you also noticed that you've returned rgb which is a float3?

and not float2

at least if I got that right

[hollow wolf]

can i fix it if i change it from color.rbg to color.rg?

[slender wren]

I am not sure this error hasn't occured to me before

but trying is worth a try

• if _float doesn't work maybe you should write _half instead

oh wait

change it to void

instead of float2 or float3

make it void

and instead of returning Color.rgb

Make one of the parameters "out float3 outputColor"

and assign "outputColor = Color.rgb"

[hollow wolf]

still error even after adding those

[slender wren]

it still needs to have the _float or _half

[hollow wolf]

oh

[slender wren]

or

can I try it out myself real quick?

[hollow wolf]

sure, much appreciate it

it was from shadertoy originally

[slender wren]

according to what I just saw

If I just copy and paste your code raw as a string

it recognizes it

but not in a file

[hollow wolf]

damn, tbh i kind suspect it, because before this i downloaded some subshader that use file too in the costume function, and it keep throwing this same error, but suddenly it fixed after 5 time closing and open the file

[hollow wolf]

yeah, probably bcs i use chatgpt, lol, guess i really need to do it by myself

it was a mistake

[slender wren]

there are a lot of things that chatgpt really can't help with

don't search for outlines in unity in chatgpt

it will just tell you to use a post processing effect that doesn't exist

[hollow wolf]

true, i just want to try can it convert from shadertoy, but now i know the answer

oh, and thanks for the help

[slender wren]

no prob

couldn't really tell what exactly was wrong since it seems to be parsing through it and not identifying ( correctly

[hollow wolf]

nah it's alright, i mean if i cant make this works i can just use full shasdergraph node

[slender wren]

apparently you could just write the body directly

and what you wrote should've worked

here

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@6.7/manual/Custom-Function-Node.html

for more info

[hollow wolf]

yeah but i cant debug it, and didnt have intellisense feature (i kinda have it in my VS, sure it didnt have all the dictionary but it workd for void,float,vec,etc), and consider how tiny it is, that's why i kinda avoid it, but it didnt sound bad if you dont plan to write much code

[slender wren]

I'll be going to have nightmares now about custom renderer features and passes and how RTHandles make no sense to me and I have no idea how it's null

btw make sure to implement that #ifndef

[slender wren]

yeah

tho imma go now

hope someone else can help you

or me

I hate rthandles

[hollow wolf]

thanks man

[hollow wolf]

damn

[grave vortex]

I can probably help a little with RTHandles, but I'm not at my pc right now, so I probably can't give you too much concrete code

What kind of problem are you having?

[hollow wolf]

tbh my main problem is my lack understanding of shader code , this "blur" shader was only for research purpose, just to see which one is more faster ( i already create semi blur shader for the UI and already buy asset called translucent image), and my senior told me to try this shader from shadertoy, and then comparing each others which one is faster,so yeah

thanks for your offer tho, much appreciate it

[grave vortex]

I see, I assume you're using URP from the mention of RTHandles, and when it comes to understanding shader code, and specifically what changes with URP, this website is basically the best resource I've found.

https://www.cyanilux.com/tutorials/urp-shader-code/

https://www.cyanilux.com/tutorials/intro-to-shaders/

I wish you luck with shader programming, and if you have any sort of specific follow up questions you can ping me

[hollow wolf]

thanks for the help man ,instanly bookmark the website

[jade locust]

For those familiar with the game Destiny, I was wanting to use a shader to make an effect similar to the Taken enemies, but not exactly like it. Could someone point me in a good direction?

[olive hinge]

i feel like maybe this is a stupid question because I can't find any examples online so maybe im missing something obvious...

in URP, in a ScriptableRenderPass, how can I pass the main camera's depth texture to a shader? For example, if i want to use blit to change the color of any pixel past a certain depth to red.

[lunar valley]

plug the normals into the output so that you can see if they are correct, but maybe you just forgot to normalize your normal

[lone stream]

dumb question, how do i create this in shader graph?

float3 UVVector = mul(rotation, normalize(ObjSpaceViewDir(v.vertex)));```
mostly the TANGENT_SPACE_ROTATION; part

[quaint grotto]

i dunno how to intepret the normals in color output

but i guess it looks fine?

if i normalize my normals then all the normals have the same strength which wouldn't make sense

[lunar valley]

no that would make sense you want that, you don't want to have any blown out lighting

[quaint grotto]

i want them normalized ?

how then would i make different areas of my landscape more bumpy if they all have the same magnitude

[tacit parcel]

normal map values are supposed to be direction.
you'll want to add heightmap for 'bumpiness'

[quaint grotto]

im using unity's node of get normals from height map

the noise is the height map

[lunar valley]

what is that Tangspacerotation even supposed to be

[tacit parcel]

will there be displacement (be it pom or geometry)? if no displacement is needed, then no need for heightmap

[quaint grotto]

i dont have a height map i just said im using noise generation

but i want the land to look non smooth etc

[lone stream]

    float3x3 rotation = float3x3( v.tangent.xyz, binormal, v.normal )```
i guess i just gonna recreate this manually

[quaint grotto]

how else would i do it

[lunar valley]

ok so its a 3x3 matrix I don't know if shadergraf has such a type tbh.

[lone stream]

yeah i might need Custom Function for this

[tacit parcel]

the normal map 'smoothness' doesnt alter the shape of the mesh it self, only the lighting on the surface. if you want a real 'bumpiness' which change the mesh shape itself, then you'll need heightmap/displacmentmap, the source could be your noise above

[quaint grotto]

i know it doesn't alter the shape im far too far away to worry about vertex displacement

its a simple sphere i was using normals to make the landscape look bumpy from afar

it looks like a coloured marble if i dont apply some kinda bumpiness to it

[tacit parcel]

are you using standard shader? you can just use the normal map as, well, normal texture. The shader should handle the light calculation

[quaint grotto]

its a shader graph standard urp lit shader

[tacit parcel]

maybe you can just plug your normal map output to normal input

[quaint grotto]

the unlit side of my sphere shows lighting

i dont understand

these normals are making no sense at all

my only guess right now is because the noise is a 2d plane but im on a 3d sphere

the normals from height map is not calculated relative to the shape of the mesh

but unity has no provided way to resolve that and that sounds like a complicated math problem beyond my understanding

[tacit parcel]

are you using height to normal node? try lowering the strength

[quaint grotto]

its as low as it can go

and yes im using that node

i think its because that node is assuming the height map is of a flat surface not a spherical one

[tacit parcel]

🤔 seems like even the example in unity's page show the same issue
https://connect-prd-cdn.unity.com/20200915/learn/images/3848430a-41d3-4f59-88e4-10bf4dd49185_image4.png.2000x0x1.png

[quaint grotto]

im not seeing the issue in that

also thats a different node

[tacit parcel]

wait, you mean the normal from height?
are you using world? try tangent space

[quaint grotto]

you able to make a quick test in your unity, use a sphere and say perlin noise and the normals for height in tangent space and see if you get lighting issues from main light

im using tangent

i tried both - world was a total mess 😄

[tacit parcel]

I'm not in a pc that have unity rightnow 😅

[quaint grotto]

ah okay

im about to head out too as its early morning here

[surreal locust]

is this possible someway?
#ifdef Feature_Rim || Feature_Metallic

[surreal locust]

SetVector for float3 and float4

no, (1,2,3) is not a vector

new Vector3(1,2,3)

[surreal locust]

found it! https://forum.unity.com/threads/shaders-and-the-mystery-of-multitude-of-different-conditional-define-checks.319112/

[hushed vigil]

There's no way to tell without trying & measuring

There's literally no way to tell based on this information

some post processing is very expensive and some is very cheap

[tacit parcel]

this is true, especially on weaker device

[surreal locust]

with shader is cheaper if it is written good

in the worst case you will have same performance

[tacit parcel]

btw, I'm trying to output skinnedMotionVector in shader

            struct appdata
            {
                float4 vertex : POSITION;
                float4 prevVert  : TEXCOORD4;
            };

            struct v2f
            {
                float4 vertex : SV_POSITION;
                float4 vcolor : COLOR;
            };

            v2f vert (appdata v)
            {
                v2f o;
                o.vertex = UnityObjectToClipPos(v.vertex);
                o.vcolor = UnityObjectToClipPos(v.vertex - v.prevVert);
                return o;
            }

            fixed4 frag (v2f i) : SV_Target
            {
                // sample the texture
                float4 col = i.vcolor;
                col.a = 1;
                return col;
            }

but it seems it doesnt give expected result, like when the mesh is standing still, it should be all black (I guess)
Any idea what I've might missed?

[ebon basin]

Is there any general resource page out there with all unity macros and helper functions for coding in hlsl? The documentation seems pretty bare unless I'm blind to be honest.

[tacit parcel]

It should be possible
https://forum.unity.com/threads/get-access-to-skinnedmeshrenderers-prev-vert-pos.1119997/#post-7204324

Oops!! It turned out that my laptop graphic card doesn't support motionvector 😵‍💫

That's weird though, I though SystemInfo.supportsMotionVectors only applies to fullscreen motion vector buffer 🤔

[young rampart]

can shader graph do instancing?

I can only find hacks to make it work

[haughty siren]

i apply an almost black dark texture on the whole screen and multiply (Zero SrcColor) blend it with a custom shader. i'm so done with unity at this point honestly, any help?

i realized that scene view doesn't render with the same graphic settings as game view for example scene view renders with hdr regardless if u have it on or not, i figured maybe it's a problem with those settings but i can't find the preset of settings that scene view uses so it'd be trial and error with 100+ different dropdowns

[obtuse basin]

i have a shader that is applying a z- offset to the position of the object it is drawing. it's mostly working except the object disappears when its original position would have been off camera, not when its adjusted position is off camera. is there a way to fix this?

[lunar valley]

so unity is culling the object at its original position? if so either set the bounding box to be bigger or dissable unitys frustum culling and do it yourself manually

[lunar valley]

whats prevVert?

[lunar valley]

it isn't that bare it should have all of the stuff just the layouting is a bit weird-ish? sometimes. It doesn't have the hlsl stuff of the shader coding tho so for that you need to look at microsofts documentation for hlsl

[ebon basin]

Yeah, its got the basic macros and functionalities, but I guess I was looking more about the functions for lighting and stuff since im not sure what I'm looking at most of the time when viewing snippets of code lol

https://xibanya.github.io/URPShaderViewer/

Kinda found something though

[lunar valley]

thats kind of cool, its also like showing a bit how all of these functions work, didn't know this existed thanks man

[ebon basin]

yeah, the problem is there's just a lot of packed functionality that's included upon included in a lot of what I'm looking at

just gotta follow the rabbit hole

[lunar valley]

still worth adding to your browser bookmark tho

[ebon basin]

yeah totally

[lunar valley]

oh damn I just realized if you click on the highlighted stuff it brings you to their definition, somebody put some work into this

oh but it seams to be for urp... :(

[ebon basin]

D:

[regal stag]

Pretty sure Xibanya has a built-in RP version too.

https://xibanya.github.io/UnityShaderViewer/

[lunar valley]

what a true chad

[tacit parcel]

it should be previous vertex position, but does the name matter? I though that as long as it use TEXCOORD4 stream, it should return correct value

[lunar valley]

no I was just wondering what that was suppoed to be, but thanks. I don't think its because of your shader how are you passing that data over there

[tacit parcel]

the mesh renderer should fetch the data (which is previous vertex position) if the Skinned Motion Vector is checked on

[lunar valley]

wait I just realized you shouldn't transform it to clip space

[tacit parcel]

I think, it doesnt matter, I've tried in object space and world space.
the prevVert should have almost the same value with the vertex position, but while the vertex gives the right value, the prevVert is not, I think it gives value which looks like uv instead of vertex position

[grizzled meadow]

made a shader that determines the vertex position depending on a texture, is there a way i can do a higher resolution version of this without having to subdivide the plane?

[lunar valley]

It does matter depending on what you want to do, for simply visualizing it so that as you said it should be black when not moving and something else when moving. If you have tested that tho and it doesn't make a difference than there is something wrong with prevVert. Have you tried simply otputing your raw prevVert which is in object space? What does it give you?

[tacit parcel]

Eh, it works, it seems that I need to force the camera to use MotionVectors mode
cam.depthTextureMode = DepthTextureMode.MotionVectors;
as mentioned here

[lunar valley]

oh well ¯_(ツ)_/¯

glad it works now

[lunar valley]

no

[grizzled meadow]

aw

[tacit parcel]

thanks 🙂 👍

[glossy verge]

Making a custom boolean is very buggy, anyway to access this bool via code?

[dim yoke]

Would love to hear what you mean by ”buggy”. I have faced no issues with booleans in shader graph. The way you can toggle that in the code is by making a boolean property and plug that there. You can then change that property using theMaterial.SetFloat(”_PropertyName”, value); value being either 0 or 1

[glossy verge]

I discovered that what the shader graph display as "default" for bools or colors are not what im seeing for real. I have to change it manually on the Material Asigned

So I can change that with setfloat as intended but I cant know if it works unless I go to the specific thing instead of changing values on the shader

and of course runtime now I know where to see those values

[dim yoke]

Im not sure I understand

[glossy verge]

when I change this color, nothing happens if I have a branch (the branch was my problem rn) and the bool default state doesnt care too if its a property but I can see those changes if I modify those values inside the material asigned to a gameObject

here

Those are the values that work if I have a branch

If you dont have a branch then they work as intended

[dim yoke]

Maybe you should file a bug report

[regal stag]

That's how properties work. "Default" is what the values are set to when a new material is created. Those values are also used for previews in the graph itself.

[glossy verge]

So its intented that you cant see any changes in the scene, only in the graph preview?

[regal stag]

Changing the default value won't change any currently existing materials

[glossy verge]

okey, thats what I needed to know

Thank you!

[quaint grotto]

had to turn off normals because of this annoying visual bug i can't fix -_-

why does it work fine in blender but in unity it looks complete garbage

this is unity's idea of calculating normals from height

totally broken

[dim yoke]

Show what you did

[quaint grotto]

generate noise > normal from height in tangent space > normal output

my strengths are tiny like 0.0001

looks like this

im pretty sure the issue stems around the fact the black patches are 0 then pixels around it are not because it only glitches on the coastline of water to land

@dim yokei used a step node to mask out land so the normals apply to water

which is the black parts

in blender using the same logical process it all worked fine

[dim yoke]

There seems to be quite harsh edge between the water and land, that will make quite strong normals around the edges

[quaint grotto]

yeah

but how else would i apply different normal strengths based on water/land

[dim yoke]

Having sudden drop on the height map doesnt make much sense anyway

[quaint grotto]

cliffs?

the land has much stronger normals to sea so i used a mask to seperate teh areas before applying the normals

[dim yoke]

The color doesnt need to be that much different. Sudden drop from black to white means theres vertical drop between the land and the water. If you want the water to have less noticeable normals, you need to make it have less variance in the height map, not make it completely different height

[quaint grotto]

how would i do that

because i also use the noise for the colour generation

[dim yoke]

I think thats problem for you to solve

[quaint grotto]

im not that good at shaders lol

[toxic flume]

Can you explain a correct way to handle it?
buffer.GetData is time consuming if data length is huge for example 100,000.
I want to dispatch in update loop and then get the result data.

private void Update()
{    
            computeShader.Dispatch(0, _threadGroupNum, _threadGroupNum, 1);
            buffer.GetData(data);
}

[lunar valley]

not getting the data back every frame if possible

[toxic flume]

Yes, I know but I thought I have another way

It is cellular automata (water simulation for a voxel game). I have implemented it in a compute shader
but now, I have doubt if it should be implemented in compute shader or using the job system cpu side

[lunar valley]

you mean you have doubt that a compute shader would be faster than job?

[toxic flume]

yes

in my scenario

Updating my 3d world data using compute shader and get back data or using job system

[lunar valley]

btw. why do you even need to get the data back, if its something that doesn't interact with dynamic objects you can probably just do it all on the gpu side

[toxic flume]

No, I cannot

it is not just about representing

Characters in the game, can dig and change the world or carry buckets of water, build pool, etc.

[lunar valley]

well I guess I will believe you

and I wouldn't really know what would be faster probably gotta test it out

[toxic flume]

If characters fill their buckets, the level of water should change.

Behaviours like changing water level is in cpu side or change the world, digging

[lunar valley]

then why do you need to get it back from gpu if you are doing it on the cpu?

[toxic flume]

Which part do you mean?if you are doing it on the cpu?

[lunar valley]

you just said baheaviours like... is on cpu

[toxic flume]

In gpu, just calculate the level of blocks of waters using cellular automata, propagate water

Surely, it is faster to put it in a compute shader but sending data from/to cpu/gpu back and forth

[lunar valley]

yeah not sure

[toxic flume]

I had implemented something like it before but there, just one time sent data to the compute shader and then a standard shader rendered based on compute buffer data

[toxic flume]

thanks.

Another question. Writing in one index through different threads in a compute shader can lead to unstable wrong result, right?
but accessing (reading) is OK

[lunar valley]

so you want to write to data from a different thread to another thread?

[grave vortex]

I have a pretty complex question to do with URP's Lighting.hlsl and additional light shadows. I've written the code to generate a basic VSM (variance shadow map), which is written to a different renderTarget than the regular shadowmap. Looking at urp's Lighting.hlsl, It looks like I might need to write my own version of the huge function that is half4 UniversalFragmentPBR() Is this the correct way to go about this? It looks like I'll have to make my own version of most of Unity's lighting shaders if I want a different shadow technique.

[cosmic prairie]

lol

[dim yoke]

You can calculate the linear equivalent of the vertex position, but thats obviously not the same value you get from the depth texture

[dim yoke]

I mean how are you supposed to know the depth to the earlier drawn scene if you dont access the texture that stores that information?

Without that you can only access information about the geometry you are currently drawing, with the depth texture you can access the depth to the scene behind that

[cosmic prairie]

what is it you are trying to achieve?

[civic onyx]

hi Guys is it possible to use Position mapping in Unity instead of Uv Mapping for Object?

for Material Shaders

[rare wren]

@grand jolt yep, removing shadowCaster pass should work. In shader graph there's an option which does the same

[lunar valley]

just use the position node for sampling textures in shader graf

[civic onyx]

thanks, done that

quick question, i am using Shader Graph is Unity Standard Version in version 2021...

Dev i am working with is using Standard 2020 version

is it possible to use Shader Graph there?

[regal stag]

Shadergraph only supports Built-in RP from 2021.2+ afaik

[tacit parcel]

x = abs(x)

[winter timber]

is there anyway to get alpha rendering order correct easilly? Like a shader that checks each vertex in the mesh for some sort of depth number, or something? (can't I just sort it by the z axis?)

[winter timber]

by changing transparency sort mode to orthagraphic instead of z axis it has for some reason done the exact opposite, and has started sorting by z axis, which is what I want, so yay!

[winter timber]

problem is that orthagraphic sorting is inconsistent, sometimes it does sort by z axis, and other times it sorts by negative z axis.... Weird

[sudden mountain]

(URP)
How can I best use the alpha from one texture as the alpha for another texture?
I currently have this in my frag:

float4 frag(VertexOutput IN) : SV_TARGET
{
    float2 uv = IN.uv;
    float4 color = SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D(_GradientTex,sampler_GradientTex,uv);
    float4 alpha = SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D(_AlphaTex, sampler_AlphaTex, uv); //AlphaTex is a grayscale version of the alpha channel of _GradientTex
    return float4(color.r,color.g,color.b,alpha.a);
}

but that gives a different result as opposed to using the _GradientTex texture's alpha directly

[regal stag]

Afaik the code looks fine here. I would assume any differences is due to the textures themselves (maybe related to the sRGB or other settings?)

[sudden mountain]

These are the two textures' settings, they were both made in the same image editing software

[snow forge]

Hi all, back to messing about with my Asteroid/Ore Shaders.

Would anyone be kind enough to give me an opinion on my idea/visual please? 🙂

[ebon basin]

breddy cool

[snow forge]

Thankies, keep changing my mind about what I want. lol.

[sudden mountain]

after closing and opening Unity again, it works now. No clue why or how

[ebon basin]

I'm actually dealing with that now for some sprite shader I'm making

I'm not sure I'm going about it the right way, but it seems like I can't use unity's functions for it

as far as coding it in urp goes

[fringe timber]

How do make toon shaders

That cast to the whole world

[umbral hemlock]

I think this tutorial is pretty good https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/custom-srp/directional-shadows/ but it only covers directional shadows. So idk I’d stick with the Unity implementation if possible 😅. But maybe by reading it you’ll learn something that’ll help you debug your current problem 🙂

[ebon basin]

So, I've only started with hlsl for urp and I've a question about the sprite renderer and how it still requires the texture property to still be passed as _MainTex, yet a large amount of these libraries pass around this property as _BaseMap instead. Is there something I'm missing here, or am I supposed to just copy and paste all this functionality to change that over?

[ebon basin]

Well, that does work lmao

turning out to be one large script

[wooden canopy]

I’m having an issue using a custom shader & material with GPU Instancing. Unity seems to be batching them into very small groups, usually of sizes between 2-6 despite having a much larger number of instances to draw. I can’t find any information about this, but it appears to be the same problem posted here: https://answers.unity.com/questions/1544649/frame-debugger-gpu-instancingbatching-why-does-uni.html

Does anyone know how Unity determines batching sizes and how I could force it to keep my instanced objects together in a single draw call? It only seems to split them up when I have other objects rendering, and those get inserted randomly in between.

I know I could manage the rendering myself with “DrawMeshInstanced” but this would be a huge refactor and I would much rather have Unity do this properly for me, and I’m not even sure it would fix the problem because Unity could still split it into smaller batches... Any clues or anecdotes would be appreciated!

[low lichen]

The question you linked shows draw calls in the transparent queue. Transparent objects must be drawn in a back-to-front order. It's important enough that Unity prioritizes it over batching. Without correct ordering, the objects will not render correctly; objects behind could be drawn in front of objects that are in front.

This is not a problem for opaque objects, because they can rely on the depth buffer to render pixels correctly, even when drawing them out of order. Transparent objects don't write to the depth buffer, so they don't have that luxury.

[wooden canopy]

That doesn't appear to be the issue for me... the queue is set to Geometry and I see it as such in the Frame Debugger.

[low lichen]

In that case, can you check what the Frame Debugger says? It should show a reason for why each draw call couldn't be batched with the previous.

[wooden canopy]

It just says the objects have different materials or meshes, which is technically correct because Unity is inserting some other random draw calls in between, but it shouldn't be doing that.

[low lichen]

Does it appear as though Unity is sorting the draw calls based on distance? Or are the random draw calls at random depths, too?

[wooden canopy]

It seems to be sorted by distance from the origin

[low lichen]

Is this in the built-in render pipeline?

[wooden canopy]

Yes, although I'm using custom shaders, not any standard ones.

[low lichen]

It sounds like Unity is still prioritizing a front-to-back order over draw call batching. Front-to-back order can be useful for minimizing overdraw (which also affects opaque objects). But one way you could force your draw calls to render first or last, is to change the render queue of your material, to either less than or greater than 2000.

[wooden canopy]

Interesting, let me try that...

[wooden canopy]

Setting it to 2001 still causes it to sort. Sorting doesn't make sense for my application since it's all based on vertex shaders, so wherever unity thinks the mesh is wrong. If there's a way to disable sorting entirely that would work for me.

[low lichen]

You could try setting the Camera.opaqueSortMode to NoDistanceSort.
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Rendering.OpaqueSortMode.html

[wooden canopy]

That fixed it! Thank you so much, I had no idea that opaque meshes would be sorted by default.

[primal prawn]

Is it possible that the normal shaders in unity cause lag in Android phone?

[toxic flume]

My voxel world is 400,100,400.
I have implemented a 3d cellular automata using compute shader in GPU side and use draw mesh instanced api to render cubes.
But the world is huge and it has many voxels.
Do you know any better way to handle it?

My another problem is that the world is dynamic, characters can dig. So, sometimes it is required to pass 3d world data to compute shader

[near karma]

You're instancing cube meshes instead of generating simplified mesh[s] for it?

[winter timber]

ok ye sorting by z axis is seemingly not possible, or atleast very very difficult....

[ebon basin]

So, I've got my sprite shader (urp) going pretty well, but I've found myself stuck with some lighting issues. Currently, I've got some billboarding with zdepth vertex modifications, such that it always renders facing the camera. However, grabbing the shadowCoords via TransformWorldToShadowCoord does not update the sprite's received shadow when rendered beyond its default position. If anyone can give me a lead on what I should look into next I'd appreciate it.

[tacit parcel]

maybe try adding addshadow pragma?

[winter timber]

the rendering depth must be stored somewhere, is there someway I could write to it?

[ebon basin]

Documentation says it's used with custom vertex modifications, but doesn't seem like it's doing anything for me. Unless it's for casting shadows, and in which case I've got going already with a shadow cast pass.

[winter timber]

Shader graph doesn't appear to have a way to set the depth, but perhaps when I'm creating my mesh I can store the depth on the mesh somehow

surely there must be a better way... So many people make 2d games, there surely must be a well known way to render stuff by z axis order, so transparent objects work well

[winter timber]

ok from googling it seems that most places recommend writing to something called a depth texture... It doesn't look easy, but it probably is easier than anything else...

[ebon basin]

What pipeline are you using

[winter timber]

urp

[ebon basin]

Have you toyed with these yet?
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@11.0/manual/renderer-features/how-to-custom-effect-render-objects.html

[winter timber]

ooh no I haven't seen those yet, I'll mess around with them thanks... Still don't get why 2d rendering is such a pain lol

[ebon basin]

yeah, shadergraph is limited on stencil and depth stuff usually

[winter timber]

that is annoying, but I'm still surprised there isn't a default urp shader for this, as it seems like something a lot of 2d games would run into

[ebon basin]

Is changing the queue on your shader not good enough for how you want to sort it though?

[winter timber]

I'm creating the mesh at run time, so all sprites are on the same mesh, and as far as I know I can't have per vertex queue

[low bridge]

so im trying to learn how shaders work, and somehow i even failed a tutorial on how fluid shaders work, anyone know if im missing something?

[ebon basin]

oh, huh that's interesting

[winter timber]

ye... Having 1 material per sprite type, and then having 1 submesh per sprite type isn't very good for performance unfortunately, so shader queue is really not viable it seems

surely depth must be stored somewhere though? Can't I just grab it and manually write to it myself when I'm creating the mesh?

[low bridge]

so uh, why doesnt this work?

i installed the pipeline from the asset manager too

[winter timber]

it seems it stored it somewhere in something called a depth buffer, but it really seems to be hidden, and not able to just be grabbed...

[ebon basin]

Beyond hlsl and the render objects I'm not too sure, but those way seem the most accessible

[winter timber]

I'll try those thanks, I'm hopeful I'll be able to trick it into accidentally giving me access

[ebon basin]

hehe

Actually, there is the scene depth node on the shader graph, but I've not really touched any of that either. But I know for sure you can't access the stencil buffer on it unless they've added that feature yet.

[winter timber]

the scene depth node appears to be read only, with no apparent way to write to it sadly

[low bridge]

context: it appears all pink like the shaders broken, which it might very well be and the step value doesnt update (i belive, i have no idea what im doing)

[ebon basin]

Fluids shaders are actually pretty technical, especially when starting out

[low bridge]

oh?

its not like im trying to make the vertexes move, just scaling the level of the mesh up and down and tract the rotation

i know vertex movement is something i shouldnt even try

[ebon basin]

But it being pink sounds like a pipeline issue, but it being on the shader graph like that seems unusual. Maybe make sure the settings have targeted universal (assuming you're using a srp)

[low bridge]

so this is where im at

[ebon basin]

keep going lol

[low bridge]

on what?

shouldnt there be a render pipeline assest? since you know i already installed the universal

[ebon basin]

Need to create a new settings asset from the asset menu for the pipeline

[low bridge]

i uh

might of gotten that...

so is everything meant to turn pink?

[viscid hearth]

guys i m new to unity and have a question on texture

can i just ask here?

[low bridge]

i love when i make everything pink and more difficult yet it still doesnt want to work

[viscid hearth]

oh nvm found asnwer

[finite tree]

is this a depth test fail or something?

how can i fix it?

[grizzled bolt]

It looks like your ground is also transparent when it should be opaque
Transparent materials are depth sorted by their origin

[finite tree]

it has instanced material with full alpha.. 🤔 im gonna do opaques for now anyways, but thanks for the info

[grizzled bolt]

Even if the alpha is full it'll still be rendered as a transparent if it's of type transparent

[grim bloom]

Why I can't create PBR Shader? Do I need to install something? I have unity URP 2021

[grizzled bolt]

It's "lit" now

[grim bloom]

Thanks!!!

[finite tree]

Oh yes, that makes sense, thanks!

[winter timber]

ok I have managed to stumble across this thread https://forum.unity.com/threads/writing-to-the-z-depth-buffer-in-urp.896942/ which at the end seems to write to the depth using some sort of function called frag. Currently I don't know where to put this function, but it seems like once I work it out that this might allow me to chuck vertex z positions into it!

ok it seems that shadergraph is weird and doesn't use vertex or fragment stuff as I searched the entire generated shader file and found neither, so I guess I'll have to just write the shader manually, weird

(really wish visual studio supported shader language...)

the vertex position is in the vertex function and not the frag function, hmmm.... So either I'm going to have to get the depth into the vertex function somehow, or get the vertex into the frag function

[meager pelican]

You would benefit from a better overview of shaders/GPU functioning. See the stick-pin at the top.
The vertex function IS USED by SG. It's the vertex stage in the stack. The frag function is represented by the fragment section of the stack. What you connect to those areas goes into those functions.

The vertex function outputs something called clip-space position of each triangle's vertex. The values are passed from the vertex function to the frag function in something called interpolators which is expressed as a structure such as "v2f" in many examples, although it can be named anything. The values for these THREE points (so three calls to the vert() for each triangle) are collected up by the GPU and then, after rasterization into pixels, are mapped to the screen and the pixels are lit by calling frag() for each pixel.

So you can pass any value from the vert() stage to the frag() stage via this "v2f" process and the values are INTERPOLATED across the triangle for each pixel automatically. SG has something called "custom interpolators" for this purpose. But it's probable (IDK your use case) that you can "just" set the depth of the triangle's verts in your vert stage, and let the frag take care of itself. Unless, for some reason, you insist on setting depth on a pixel-by-pixel basis, they're usually the result of interpolating across the verts.

[winter timber]

thanks a ton, I shall check the pins then, and I think I understand it a bit more now! So if I understand what you are saying I should be able to just access depth in the vertex shader? Is there any manual anywhere for this btw, so I could search for depth related stuff that can be accessed in the vertex shader?

[toxic flume]

Yes, for water, I have decided to instancing them using Graphics.Draw but for other voxels I create a combined mesh using greedy mesh algorithm on cpu. It is chunk based.

[winter timber]

if there is a manual it must be hidden, I can't find it.... And I don't have auto complete, so I'm kind of stuck... Anyone got a link to the manual, or any form of documentation?

I suppose I could manually brute force the shader file like a password, except that would take an extremely long time, so I'm hopeful there is documentation

edit: found docs yas! https://docs.unity3d.com/2022.3/Documentation/Manual/shader-shaderlab-commands.html

ok I managed to turn ZWrite on which feels like a good first step, I might not know how to write to it yet, but I'm getting closer!

[tacit parcel]

wait are you using shader graph or shader code?

[winter timber]

a bit of both, currently I'm messinag around with shader code though

[tacit parcel]

oh, you are extending shadergraph? nice 🙂 👍

[winter timber]

I just want a way to render alpha stuff in the order of the z axis lol, didn't realise it was going to be so difficult

[winter timber]

somewhat, but not really, I have 2 seperate shader files, so I'm sort of learning what shader files look like based off of shader graphs generated shader files

[tacit parcel]

🤔 if you really need to z order transparent polygon, your best bet would be reordering your polygons from c#, iirc, you created the mesh from code right?
iirc, unity renders polygon by their sequence in the mesh

[winter timber]

I do create my mesh via code, so I suppose I could? That seems quite painful though, I just want to be able to have non-square sprites, that is all I want lol

[tacit parcel]

if your sprite doesnt need to have alpha blending, you could also use alpha test, alphatest writes to zbuffer and automatically z sorted

[winter timber]

I don't know what alpha blending is, but my sprites are only ever 0 or 1 alpha if that is what you mean?

[tacit parcel]

yep, I suggest you use alpha test then

[winter timber]

ok how would I do that in the least painful way possible?

[tacit parcel]

maybe its alpha clip setting (I dont use shadergraph often so I forgot)
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@15.0/manual/images/GraphSettings_Menu.png

[winter timber]

brute forced all the depth settings I could find in shader graph, and it turns out that doing this worked, thanks so much, everything is awesome now!!!!!

[frosty linden]

Hello, I'm creating a simple new hair shader for HDRP but when I check to compile, it says there are 63 variants? There are many keywords I don't need for this shader. Is it possible to disable some in shader graph?

This seems like an insane amount for such a simple shader. I don't need refraction for example

[tribal badger]

I have a shader graph that does some custom vertex displacement and samples a texture. I'd like to complicate the texturing part to be more "standard" include a normal map, maybe bump map and anything the standard deault shader does.

Is there a way to include / combine the "standard" shader in shader graph with my custom displacement, or is the only way to redo the default behavious in shader graph?

[warm pulsar]

I've also been interested in that more than a few times!

The problem is that the built-in shaders are...a lot of shader code

[amber saffron]

Variants that are not used in the project will (or should at least) be stripper during project build.

[amber saffron]

You have to re-do the behaviour of the standard shader.
Feel free to use this as a base, it's an old repo but should still work : https://github.com/RemyUnity/SG-HDRP-Lit

[heavy relic]

I'm trying to recreate the proximity based vr boundaries you see on oculus and steam vr. Can anyone point me in the right direction to recreate this effect?

[mental bone]

A spheremask would be the simplest approach

[heavy relic]

So far I've managed to get the effect on the exact intersection, but I'm trying to have it fade out smoothly instead of only rendering over the object

[grave vortex]

Off the top of my head, try computing distance from the center of your sphere, then use a bunch of remap nodes to control which distances correspond to being fully within the effect, and which distances are partially faded.

You could map the distances where it should be fading to an alpha between 0-1

[frosty linden]

Indeed, but doesn't the shader gets compiled before the build?

I just clicked Compile and a huge pile of code appeared using all variants.

Isn't there anyway to disable keywords since I already know which keywords I won't need ?

[amber saffron]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-Shader.html
Compile and show code button :

Manually compile all shader variants for a selected graphics API.

[frosty linden]

Also, is there a way to expose the _CullMode variable through Shader Graph, without compiling, so that I can change it at runtime?

[frosty linden]

Got it. Too bad then. That could help reduce compile time.

[amber saffron]

This is only for this specific editor button.
Like I said, when building the project, unused variants are stripped

(unless they are multi compile)

[frosty linden]

Ah, interesting, thanks for the clarification.

[amber saffron]

Depends on the render pipeline, HDRP exposes de double side toggle, I don't remember if URP also does it

[frosty linden]

Yes, double sided is exposed but when I use the HDRP hair shader in transparent mode, only one side gets displayed.

I was told it's a alternative solution to avoid the transparency depth issue and we have to duplicate the model and invert the cull mode to replicate the double sided effect.

So far, I simply duplicated my shader graph and changed the cull mode in the new one and the hair works really well now, but I was wondering if I could change cull mode at runtime to avoid having two shaders which will both compile during build.

Or would you have another suggestion to get a nice hair shader with proper transparency by any chance ? 😄

[amber saffron]

Enable transparent depth prepass and tweak the depth pass clipping values

[amber saffron]

Did you look at the hair shaders in the hdrp material samples ?

[frosty linden]

No, I didn't know there were samples for that :x I'll take a look, thanks.

[mental bone]

I would say that is simply not true

At least it’s a very ambiguous statement. A compute shader is just a general purpose program that can run in parallel on the gpu. A regular shader also runs in parallel but does very specific things

[cosmic prairie]

it can be faster

you avoid the rasterization stage and vertex stage

what do you want to use it on?

[tough glade]

How can I keep Translucent materials from making thicker patches when they overlap

[warm pulsar]

that doesn't really make sense

a compute shader is used to perform non-rendering work on the GPU

[cosmic prairie]

oh no those won't be faster, also compute shader is not for geometry most of the time... unless you are applying toon as a post processing effect or doing deferred rendering you can't use it

[cosmic prairie]

well some use it for deferred rendering

[lunar valley]

you can do it in a compute shader tho if you really want it

[warm pulsar]

that sounds very big brained

[lunar valley]

to each his own

[smoky widget]

I need some help. How can I use derivatves when sampling from a texture2darray with UNITY_SAMPLE_TEX2DARRAY?

I just had to use the version with lod and addup the derivatives

[untold blade]

Why is it Pink when I selct the standard shader?

im using hdrp

[smoky widget]

But now i get artifacts at certain distances

[smoky widget]

are u using urp?

[untold blade]

im using hdrp

[smoky widget]

then you need to make sure that the shader you are selecting as standard, is the standard form HRDP

[untold blade]

but I want to switch from hdrp to a the standard shader. (I wanna convert it in a mobile game)

[smoky widget]

Then you need to first change the lighting pipline to be the default one (or URP) and then change all the shaders. But i've never worked with those, so proablt someone else can help you

[glossy hornet]

why does the shader graph/material im trying to attach to a cube cause it to flicker?
was following a tutorial...
i downloaded/imported this guy's project into my own, and the sample cube he made dont flicker
but when i make my own (with identical settings in the inspector as his) it does flicker

heres the shader graphs:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/497872424281440267/1116764611878846505/image.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/497872424281440267/1116764650218999950/image.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/497872424281440267/1116764705764159518/image.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/497872424281440267/1116764739444420618/image.png

heres a video of the shader working fine when importing a tutorial asset but it flickers when i do the exact same settings in the inspector:

screenshots of the inspector for both objects:

right cube (imported)

left cube (created)

[desert orbit]

It seems like projection on the top of your cube is scaled. This flashing is actually animated lines zoomed in and moving

[glossy hornet]

hmm.. interesting

i set both cubes to the same size now

but the flickering still exists

[desert orbit]

It's not size, it's shader code has top scaling wrong

[glossy hornet]

okay i set them to the same orientation/scale and now the flickering is gone

how should i make this flickering go away though

[desert orbit]

If you want to keep effect local to the object you need to use local projection.

[glossy hornet]

oh

is that a quick setting i can toggle? or does it require redoing the graph

[desert orbit]

When you rotating it, world projection would differ with rotation

[glossy hornet]

is the texture image causing this issue?

should i just remove the texture image and use something else

[smoky widget]

I need some help. How can I use derivatves when sampling from a texture2darray with UNITY_SAMPLE_TEX2DARRAY? I thought i found a way but not really

[glossy hornet]

how do i do that?

tried googling, didnt find much :/

[desert orbit]

The usual way applying something like that is using triplanar node. I don't think it has a local position switch though

Or it's just for normals support it doesn't. Take a look at it. https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@6.9/manual/Triplanar-Node.html

[glossy hornet]

thanks

[untold blade]

Why is it still pink?

[near karma]

I've been having so much trouble understanding numthreads and Dispach thread counts, no matter the resources people have shared. I know that I can't go over 1024 in numthreads, but I'm trying to convert from 10^3 voxel chunks to 16^3 chunks. I obviously can't put numthreads(16*16*16, 1, 1) or numthreads(16, 16, 16). So I put numthreads(16, 16, 4). Only problem now is that I don't know exactly how to decide the threads for Dispatch() and how to make sure that the actual thread knows which dispatch group it's in so that the shader still samples the noise accurately.

I need 16^3 chunks for octree LOD, which I can't do nearly as easily or optimally in 10^3 chunks.

[tribal karma]

Hi, i followed Brackeys tutorial on Grass Sway and it works so far but when the player is moving, the grass sway becomes way faster. When player is idle the grass has the normal speed again. Does anybody know why that might happen?

in hdrp shader graph

[near karma]

Do you have a node that depends on camera position? If you do, parameters of your shader will change when the camera moves

[tribal karma]

No, only world position nodes

[near karma]

Can you send a picture of the graph?

[tribal karma]

yeah

wait a sec

[near karma]

That's the plan

[tribal karma]

hope you can read everything with this res

[tribal karma]

idk if you still tryna help but i fixed it

[near karma]

What was the issue? (I was working on my own problem)

[tribal karma]

Hm i tried some settings and eventually switched every position node from world to object and that seemed to fix it

[tribal karma]

But i appreciate the help

[urban lodge]

Is there a way to remove specular highlighting when using Shader Graph with the built-in RP? I activated the "Allow Material Override," but changing the Specular Color block to black, or whatever color, does nothing. Is it broken in the built-in RP, or is there any additional option I need to toggle?

[urban lodge]

There is no workflow mode in the built-in for some reason. I switched to URP, and the option does show up there. I guess it's missing.

[frigid bramble]

Hey hey, was directed here since I need help figuring out how to make an animated gradient background for a project

Is that uh - something really complicated to try and do?

[meager pelican]

More info is necessary. What type of gradient? Is it from the gradient editor in the inspector with multiple key points? Or just a gradient between two colors?

What type of background? A skybox?

[frigid bramble]

2D background but actually I think I found a cheat

I made a gradient and basically just made it so it spins very slowly to make it seem like the colors are cycling

[chilly robin]

I have a question regarding SRP Batching. In my scenario I have characters that have the same outfit and textures, but tinted different colors. I realize that if I make different materials with different color tints, that the batcher will work on them. However that limits me to making a handful of preset materials. Is there no way I can change the color at runtime and still preserve the batching?

[chilly robin]

Correct

No, changing material property breaks batching.

I was curious if there was a workaround that I maybe didn't know about.

[snow forge]

Mornin' all,

So, I'm playing around with an Asteroid Shader (HDRP ShaderGraph) that uses Tesselation to add detail/shape to a standard Unity Sphere.

I'm running into an issue with the Tesselation side. I'm using a simple noise node to drive the displacement but I'm getting 'splits' in the sphere when I increase the displacement amount. (I suspect it's something to do with the UV's on the sphere as the splits are 'straight lines'.

Would anyone have any ideas on how (or if it's possible) to fix this issue?

((Example and ShaderGraph attached))

[lunar valley]

You can just docs float3 forward = mul((float3x3)unity_CameraToWorld, float3(0,0,1))``````cs float3 up = mul((float3x3)unity_CameraToWorld, float3(0,1,0))``````cs float3 right = mul((float3x3)unity_CameraToWorld, float3(1,0,0))

_WorldSpaceCameraPos

idk really, but I mean a matrix multiplications are just a fiew multiplications which usually is cheap, but I guess with your second option you are retrieving their values directly without needing to do any calculations so I am gonna guess it is

you don't really do much with that bottom row in 99% of the cases you will have 0,0,0,1 sitting there.

But if you want greater info I wouldn't be able to tell since I never had to deal with it

[teal breach]

Anyone tried adding a custom target to shader graph before?

(so you can add custom passes, change base calculations, etc)

[low lichen]

SRP Batcher wants you to use material instances. If you use Renderer.material from script, it will automatically create an instance for you.

[chilly robin]

Oh, do instances get batched? I didn't know this.

[low lichen]

Yeah, SRP Batcher combines draw calls based on shader variants. So it's best to use the same shader with the same features/keywords enabled to ensure you're using as few shader variants as possible.

[chilly robin]

That part I knew, but I didn't realize instances qualified for batching as well. I'll experiment with this. Thank you

[unique raven]

how do I get the transformations of a model from an animated skinnedmeshrender to pass into shadergraph? When I put a monobehaviour to output the model's transform values whilst it's animating, the values never change and I don't know why as it's very clearly changing in position/rotation/scale from the animation. Any ideas?

[meager pelican]

What you really want is instancing rather than batching. And I mean material property blocks, not unique material instances. But with SRP batcher, last I knew, instancing breaks the SRP batcher....but then again you get instancing. The problem seems to be in how the instancing stuff is passed around/indexed and how shader graph works. I'm not sure if you can do it when hand-writing shaders in URP but I suspect you can. The SRP batcher isn't really set for instancing, and it usually wins out in priority over instancing unless it is disabled. I'm STILL confused on all this. And I shouldn't be, frankly.

I THINK you can disable SRP batching for that shader and enable GPU instancing, but you may have to write the instancing code by hand. Maybe. Kinda. IDK, when in doubt, punt, and ask the wizard named @regal stag

And in a puff of virtual smoke, he appears....

[regal stag]

Afaik instancing is only really useful if you're rendering thousands of the same mesh. The SRP batcher is meant to perform better in other cases, that's why it takes priority too.
I'd just use material instances and let the SRP batcher do it's thing (also assuming you're in URP/HDRP, using a shader that supports it, and avoid using material property blocks).
The only case where I've used instancing is rendering of grass blades, where a DrawMeshInstancedIndirect call also removes the overhead of needing gameobjects.

[fringe timber]

How to make toon shades?

Shaders*

[meager pelican]

Yeah, I could see it for things like, say, trees where you have maybe 5 or 10 tree types but many instances of them in a forest and different tints and heights/ages passed in, set in script, not contrived based on something static like world-space position.

[regal stag]

Perhaps yeah. It might be different for instanced GameObjects, but I know with Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced/DrawMeshInstancedIndirect calls you also don't get sorting by distance from camera and frustum culling, so even then it could be cheaper (or at least easier) to rely on the SRP batcher instead.

I imagine you probably wouldn't have a different material for every tree though but a handful of different ones that get reused (enough variation to not be noticeable, without each needing to be unique). Though since trees don't tend to move, using some world position mapped noise in the shader doesn't seem too crazy to me 😅

[regal stag]

Should be able to find some tutorials if you look. For URP & shadergraph, maybe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQyCPaThQnA
I've also got https://github.com/Cyanilux/URP_ShaderGraphCustomLighting which might help, and includes a toon example.

[regal stag]

Kinda sounds like more of an #🏃┃animation question. I think the animation would need "root motion" enabled so that the Transform component (and so model matrix in shader) actually gets updated.

[teal breach]

I've almost managed to add a custom pass to shadergraph

[chilly robin]

@meager pelican @regal stag Thank you both for the responses! Helpful information 👍

[smoky widget]

How can I use derivatves when sampling from a texture2darray with UNITY_SAMPLE_TEX2DARRAY?

[queen vortex]

Hey guys, a quick question, I was wondering if there is any way to tiling a texture in worldspace only on one axis, for example, I want a texture to always be at the bottom in the UV, that tiles sideways but not upwards. That respects the scale of the object but that it does not repeat upwards, only to the sides. Any tips on what I can do to achieve this?

[regal stag]

Depends on the target platform but that macro ends up using tex.Sample. Can't see a similar macro for a grad version, but could try just using tex.SampleGrad(sampler, float3(uv, index), ddx, ddy)

[smoky widget]

what should I use as sampler?

This is how I defined the array before UNITY_DECLARE_TEX2DARRAY(baseTextures);

Also, where did you see what the macro is actually using?

@regal stag

[regal stag]

The macros are defined in the built-in shader includes, such as : https://github.com/TwoTailsGames/Unity-Built-in-Shaders/blob/master/CGIncludes/HLSLSupport.cginc

[regal stag]

I'd probably define it as Texture2DArray tex; SamplerState sampler_tex; instead

[smoky widget]

Thank you!

[regal stag]

I don't know which Unity version this was added, but in 2022 lts at least, you can specify a per-axis wrap mode in the texture import settings.

[queen vortex]

Thanks a lot, I'll take a look, I never noticed that option

[smoky widget]

@regal stag any idea? Unexpected identifier "Texture2DArray". Expected one of: typedef const void inline uniform nointerpolation extern shared static volatile row_major column_major struct or a user-defined type

[regal stag]

Not to sure, might need #pragma require 2darray (or #pragma target 3.5)

[smoky widget]

I think I needed to have #ifdef SHADER_API_D3D11

[regal stag]

That makes sense too as it's the DX11 syntax

[smoky widget]

@regal stag actually, i need all of this

#if defined(SHADER_API_D3D11) || defined(SHADER_API_XBOXONE) || defined(UNITY_COMPILER_HLSLCC) || defined(SHADER_API_PSSL) || (defined(SHADER_TARGET_SURFACE_ANALYSIS) && !defined(SHADER_TARGET_SURFACE_ANALYSIS_MOJOSHADER))

to work, any idea?

(it's the same that HLSLSupport.cginc has)

[regal stag]

If it works, it works.
Might be able to use the only_renderers or exclude_renderers pragmas to simply which APIs the shader is complied to (https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-ShaderCompilationAPIs.html). But not sure. I tend to work in ShaderGraph these days

[lilac mist]

Have a strange issue in the shader graph.
It looks like my shader graph produces different results compared to the tutorial I'm watching.

Even with exactly the same input values, my results are darker overall in the example output window

Anyone encountered this before?

It is not limited to the voronoi node, all nodes appear darker

[ebon basin]

If you can't replicate it, I'd just fool around with the values until you get the desired results since it doesn't seem like you're far off

[cosmic prairie]

try to multiply the value by itself, or pow()

should make it similar or the same

they probably removed an operation to make it cheaper and have it like that in case you need "more raw" values

[cosmic prairie]

it may also be a colorspace difference too

oh yours is the darker one

yeah gotta be colorspace

yours is probably in linear (as it should be) and the tutorial in gamma (some older mobile devices need that)

in gamma colorspace colors may appear lighter and washed out

[lilac mist]

I see, so then is it safe to ignore?

Like the input values are the same so it was a bit confusing to see the output values vary so

[real vale]

Hi, I am not shure if this question is right here, but
I have a mesh I made using blender, it is very simple, I tried using shadergraph to add effects on it but the objectspace is not working.
the whole mesh gets colored with the same color, when I trie using a noise on it, in the emmission section
I can't get it to work, I tried researching , but the post I found on the forum wasn't usfull.
Adding to that there was a feature mentioned in that thread abount mesh preview, but for some reason meshpreview is not a thing in unity 2021.3.25f1
I really don't know what to do anymore, please help

this is my shadergraph, with a sphere i get the intended behavior

but not with my mesh

[grizzled bolt]

Two of your Voronoi nodes are using mesh texture UVs for their mapping, so you need to make sure your mesh has valid UVs

Also note that unlike in Blender by default, Unity's Voronoi and other procedural noises are 2D

[real vale]

Thank you, I am a complete beginner with blender, but I am shure I can somehow figure out how to make a working UV. The 2D vornoi I knew, but I hadn't expected that I have to generate a new UV, when exporting the mesh from blender

[queen vortex]

Hey guys, I have a question, I have an atlas with 4 textures as you can see there, I remapped the uvs to occupy one of the textures in the atlas, so far so good, but is there any way to make only this texture be "tileable" based on the position of the world without repeating the others as in the example below ?

[real vale]

Thank you so much I got it. Thanks for your help!

[grizzled bolt]

You can use modulo or fraction with some maths on the UVs to repeat parts of the UV range

[queen vortex]

You're a god man, thank you so much ! ❤️ using a modulo node resolved

I need to learn more about shader graphics nodes, didn't even know this one existed or what it does 😛

[grizzled bolt]

Worth going through the docs of each of them at least once
https://youtu.be/84A1FcQt9v4 here's many of them explained helpfully with typical use examples for many
Though there are still some new ones

@queen vortex Oh and I forgot about the Flipbook node
It does much the same thing but you can have unequal number of rows and columns, and it lets you go through all the "cells" row by row without any extra math

[queen vortex]

Many thanks for the info! I will take a look

[pale python]

hey,
i have a couple of shaders that requires few common functions that are currently written in a cginc file name math.cginc.
some shaders only uses 1 or two functions from the math file, and I still need to referer to all of it in each shader of them via #include "math.cginc".

so im wondering if referring the file in all shaders would have a negative performance impact ? and if Im better off making file for each shader and only referencing the common functions among them all?

[ebon basin]

Discord being weird and not allowing me to post a code block x_x

[ebon basin]

I doubt it would be a problem, the compiler should just discard what you're not using anyway, but if you're just using a few functions from another library I guess it wouldnt hurt to just copy them over to your script if you wanted to.

[ebon basin]

// billboard mesh towards camera
float3 vpos = mul((float3x3)unity_ObjectToWorld, IN.positionOS.xyz);
float4 worldCoord = float4(unity_ObjectToWorld._m03, unity_ObjectToWorld._m13, unity_ObjectToWorld._m23, 1);
float4 viewPos = mul(UNITY_MATRIX_V, worldCoord) + float4(vpos, 0);
    
// view to clip space
OUT.positionCS = mul(UNITY_MATRIX_P, viewPos);
    
// calculate distance to vertical billboard plane seen at this vertex's screen position
float3 planeNormal = normalize(float3(UNITY_MATRIX_V._m20, 0.0, UNITY_MATRIX_V._m22));
float3 planePoint = unity_ObjectToWorld._m03_m13_m23;
float3 rayStart = _WorldSpaceCameraPos.xyz;
float3 rayDir = -normalize(mul(UNITY_MATRIX_I_V, float4(viewPos.xyz, 1.0)).xyz - rayStart); // convert view to world, minus camera pos
float dist = rayPlaneIntersection(rayDir, rayStart, planeNormal, planePoint);

// calculate the clip space z for vertical plane
float4 planeOutPos = mul(UNITY_MATRIX_VP, float4(rayStart + rayDir * dist, 1.0));
float newPosZ = planeOutPos.z / planeOutPos.w * OUT.positionCS.w;
    
// use the closest clip space z
#if defined(UNITY_REVERSED_Z)
newPosZ = max(OUT.positionCS.z, newPosZ);
#else
newPosZ = min(OUT.positionCS.z, newPosZ);
#endif```
So I've been marathoning a bunch of urp shader tutorials this week as I try to modify some shader code I've obtained from the forums. It's for billboarding meshes, so the z value is being changed throughout vertex function. However, I am having a problem when it comes to retrieving shadows correctly, as they appear to render as if the vertices are never changed.

My assumption is that the world space (or object space?) position has to change as there seems to be a lot of functions related to getting the shadow coords from that. By messing around and rotating the WS/OS by a direction, I do seem to get some results that come close, but perhaps my values are off. I'll probably eventually solve it this way, but I was wondering if this is generally the way I should go about it, or am I solving this in a backwards way?

I do actually solve this problem outside the shader, but that's cheating and I'd rather just do it all in here ;)

[lunar valley]

you don't have uv bitangent and tangent vectors

[worthy marsh]

Anyone knows how i would go on about Isometric walls

and making them disappear when the player is behind them?

what im doing rn is having a shared shader with a _PlayerPosition property which i update using a script

i am currently drawing a vector from the vertex position, (world space) to the player position

and then based on the direction, i'm making them transparent

the obvious problem with that is, that it makes "jumps" from opaque to transparent withint he same object, ie cut in half

Is there a way is could get the "Southern most" point of the object and then discard the whole rendering at once

because i could theoretically just change the Pivot and base the vector off of the pivot instead of the vertex position, but i wanna calculate it just once and then decide if i want to keep it or discard it

because i don't really think calculating the same thing many times for no reason is a smart idea

has anyone a better, faster or smarter solution?

I'm very new to ShaderLabs

[cosmic prairie]

does it not get messed up around seams from far away? I've struggled with texture atlases and mipmapping

[weary plinth]

Hi hi, this may seem really stupid so apologies in advance. Made a game for school, set up a menu etc. I have a level select button to choose levels. Whenever you choose a level it runs the appropriate scene. Pretty simple and it works. Only issue is that whenever I run said scene, the lighting/shaders look terrible. Furthermore, the actual player material (transparent thingy) shows as completely matte, as well as the trail having no colour. If it helps, its on URP.

If I go into the scene by itself and run it, works perfectly no issues. Why is this and how can i fix it haha
(idk if this should go here)

[cosmic prairie]

not rly a shader issue, I'm pretty sure you need to create a lightingsettings asset for every scene ( in windows>lighting> environment menu I think or something similar) and you also have to bake the lighting for every scene even if you use not baked lighting

I think Unity only loads the lighting settings then

[weary plinth]

ahhh okay thank you

[cosmic prairie]

tangents are baked into a mesh (if you need a procedural mesh there's mesh.RecalculateTangents)

bitangents are the cross product of tangents and normals

I think there's also a bitangent facing flag in tangents "w" component to tell which way the bitangent will face after the cross product

it's basically a parallel vector to the quad / triangle that I think faces in the direction of the vertical uv component

based on this random image I found it could be the horizontal

it looks as if bitangent is vertical

a lot of green on the sides