archived-shaders

[sly delta]

Hey guys, im having some trouble with a billboard shader graph.

What happens is that when i build the game, if i have the same sprites in multiple objects in the scene, those sprites dont render correctly unless the camera is around the same direction from all of them.

So, to fix that i've tried to enable GPU instancing (in my head, it creates a different instance of the material) , so that should make the billboard calculations per instance as well.

But no, while that fixes it on the editor, it doesn't change anything in the build.

I've also tried saving the material in variable(read around that forces the engine to create a copy of that material, idk), but it doesnt help eighter.

Apprecciate the help!

[grizzled bolt]

Sprites? Sprite Renderers? Or something else

[sly delta]

Sprite Renderers

[grizzled bolt]

I don't know the specifics but I'd assume it's sprite batching not playing nice with your billboard shader
It might be a better option to do the billboarding with a script instead to avoid fighting it

[ebon basin]

dynamic batching doesnt like it when you touch with the verts

[sly delta]

the weird part is that it only happens on the build.

[ebon basin]

Was just mentioning it, but you can fix it by enabling SRP batching for sprite renders, but that option mysteriously disappeared with unity 6 from 2023+ but I theorize that disabling dynamic batching may force SRP if it's enabled but haven't looked into it much.

[sly delta]

well, is it a problem im using URP?

[stoic phoenix]

I have a question how can i fix shader errors like they are already fixed but when i come to unity there's red text showing that there's an error and it only goes away if i restart unity

[stoic phoenix]

also is there like an inbuilt noise function I can use in hlsl

[past dune]

one solution that I've found is to get both cameras depth buffers and use them to know when to render the overlay the problem is that it is extremely inefficient

because it samples two depths buffers , rendering two cameras both textures and depth buffers

[smoky widget]

Hello, I've created a texture2D through setting Color32 structs where each channel is a byte referencing an int. Basically it contains indices

How can I properly sample that on the shader?

[vast wren]

guys
i need some help

Is there any tutorial

or some course

that teaches 100% unity shading from scratch

I really need it

like this course is hosted by Indian Developers but its kinda too expensive for a monthly subscription

[grizzled bolt]

Is there a tutorial or course that teaches 100% of anything? Unlikely
But you could check out ShaderQuest by Harry Alisavakis, or the video series by Freya Holmer

[vast wren]

After watching all the video series by Freya Holmer.

Will I be able to Achieve something like THIS HERE

[grizzled bolt]

They don't contain instructions how to make that specific type of shader, so not directly
But they go over what shaders are and how they work, so you have an idea what you're doing when you practice

[vast wren]

Yea I know
But a general Idea can also help
Just like how a programming language is

[grizzled bolt]

There are hundreds or thousands of different techniques, which courses can't realistically go over

[vast wren]

So i cannot fully learn Shading ever

[grizzled bolt]

If you find step by step tutorials how to make a specific effect, you can of course follow it without any prior knowledge to get that effect
You can do that many times and experiment to begin to understand what's happening and how to make your own effects

But it's a much quicker process if you know the theory

Especially if you want/need to code the shaders
Shader Graph makes shader creation much more approachable, but also hides the technicalities from you

[vast wren]

I usually hate graphs
They are quite not easy to understand and Digest

I prefer coding over else

[grizzled bolt]

If you don't want to become a tech artist, just make some shaders, knowing all the technicalities may not be necessary as long as you use Shader Graph
But to look at an effect and intuitively understand the techniques and math used, that does require understanding the theory either from study or from a whole lot of practice

[vast wren]

Dont worry about that
I found a book that explains it in detail

just reading it right now

I just now understand what Model View Projection meant when you pass in the vertex to the v2f shader by doing some calculations so the vertices are placed in right position infront of the camera

Previously i didnt know

I am more interested in learning shader languages since I plan on writing my own game engine too
So I should at least have some understand of them

[grizzled bolt]

Of course
Shader Graph makes it deceptively simple, which can limit your learning
If you write shaders especially for practice, it's recommended you use the built-in render pipeline as then you don't have to worry about code unique to URP/HDRP

[vast wren]

yea I am starting with Built-In first
Then to URP/HDRP

[random sequoia]

Hi! I have imported a character that has a beard. The textures provided are a Diffuse and a Opacity map. Do you know what material shall i use? (the unity project is in URP)

[hardy juniper]

Ideally you add the alpha to the texture yourself (krita can for free)
or use shader graph but its not ideal to have 1 tex for alpha only

really old things or stuff made for 3d software may still split alpha in its own tex but its an outdated practice

[random sequoia]

Thanks for the reply, so basically i need to add these two textures together?

[hardy juniper]

you sure the hair doesnt have alpha already?
is it selected to be imported on the import settings?

when you click it, does it say RGBA at the bottom?

[random sequoia]

Both say sRGB

These are the import settings:

Then i have created a SRP Lit material and i have added the two textures:

But this is the result:

[hardy juniper]

im confused, you put one in base and one as metallic but i can see clipping working

therefore one has alpha and is working

If alpha source is set to something valid + alpha is transparency is true then you will have alpha

[random sequoia]

So the Diffuse should be the Base map

[hardy juniper]

yes

[random sequoia]

With alpha source and alpha is transparency

[hardy juniper]

remove metallic for now and then see how it looks
yea. transparent mode will use alpha from base map (a.k.a diffuse)

[random sequoia]

So there is no need of using a Blending mode?

This is what i have got

[hardy juniper]

yea additive is probably not ideal but mess around and see what you get

[random sequoia]

I should get this result

[hardy juniper]

https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.2/Documentation/Manual/urp/blending-modes.html

try with alpha clip off too (if you want it on, mess with the threshold)

[random sequoia]

Thanks a lot

I will also check Krita

[hardy juniper]

not sure you need to do this but if alpha is really not there on the diffuse then yea krita can be used to add the transparency to it

add both as layers then convert one to "transparency mask"

[plain urchin]

Hi. I'm using URP, and will also use GPU Instancing
I generally use 1 texture for all objects containing the gradient atlas
https://itch.io/blog/797457/optimization-of-3d-texturing-for-mobile-games-definition-of-the-gradient-texturing-process-and-analysis-of-its-efficiency-and-performance-in-engine
And have shaders make use of vertex color for some effects

Regarding making variants/batching, if i want variants of the color by moving the UV in the atlas, if i edit the UV of some trees in runtime, will that break batching? Or even better edit only 1x, and use that mesh as the new variant for all trees that have different color?

Or is it better/more performant(?) to make a variant of a material instance? So, having a variable for the UV offset to get the desired color

Since it's URP, i read somewhere that MaterialPropertyBlock does not work here
So out of the 2 options above, which one is better?

[ebon basin]

As far as what I've tested with some voxel projects is that setting the UVs via Mesh API and using a texture array batched fine, but still something to test with the debug tools (the scene statistics aren't accurate for URP/SRPs)

Oh, for instancing I'm not entirely sure. Usually that method call is of a specific mesh and material

What you can do though is have a material that takes a seeded value that applies the variance to the trees without having to modify it outside of it.

kinda of how the terrain does it

[stoic phoenix]

Is there an inbuilt noise function in hlsl

[kind juniper]

No.

[stoic phoenix]

So I need to write my own noise function?

[kind juniper]

Yes. Or use unity includes. Or shader graph.

[stoic phoenix]

Ah I see

[ebon basin]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@7.1/manual/Simple-Noise-Node.html
Shader graph nodes has the HLSL code

in the docs

[stoic phoenix]

can i like

import shadergraph

functions

into my hlsl or something

[ebon basin]

yes, click the link

[kind juniper]

You can copy it.

[stoic phoenix]

i did

[kind juniper]

I'm not sure you can include the files

[stoic phoenix]

obviously

that's not what i want

im just looking for libraries to include

so i don't have to copy them each time i write a new shader

[ebon basin]

you can include libraries yeah

[stoic phoenix]

ok so how do i download this library

[ebon basin]

Ive not really looked into the generated code from the shader graph. But try making a blank graph with a noise node and open the generated code

could be inside of a library, but probably a bunch of other bloat you dont need

[kind juniper]

You can make your own include file and use it anywhere you want.

[stoic phoenix]

v2f vert (appdata v) {
    v2f o;
    o.vertex = UnityObjectToClipPos(v.vertex);
    o.uv     = v.uv;
                
    // main
    float4 color = tex2D(_Texture, o.uv);
    o.vertex.y += color.x;
                
    return o;
}``` Can i somehow offset the y pos of the vertex based on color like this?

[ebon basin]

sure, why not

[regal stag]

You'd need to use tex2Dlod for sampling in vertex stage

[stoic phoenix]

what is tex2Dlod how is it different from tex2D

[amber saffron]

tex2Dlod samples the texture at a specified mip level, when tex2D will automatically get the mip level from the per pixel derivatives (DDX, DDY) of the coordinates where you sample.
But in Vertex stage derivatives are not available, so tex2D also isn't.

[stoic phoenix]

Ah I see

[dim yoke]

In vertex stage, you can just sample at LOD level 0, the full resolution mip level.

[past shoal]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/18g4rok/updated_flame_demo_showing_the_movement_reaction/
Saw this cool reddit post of a flame/thruster shader. It looks like its a mesh of some kind but that is as far as I can determine of what this tech is doing.
But yeah, are there any tech savvy vfx artists who know whats going on here? I'm quite new to writing shaders so a lot of the tech is unknown to me.

[stoic phoenix]

How do I create a screen shader for a camera rather than a material?

does anyone know

[amber saffron]

What do you mean by "a screen material" anyway ?

In any case, if you are thinking of a post process, at the end a material is created, even if it's just to use the shader default values.

[stoic phoenix]

Yeah, I think it's that

how do i make a post processing shader?

[amber saffron]

Like this ?

[stoic phoenix]

Yeah, but not shadergraph

I hate visual scripting ect.

[amber saffron]

Are you using URP ?
If yes : shadergraph removes a lot of boilerplate code from writing shader in render pipelines, but a post process shader is pretty straighforward and you can probably use an unlit shaderlab shader.

If you are using built-in, there is also a custom post process example for the post processing stack.

[stoic phoenix]

I'm using in built render pipeline

also I need to dowload the post processing effects from the package manager right>

[dusk sky]

Why the direction of main light is not correct in scene view...

float4 frag(Varyings i) : SV_Target {
    return lerp(_BrightColor, _DarkColor, step(dot(GetMainLight().direction, i.normalWS), _Threshold));
}
```I'm using unity 6 with urp.

[amber saffron]

Yes.

The other option is to use Camera.AddCommandBuffer and code the post process yourself to not depend on post process stack package.

[dusk sky]

This is how (GetMainLight().direction looks like in scene view.
Everything looks fine in game view.

[amber saffron]

I think it's because you are using the "unlit draw mode" in the scene view 😅

[dusk sky]

Oh wait

[dusk sky]

Thank you a lot, it confused me for an hour. 🤣

[ripe sedge]

Hello everyone, is there any intellisense plugins/tools I can use that specifically includes Unity's built-in intrinsic variables? So far the only leads I have are paid options through the asset store.

[quartz sail]

I have a player character made up of multiple meshes, but it’ll like to apply a vfx/shader graph that I need a skinned mesh renderer, I realized when going to add the mesh component I can only add one single part of the mesh, is there anyway to have the entire player character without joining them all together

I considered importing in a 2nd joined player character then use that mesh for main player character… but the player has multiple hair options and I think if I used the combined mesh it wouldn’t look correct when only having one hair selected

Does that make sense? Is there a solution outside of applying the shader to each part because that won’t give the look I’m hoping for

[hardy juniper]

a skinned mesh renderer uses 1 skinned mesh (which can have many sub meshes with different materials)
you need to combine these parts into 1 mesh then export

[solar current]

I have a question about the performance of branching in vert and frag functions, here's an example that illustrates what I'm trying to do.
Assuming that the three "DoStyle" methods are long and complex, I want to avoid having all three methods processed for each vertex given that the vertex can be set to any combination of the three styles (or none of them). Is the usage of [branch] going to have the intended effect on performance, or is it more computationally expensive to use the [branch] compared to letting the compiler dynamically branch the code?

struct vertdata {
    float style1;
    float style2;
    float style3;
};

StructuredBuffer<vertdata> vertbuffer;

v2f vert(uint id : SV_VertexID, appdata a) {

    v2f o;
    o.vertex = a.vertex;
    o.uv = a.uv;
    o.color = a.color;

    o.texcoord1 = float3(float(id) / float(MaxBufferSize), 0.0, 0.0);

}

fixed4 frag(v2f IN) : SV_Target {

    float4 color = IN.color;

    int id = round(IN.texcoord1.x * MaxBufferSize);
    vertdata v = vertbuffer[id];

    [branch]
    if (v.style1 == 1) {

        color = DoStyle1(color);

    }
    
    [branch]
    if (v.style2 == 1) {

        color = DoStyle2(color);

    } 
    
    [branch]
    if (v.style3 == 1) {

        color = DoStyle3(color);

    }

    return color;
}

[kind juniper]

It might make it more performant. The GPU executes many threads at the same time in what's called "waves"(usually 32 or 64 threads). Even if only one thread in a wave enters your if statement, all the other threads in the wave will have to wait for it, regardless of using the branch keyword or not.
So, [branch] would only help if all the vertices that enter the branch are in the same wave(close together in the vertex buffer I'd assume).

[tacit parcel]

seems like the flame is (can be) made using line renderer, all the point seems to be handled by script or physics (or both)

[steep zephyr]

Hello ! i'm quite new to unity, and i searched on how to activate the UPR when this problem arise but i can't figure it out (i'm a dummy :c). If someone has an answer i'll gladly take it !
For context: I'm making a VR game but i can't figure how to activate the post process to implement some bloom in my game

[echo ermine]

i was messing around with some shaders from shader toy i ported and must have messed something up bad i got a random D3D device lost error but my question is when writing shaders do you have to be careful so you dont brick your computer cause now im scared to mess with shaders completely lol

[ebon basin]

GPU drivers can crash which could require a restart, but otherwise not something to worry about

[violet crater]

can anyone smarter than me tell me which what i should set these rotation numbers of the directional blend to if i want to effectively switch where the grass and rainbow appear so that the rainbow appears on the flatter area while the grass appears on the more sheer area

[violet crater]

I need to find some way to either
Change which texture set is located where in this directional blend
or just find a way to make the detail map be associated with the secondary texture not the first

[echo ermine]

okay cool was a little scared lol

question what should i avoid so this doesnt happen again?

[ebon basin]

Similar coding concepts apply; make sure you're exiting your loops, not dividing by zero, not using null/uninitialized values, ect

beyond that it's up to what the graphic APIs and your device supports

[haughty lichen]

Hi guys ! I'm having a hard time making Graphics.RenderMeshIndirect work in HDRP.

I used to use Graphics.DrawnMeshInstancedIndirect but now I need to use light layers and so I'm upgrading the function to Unity's new system.

From the documentation (https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/ScriptReference/Graphics.RenderMeshIndirect.html)
I should add these directives in my shader

#define UNITY_INDIRECT_DRAW_ARGS IndirectDrawIndexedArgs
#include "UnityIndirect.cginc"

And this in the vertex shader

InitIndirectDrawArgs(0); // pass SV_DrawID semantic value here for multi-draw support

The issue is that it doesn't seem to work in Shadergraph, and I didn't manage to create a simple HDRP-compatible HLSL Lit shader to modify myself...

Does anyone have experience with this ?

[echo ermine]

oh okay thanks man

[low lichen]

It's hard to use these low level APIs while also complying with everything HDRP needs for lit shaders. If you can, it would be better to piggyback on existing systems that support HDRP, such as BatchRendererGroup. But, it's not indirect, so it might not be what you need.

[untold cobalt]

Hi Guys! I'm having a hard time making TMP Text (in world Space) to only be visible under a light source, otherwise It should blend into darkness. I did write the logic in a duplicate shader copy of TextMeshPro/Mobile/Distance Field. Then I created a material of this shader and drag-dropped into the text gameObject. It didnt totally replace the LiberationSansSDF Material but its parent is referencing to the shader I created. Still I see no such effect working. I did use light position and light range where light position gets updated wherever light moves. Any ways to debug this and find where is the problem? Because right now I am having a hard time understanding what might be going wrong and why nothing is working?

 // Torch visibility calculation
 float distToTorch = distance(input.worldPos, _TorchPosition.xyz);
 float torchFactor = saturate(1.0 - distToTorch / _TorchRange); // 1 when close, 0 when far
 c.a *= torchFactor; // Apply torch effect to alpha

[sly delta]

Hey guys, this sequence is part of a billboard shader for 2.5D style game.

Im using a lit shader graph to be able to use 3D lighting and shadows on these objects. The material goes into a sprite renderer and as such, i cant really use the FlipX property on the sprite renderer to mirror for different directions.

So what im doing is that im multiplying the UV.x by -1. Thing is the sprite gets totally out of center (well.. i am offsetting the UV right). So how would i go about doing this correctly?

[ebon basin]

That seems like the idea, but I'm confused why FlipX wouldnt work in the first place. If you don't want to mess with the UVs though, you can just flip the verts with a similar idea and remove backface culling

[hollow cedar]

I’ve got a quick shadergraph question

Am I able to use shadergraph to actually edit a texture? So for example, sampling individual points on a texture and saving those samples into a new texture? And if so, does anyone know of a guide or any documentation to look at in this regard?

I’m honestly a little fed up with shadergraph and the documentation (or lack thereof) and might just teach myself HLSL (good idea long term for sure) so that I have a better understanding of what shadergraph is actually doing

[ebon basin]

Yeah, it's not that hard actually. You can use command buffers to take the material render and then blit it onto another texture

assuming you a need for the shader graph that is

[low lichen]

Custom Render Texture shader would be the closest to what you're describing, but it's not set up to let you sample arbitrary pixels. Shaders generally run for every pixel of the screen/texture, or portions of the screen/texture.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@17.0/manual/Custom-Render-Texture-Example.html

[hollow cedar]

So shaders wouldn’t allow me to pick pixels at all, even if it weren’t arbitrary? Just anything done would blanket apply to all pixels in the texture?

[ebon basin]

it runs for every pixel but doesnt mean you cant logic yourself a way to only select those pixels

[hollow cedar]

So almost like telling it to “ignore” every nth pixel?

[ebon basin]

right, like think of a mask you multiply with a color and if that mask is 0, then the color output is 0

[low lichen]

If you explain what you want to do, we can give you a better answer.

[ebon basin]

well, every nth pixel would be somewhat of a problem

not impossible as it's up to how you mask it all

more of a job for compute shader though

[hollow cedar]

What I’m trying to do could be accomplished on the CPU, but I’m trying to do it on the GPU because of it being time sensitive and the CPU running other critical processes

In essence, I have a texture (not in front of my project so I can’t remember the dimensions for sure, but let’s call it (4000x4000), and I’m trying to sample the texture in polar coordinates with the center of the texture being the origin, and it sampling every .5 degrees and have a radius of 1840. Then it would create a new texture (I know the dimensions this time) 720x1840 (720 for each theta and 1840 for each pixel along the radius at each sampled theta)

I was hoping to use UVs in some way to make Unity handle sample points that were between pixels

[low lichen]

Well, then you do want to run the shader for every pixel of the texture, just every pixel of the smaller destination texture. That's the texture you create and run the shader on, and you give it the larger source texture as an input.

Then you just need to calculate the correct coordinate to sample the source texture for every pixel of the destination texture.

[hollow cedar]

Well I understand what you’re saying 😂 I’ll see if I can figure out how to do it lol

Do you happen to know of any code or an existing graph somewhere that I can look at for inspiration? If not, I’ll just make an attempt when I get home and I’ll message here where I get stuck.

I’m a complete novice at shaders and decided to give shader graph a try since it looks like it could help simplify shaders. Clearly not quite the case

[untold cobalt]

Can anyone help me with this? I am ready to explain more

[low lichen]

It's best to just think about one pixel when creating the shader. Think about how you can take the input data (in this case, mainly the UV coordinate) and turn it into the output data you want. The logic isn't any different to how you would implement it on the CPU, you just need to restrict your thinking to one pixel, because the shader will be run in isolation for each pixel.

[hollow cedar]

I get that. Where I’m hung up at is that not every pixel will get used, since I’m basically degrading the texture, so it’s difficult to think of the logic in the kind of way.

The two mental hurdles that I have is that:

1. I’m not sure how to set up logic to tell shader graph when a pixel is relevant or not. So how do I eliminate one pixel or keep another when the shader is being run for each pixel? Would it be as simple as setting up a range of the only relevant coordinates and seeing if the pixel in question meets those relevant coordinates?

And 2) I’m relying on Unity’s interpolation for relevant coordinates between pixels, so I really wanted to use UV coordinates to get “pixels” between pixels. But that way of thinking flies in the face of restricting my thinking to one pixel

[low lichen]

You mentioned a texture 720x1840. Are there unused pixels in that texture?

[hollow cedar]

There will be unused pixels in the source texture, the (guesstimating) 4000x4000 texture

[low lichen]

Then there will be no unused pixels for the shader to worry about. You only have 720x1840 pixels to calculate values for, and that's how many shader programs will be invoked.

What pixels in the source texture end up getting sampled doesn't matter.

[hollow cedar]

So for each pixel in the 720x1840 texture, it’s going to look at the 4000x4000 texture and figure out which UV point to get the RGBA values from?

[low lichen]

Each pixel in the 720x1840 texture is going to figure out what coordinate to sample from the 4000x4000 texture, sample it, and return it (i.e. write it to the 720x1840 texture).

[hollow cedar]

Okay, I think I get what you’re saying now

[low lichen]

Imagine if the shader is just this C# code:

public Color GetColor(Vector2 uv, Texture2D sourceTexture)
{
    // todo
}

How would you implement that? Probably convert the UV to polar coordinate, to then sample the source texture and return it.

You can worry about other specifics later, such as what sort of filtering you want to use when downsampling. Bilinear filtering is easy, as long as the source texture has it enabled and you stick to float UV coordinates (in 0-1 range) instead of integer pixel coordinates.

[hollow cedar]

The filtering isn’t actually important to me on the source side. I guess I should mention what I’m doing. I’m building a proof of concept for a bigger project.

I’ve essentially gone into photoshop and created a fake weather radar image like what the picture I attached (without the map underneath). US radars get data every half a degree and have a range of 460k km (but each data point along that range accounts for 250m), so that comes out to 1840 data points per half a degree rotation. So I am attempting to “scan” the image I made in the same way US radars scan, and export that data into the 720x1840, where the 0,0 pixel would be the 0 degree rotation and 0m-250m data. The 0,1 pixel would be the 0 degree rotation and the 250m-500m data. The 1,0 pixel would be the .5 degree rotation and the 0m-250m data. Etc etc.

Doing it this way gets it into a format that would be similar to what I will eventually use for real data. But first I need to make my fake data look real.

Since I’ve basically already done the “interpolation” when creating the image. And now I’m blocking it up the way a radar would to eventually display it in the way that we traditionally display radar data

My final shader will have the 720x1840 texture wrapped into a circle and interpolated using a nearest neighbor interpolation

@low lichen you good with moving this convo to a thread?

[sly delta]

yeah i was very confused why flipX wouldnt work eighter, flipping vertices might be better than messing with UVs. ill see if i can integrate that with the billboarding

[hardy juniper]

@sly delta remember that sprite renderers make a mesh with uvs specially to fit the sprite in the spritesheet so inverting uvs by doing 1 - uv.x wont work.
It can work if you provide the min/max range to the shader and inverse lerp then lerp back.

[main totem]

So I was working in shadergraph on the built in pipeline, and I noticed these nodes. What the heck are they? Does anyone know?

Specifically Reflectance and Specular Occlusion. Never seen them before

[grand jolt]

can someone help me the shader is stretching on the bottom and top im using the shader graph

[royal aurora]

AAA games would have you cough up a big $20 for this.

[main totem]

So I know this might seem like an odd question, but does anyone know which blend mode is most similar to the mix blend mode in Blender?

[hardy juniper]

Lerp?

[ebon basin]

We talking about the mix node? It's most likely a lerp yeah

[untold cobalt]

Hi Guys! I'm having a hard time making TMP Text (in world Space) to only be visible under a light source, otherwise It should blend into darkness. I did write the logic in a duplicate shader copy of TextMeshPro/Mobile/Distance Field. Then I created a material of this shader and drag-dropped into the text gameObject. It didnt totally replace the LiberationSansSDF Material but its parent is referencing to the shader I created. Still I see no such effect working. I did use light position and light range where light position gets updated wherever light moves. Any ways to debug this and find where is the problem? Because right now I am having a hard time understanding what might be going wrong and why nothing is working?

 // Torch visibility calculation
 float distToTorch = distance(input.worldPos, _TorchPosition.xyz);
 float torchFactor = saturate(1.0 - distToTorch / _TorchRange); // 1 when close, 0 when far
 c.a *= torchFactor; // Apply torch effect to alpha

[steel notch]

In what cases would you NOT enable mipmaps 🤔

[leaden mason]

Hello,
I am using shader graph in URP.
I am loosing my mind here.. I'm trying to have a linear gradient from the top to the bottom of an object. Nothing crazy. I need it to be independant of the orientation of the object (otherwise I would just use the object space Y).
My logic is that I would get the world space position, split the Y and remap it from (MinBounds.Y, MaxBounds.Y) to 0 to 1.
But I get a magenta output. Clearly I am doing something wrong, but I have no idea what ..

[shadow kraken]

This works fine in the scene for me, have you tested it? Don't just look at the preview in the graph

[leaden mason]

the preview in the graph is magenta, probably because I have min and max set to the same value.
But it doesn't work in game either .. it returns purue black, no matter the object I choose (default primitives too).
I'm using 17.0.3 of URP ..

[hardy juniper]

nvm i cant read

[leaden mason]

Found it! I am using Forward+ and bounding box does not work in Forward+. It works perfectly fine in Forward

[shadow kraken]

Huh that's interesting

[flat hedge]

Is there a way to ignore the object scale in a canvas shader urp?
As you can see, it's supposed to be a rectangle with equal edges but gets stretched as I change width/height/scale.

[keen hearth]

Use a tiling and scaling node

Set tiling to be whatever the scale ratio of your object is

[flat hedge]

is there a way to automatically detect this or do I have to manually change it per object?

I tried this but it only resulted in weird tiling:

[flat hedge]

Yeah, I have no clue what I'm supposed to do.
This is the closest I've got to a proper looking shape, however, it clearly goes out of bounds and is still deformed :/

[ebon basin]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/sprite/9-slice/9-slicing.html
Looks like you want to 9 slice it

otherwise keep the aspect ratio the same

[flat hedge]

yes, however, this is a shader, not a sprite

can this be done with a shader or do I have to have a sprite that I apply a shader on top of?

[ebon basin]

Actually not too sure. It does seem like the rounded rectangle generates something relative to your UVs, but maybe it's not refined enough to really give you those edges

[dreamy surge]

I was wondering if someone might be able to get me pointed in the right direction for this. I use Enviro 3 fog, but only one wall doesn't seem to account for the fog distance. I don't see anything different about the material or shader that would give this result though.

Please let me know if I should post this in a different channel.

Game objects are set to static. I haven't tried baking lighting yet.

[ebon basin]

Is it that model specifically? Try recalculating the normals

Maybe check if you're writing to depth as well

[keen hearth]

I’m in class right now but I assure you that it is possible

[main totem]

It appears to be a similar effect, thanks. Now I gotta figure out why the material seems abnormally dark. Would the add module be the same as the add shader module if I'm doing it on a per channel basis? Like adding the diffuse and normals together?

[hardy juniper]

you mean node and you can see the actual formulas here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@17.2/manual/Blend-Node.html?q=blend

but why would you add diffuse and normals

[hollow cedar]

Is it possible to take two different UV maps in shader graph, split the channels of one and remap it to act as a variable in an equation done on the first UV map?

So for example, if I want to have an equation for my first UV map of:

x = .5 + r * cos(theta)

Could I use a separate UV to bound r? So take the R channel of the second UV and remap it so the R channel goes between .000271 and .5?

[hardy juniper]

yes

[hollow cedar]

Dope, thanks

[hardy juniper]

its just vectors and numbers so you can do whatever

you can sample a texture with any vector2 so you can change things as you wish

[ebon basin]

You can also encode your model with multiple UV maps and export it, but if you're baking light then you shouldn't bake to UV channel 1

[hardy juniper]

encode? but yes models can contain multiple uvs and you can pick what you want in your shader

[main totem]

I mean adding two normals together and two diffuse together. Specifically adding specular lighting to the diffuse and just adding a detail normal map.

Also I was referring to the vector add node in Unity and the Add Shader node in Blender.

[hardy juniper]

You can for sure sample 2 diffuse and combine them how you want and do the same for normal maps (I forget the best way to combine normals however)
Both are just colours that are combined to a new colour

[dreamy surge]

Thanks! I figured it out.. it was actually on the enviro 3 side with an effect removal stretching a bit too far and clearing fog

[main totem]

Would I need to normalize the result if I use the add node? Also, I used the Normal Blend node, I assumed that was it's intended purpose.

[hardy juniper]

yea you want to normalize using saturate

[sly delta]

Hey guys. im having a strange problem happen.

Im using unity 6.0.19f1 and i created a shader graph that gives me the following error :

if i close the project, clear the library folder then open it back up it works fine. It also works with the error, but i'd rather not have this polluting my console. Does anyone know what to do?

[main totem]

Not just the normalize node?

[hardy juniper]

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

[main totem]

I think the Normalize does the same thing, but for vectors, it maintains the direction but clamps the value to 1

Actually the way its worded it always has a length of 1

[hardy juniper]

when you sample your normal tex it will be in the range 0-1 till you do xy * 2 - 1

Though i presume in shader graph you dont do this step

[hollow cedar]

Just to confirm a suspicion of mine, by manipulating UVs in specific ways, I should be able to create custom interpolations, right? Like for example, if I knew exactly where each data point in a texture was, I could make the corresponding UV pixels blend with the pixels around them in a way that would be the same as an inverse distance weighted interpolation, right?

[iron scroll]

greetings esteemed shader wizards, I would like to learn what's the best/most performant way to shade a small sprite so we can animate it like this:

I figured I would need at least 2 float inputs, but no idea how to create a shader graph that would correctly render this in a flexible way

any help is greatly appreciated!

[ebon basin]

How many are we talking? If just a handful, canvas has utility for fill along with some masking/stencil operations

[iron scroll]

we are talking like 10k-100k instances, as this is DOTS stack. that's why I'm asking, as I don't have any intuition on how to make it performant

actually one way is to have hardcoded texture frames for every possible combination (assuming some max width) and just animate UVs switching to the correct frame that has desired number of red/yellow pixels

but that's ugly and not flexible for sure, although super easy on the shader I guess

[ebon basin]

https://www.stevestreeting.com/2019/02/22/enemy-health-bars-in-1-draw-call-in-unity/
This was kind of the idea back in built-in, but MaterialPropertyBlock isn't something you use with SRPs. The SRP batcher may be fine such that creating multiple materials would be batched by it assuming they're similar enough, but otherwise I'd go with an instancing approach and look into using the graphic's API with methods like https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/ScriptReference/Graphics.RenderMeshIndirect.html

Not entirely sure about DOTs though and tying it all together

[lean phoenix]

Hey guys, how to write a pixel art shader for a 3d game?

[iron scroll]

thank you, I think I saw this approach. tbh it seems SRP works fine with material properties. i animate some sprites that way. no experience with rendermeshindirect though. i'd just need a shader graph that somehow can divide a bar into 3 colors, that would be good enough probably. will try experimenting on Sunday

[hardy juniper]

you can reduce the precision of the uv before sampling a texture:
e.g. floor(uv.xy * 32) / 32

[limpid yew]

why do vertex colors show on the object?

instead of the red there's supposed to be an another texture

[kind juniper]

Yeah, I'm not sure I understand what this setup is supposed to do. It seems wrong to me. You're using texture color as uvs or something, if I get the Split Texture Transform Node correctly.

Ah, the uvs are from the tiling and offset node. Still looks weird to me.

It's like it doesn't do anything at all

Can you not just get rid of the split and the tiling nodes?

[torn palm]

I'm trying to sample a texture on top of a tilemap that use auto tiling rule. I almost did it but the texture seems blurry.

In my screenshot, you can see the difference using the same exact texture.

[kind juniper]

You'll need to share some details on your setup and what debugging you've done so far.

[torn palm]

Ok so I am creating a processor to handle the shader.

I am pasting the shader on top of my tilewalls.

I am detecting for the background tile to determine which texture to apply on the tilewalls.

That's the summary of what I am trying to achieve.

I also am trying to use 4 differant texture per tilewalls that will be placed based on X and Y position.

After that I want to apply a blending effect that will determine if the texture above, below, and on both side are crustrock or dirt and the crustrock tilewall will apply a "blending" effect that transition from crustruck to dirt texture. But I'm not doing this part until I can see the texture without a blurry effect.

As you can see the texture I show above, the texture on the top is already doing that blending effect, later I will try to do the same with tilewalls that are, for now, blurry.

Processor:
https://pastebin.com/5Eg3Qc1b
Shader:
https://pastebin.com/g3aPqwmF

I have done a lot of debug and testing too.. Idk where to start with that

I noticed applying the shader on other tile that aren't using auto tiling rule don't have this blurry effect.

I got a feeling the problem is not the shader

this is my auto tiling rule script:

https://pastebin.com/fWJ49BF3

But then again, without using the shader the auto tilemap was having normal texture, no blurry effect.

1: Auto tilling rule with the shader cause blurry
2: Auto tilling rule without shader has no problem
3: Shader without auto tilling rule has no problem

[little wing]

I have this shader for cheap fake puddle reflection, problem is i cant get the mask to work, its not transparent, its just black
what am i doing wrong?

[limpid yew]

i did

its still red

[boreal totem]

i have a displacement matrix for my object
how do i actually move the object based on it
it's bot left node (GetInstancingPos(out Matrix4x4))

[jolly pulsar]

I have a problem with my scrolling UVs shader, for some reason it won't make my texture show up no matter how high or low the tiling is set. These two errors are showing up, idk what they mean and i'm not finding comprehensible answers on internet. The Uvs are fine (as shown in 3dsMax) and the shader looks like this. any tips ?

[iron scroll]

i've learned about branch nodes and it was actually easy to solve with it. pasting the graph if anyone's interested

the top part is compressed but it's just padding

[copper falcon]

Question around TexelSize. Unity insert _MainTex_TexelSize and _BlitTextureTexelSize which according to BingChat contains this.

I can not find any sources for that. Any sources are someone says thats what it is.
What it this as a technical term? Is that documented? Can't find things about TexelSize in the Unity Manuel and the ShaderGraph Manual explains that it ises uses z and w as node outputs.

[regal stag]

https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/Manual/material-properties-texture-properties.html

[copper falcon]

It's you again. It's always you. Why are you so wonderful, Cyan? Thanks once more 😉

[eternal crater]

For some reason my render feature looks pink in the .exe but in the editor it looks normal

[kind juniper]

Make sure you're using the same quality settings as in the editor. Or configure all the quality settings with the same render pipeline.

[eternal crater]

Thanks! I'll try that

[steel notch]

If you guys had to make a gradient texture for gradient mapping, what resolution would you pick?

[neon mason]

Has anyone used the new shader graph samples (UGUI Samples)? I have a question about UI blur. I have a panel with a material with a shader and a subgraph that should do blur. The panel should be dark, that is to darken what is behind it and blur at the same time. The problem is that if its color is black, the blur does not happen, and if white - everything is fine

[hardy juniper]

Just so you know lots of branches in shaders are bad.
You can research more if you are interested.

[regal stag]

Branch nodes use ternary operator though which in hlsl always computes both sides, so should be fine

[steel notch]

If you have branching through an Enum, are all options calculated?

[regal stag]

Enum Keywords create multiple variants of the shader, so no. But breaks batches

[steel notch]

Breaks batches? Also wait if you have a shader with multiple enum keywords does that make a variant for every permutation?

[regal stag]

Only one entry in the Enum Keyword can be active, but yes it creates every permutation with other keywords, that's why shader variants can grow so quickly
Breaks batches as in, if you have materials with different active keywords (including different enum entries) they would be in separate SRP-batches

[hardy juniper]

I read recently that this is not the case with open gl so tbh i dont fully know how the branching will be on some platforms

[teal igloo]

hello how can i make so this is between one color and another? in shader graph

actually never mind that since i can just plug it into the opacity of the blend, but if someone knows it would be usefull for the future, thanks

[steel notch]

what do you mean by "between"?

[teal igloo]

basically u see its white and black, can i make it red and black?

i think i could by just blending it, but that would be +1 blending in the shader so i will just plug this into the opacity i guess

[hardy juniper]

you can use the gradient output to lerp between 2 colours

or multiply red against the output

[steel notch]

You can use a Lerp node (or the Overwrite mode in the blend node which does the exact same thing).

[teal igloo]

one more question, how could i make so that this is different for every single object? so i dont need to make a material for each seed and so on

also ignore that random UV node up left, forgot u dont need to make one lmao

[ebon basin]

At runtime you can just dupe the material and change the property which SRP should still batch, otherwise use some object data that's sent into the GPU that you can use to devise a new seeded value.

Built-in you'll want to use materialpropertyblocks

[teal igloo]

i think i will just have to instantiate the book (object with material) anyways, and there i will just change the material's properties

[grand jolt]

Hi, I'm trying to make an object outline shader with shader graph and can't get to show the object in front of the outline. I've seen a couple of tutorials but didn't find any over complicated solutions that ended up with visual artifacts or the outline hidding between outlined objects. Could I, please, get advice or a working tutorial link? thx in advance

[karmic hatch]

try inverting the normals?

so vertex normal -> -vertex normal

[raven forge]

I been trying to find/create a lit PSX shader in unity, with pixel snapping and all those things to make stuff look like ps1, but i can't find anything related to that, someone knows how can i make something like this for unity 6? Doesn't matter if it's shadergraph or just a .shader file

[iron scroll]

thanks, yes I've read we should avoid it, but I'm not sure how to achieve it other way. and I see Cyan saying it should be fine. i guess i will revisit this when optimization will be needed

[hardy juniper]

For branches both versions are calculated then only one result is used. Depending on how it's compiled it can cause a slowdown but tbh I don't know much about the specifics.
But yea some things like selecting 1 value or another should be fine.

[grand jolt]

That doesn't seem to work

[hardy juniper]

Sometimes we can avoid a branch by using lerp or other mathematical operations to produce the result

[karmic hatch]

right, invert normals and then turn on backface culling

(which should then cull the front face, since it's inverted)

[iron scroll]

yeah i have 6 branches which are split into 2+4, so intuition says it should be fine, but no idea how to properly test, i mean in my case performance looks ok

btw any ideas on how to render text in a shader? is it possible to generate any sequence of digits? or is it better to procedurally create submeshes for each digit and set UVs to render correct digit?

[hardy juniper]

That is what tmp does

This explains it and goes over his complex way
https://youtu.be/SO83KQuuZvg?si=wD5EcCZ83bbe1x3W

[short orbit]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACSX6cxv4c
I made a tutorial on how to make a "retro filter"

[crystal sky]

can someone tell my why unity is not showing textures correct?

[hardy juniper]

what part specifically? lighting can explain some slight colour differences. Do you mean the emission colour?

[crystal sky]

Yes it not the same

[kind juniper]

It looks like you have a custom material/shader in blender. So you'll need to recreate it in unity as well with a shader graph.

[crystal sky]

uuh ok 😭

[grizzled bolt]

The main difference I see is that blender's bloom tints towards white, while Unity's is pure cyan
Which might just indicate the emission intensity is not high enough in Unity, or the color is too saturated

[low lichen]

If there is no red in the color, it won't be able to reach white no matter the intensity. Adding just a tiny bit of red into the emission color will fix the problem. It can also be fixed by using a tonemapper that shifts those pure RGB colors into something more natural.

[crystal sky]

fr?

[left pecan]

hey guys, quick question
we know UnityObjectToClipPos(vertex) converts from object space to clip space
but if all objects are all centered in (0,0,0) in object space, how can UnityObjectToClipPos(vertex) know that one's center is in a place and the other's is in another?
if we are talking about the same vertex of 2 different cubes with the same rotation, wouldn't these vertices have the exact same object space position, thus being mapped to the exact clip space position (even if they are very far from each other)?

[low lichen]

Try it. 1/255 red will hardly change the color, but it will bloom to white like in Blender.

[low lichen]

What UnityObjectToClipPos does is first convert the object position to world space, using the unity_ObjectToWorld matrix, and then converts the world position to clip space using the UNITY_MATRIX_VP (camera view projection) matrix.

You can see the source code for the function here:
https://github.com/chsxf/unity-built-in-shaders/blob/b9387b6980aba6470d23459c7b931f077799ed7c/Shaders/CGIncludes/UnityShaderUtilities.cginc#L46

So if you're calculating world position in your vertex shader for other reasons, it's more efficient to convert that directly to clip space than to use UnityObjectToClipPos.

[left pecan]

oh, so the secret is the Model matrix, right?

I had in mind all matrices were the same for all vertices but looks like the Model matrix is object-specific (e.g. each mesh has a different Model matrix)

but View and Projection matrices are the same for all objects

is that correct?

[low lichen]

Yes

[left pecan]

thanks! makes much more sense now 😄

[summer yacht]

Hi guys does anyone know hot do i apply an unlit shader to TMP text? I've tryied literally everything and can't get it to work...

[low lichen]

Dynamic batching can mess with the model matrices though. When it combines the meshes, it moves the vertices in world space, so in that case you can have what seems like the same model in different places but with the same model matrix. That can mess with shader effects that rely on accurate model matrices.

[low lichen]

Whatever shader you apply to a TMP text will have to do all the work that is normally required to render TMP text. It's easier to modify an existing TMP shader than to create one from scratch.

[summer yacht]

Ok thanks, then i guess that i'll have to mess with hlsl code

[summer yacht]

Ok, I managed to get this to work. I copied the shaders used by TMP and modified them to get the result I wanted. The only problem is that the TMP script, for some reason, automatically replaces my custom material with the default one. I modified the TMP_BaseEditorPanel.cs and somehow managed to avoid this issue, but Unity is literally warning me not to modify asset packages because they can revert changes without any warning.

I'm wondering why I have to go through all this hassle to achieve something so basic

[hardy juniper]

Are the included HDRP and URP lit/unlit shaders not enough?

[hardy juniper]

And with a package you can make a copy in Packages/ and that will keep any changes you make to it

[low lichen]

The material is part of the font asset. It sounds like you're changing the material on the MeshRenderer itself.

[hollow cedar]

Quick question, are shaders on materials, specifically ones that edit how a texture is displayed, run just once or are they run each frame?

[hardy juniper]

the "fragment" shader is executed per pixel rendered each frame

[low lichen]

Every frame. With a few exceptions, everything you see rendered on screen is being done from scratch every frame.

[summer yacht]

Yeah at the end i modified the shader of the material in the font asset

[low lichen]

But I know from our previous conversations that what you are doing is not a normal use case of shaders. Not abnormal either, by any means, but most shaders are on objects in the scene and that is rendered from scratch every frame.

[hollow cedar]

Gotcha, so is why is it ill-advised to have a shader that goes through each pixel? I’ve seen a lot of comments, specifically on the Unity forums, that doing things on the GPU like texture comparisons are better for the CPU and not great on the GPU

[low lichen]

If you are using a Custom Render Texture with a material like I suggested last time, then it depends on the update mode setting you have on it.

[hardy juniper]

You may be confusing compute shaders with normal shaders used on a mesh

[hollow cedar]

I actually still have yet to successfully make what we talked about. I’ve got another plan, but can’t test it until I’m home from work

[low lichen]

There must have been some additional context in those threads that prompted those answers. GPUs are precisely designed to run shaders per pixel very quickly.

[hollow cedar]

That was kind of my assumption too, so I was confused. Not sure what they meant. The most ready example I have is from stackexchange: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5109404/use-shaders-to-compare-images

But it is a fairly old thread, so perhaps that was when GPUs were less advanced

[hollow cedar]

Any chance I can create a thread with you or PM you?

[low lichen]

You can create a thread here if you like. If I have something useful to say, I'll say it in the thread. If not, hopefully someone else will.

[hollow cedar]

Awesome, thanks!

[low lichen]

It also has very few views and only one answer with no additional votes. It's a bad answer, but because there are few views and no other answers, there's no one to tell them they are wrong.

It would be wrong in 2011, too.

At best, you could argue that if you don't already have these textures on the GPU, then the extra overhead of setting up a GPU context just to do this comparison is not worth it. Especially if the textures are relatively small. But that nuance is not expressed in the answer or the question.

[hollow cedar]

Okay, gotcha

And just to verify the solution I have in my head, am I safe in my assumption that the polar coordinates node has the theta values in the R channel and the radius coordinates in the G channel?

[low lichen]

Have you read the documentation for the node?

[hollow cedar]

I have, it says the output is a float2(radius, angle). So I guess I have it backwards then, R is radius and G is angle?

[low lichen]

I guess. I haven't used this node before.

[elder halo]

Hello, I cannot get rid of this subtle background and edges in shader graph, It works fine with unlit material, but i want a lit one, i tried with alpha channel and without, i tried alpha clipping, im unsure how to get rid of it

[grizzled bolt]

Probably looking for Preserve Specular option in graph settings

[queen stream]

ive got this graph that does a little distortion effect fresnel. from some angles the fresnel looks correct, but at other angles, the fresnels size gets larger

[hardy juniper]

My first thought was not correcting the colour to a pos from the normal tex but the node may do this for you already in "Normal" mode 🤔

[queen stream]

that might make it a little clearer with how the normal texture changes

[regal stag]

I'd try a Transform node to convert the texture output from Tangent to World space instead of the Multiply/Add

[queen stream]

that did it!

[regal stag]

Shouldn't need to add to the normal vector, that's already handled in the transform

But I guess might adjust strength (if that's what you want might be better to use Normal Strength node in-between the sample & transform)

[queen stream]

oh so it does

[golden copper]

Has anyone played with vertex animations for characters and if so do you know of any plugins or tutorials on getting started in Unity, I feel like I'm missing something and just not finding the info right now

[hollow cedar]

Is it possible to have shader graph tell you what the min and max values of a channel are, as opposed to it just showing you the gradient when you preview the channel?

[waxen ridge]

I am using unity 2022 with URP.
I need to switch from Forward rendering to Forward+, since I am building an rpg where I need to support MANY lights.
Unfortunately, some of my objects are flickering HEAVILY if I do so.
I tried adjusting the cameras near / far clipping planes to no avail. From what I can tell, many of the materials / shaders that are flickering have been made with Amplify shader. Is there anything I can do to fix the problem?

[harsh mirage]

Hi everyone i am having trouble with the unity TerrainDemoScene HDRP. I am getting this error on the speed tree shader graph

[copper falcon]

Forward+ uses a different way to iterate the lights. The flickering you describe sound like something that may happen is the old additional lights loop is used in a forward+ scenario.
Acording to the asset store, Amplify Shader Editor supports forward+.
Have you tried it with a current version of , Amplify Shader Editor?

[waxen ridge]

Hello, thanks for the reply. I am not using and don't have ASE. The shaders I am using / bought were built using ASE.

[copper falcon]

oh, so you don't have the ASE files, only the shaders?

[waxen ridge]

yeap 🙂

[harsh mirage]

Here is the error log:

[copper falcon]

For every technical problem there's a youtuber form india to solve it.

This guy shoes how to write a *.shader for URP that works for both forward and forward+
It is for Unity6, documentation about it was kinda "not good" during previous versions, but it can maybe teach you how to rewrite the light loop to forward+ directly in your shaders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9fNaAAADnE

[teal igloo]

has anyone made any shader for outline? i tried a lot of methods but none work, i dont want fullscreen, im trying to make it only one object

[waxen ridge]

Thank you so much, I will take a look!

[ebon basin]

https://ameye.dev/notes/rendering-outlines/

[teal igloo]

yeah i have looked at that (browsed trough discord older messages about outlines) but honestly have no idea how i can make that in shader graph

[ebon basin]

Silhouette Buffer is relatively easy and probably the best looking for the least effort since the quality of the model also matters in the equation usually

you just dont get the benefit of inner/rim outlines

[teal igloo]

could you help me with making that in a shader graph?

sorry im pretty new to shaders, if you maybe already did it or anything it would be very helpful, ive been struggling with making a outline shader for a long time, my old method was just rendering the object but back, but that had a lot of bad things

[ebon basin]

There's plenty of these you can find around on blogs or youtube. Nothing that uncommon

[teal igloo]

idk man i can always try and just look deeper but was just thinking that maybe you already made one and could share (under your permission), just asking since i have looked at a lot of vids and reddit posts and all of that, but none worked good

[ebon basin]

https://www.cyanilux.com/resources/
Cyans got a bunch of resources too. I suggest trying something if you run into any problems then show what you managed so far with the problem you run into

[gilded nest]

I made a custom shader, employing similar lighting to URP simple lit. It works good in game and prefab editing mode, however the prefab thumbnail shows it completely dark lighting. However, clicking on it and looking at the other preview that shows in the inspector panel, shows correct lighting.

I tried a hacky fix: implement a minimum ambient light field. This did work to make the prefab thumbnail appear less dark, but I want to try fix the root problem without weird workarounds.

Anyone else encounter a similar issue and manage to fix it? (I tried restarting Unity, reimporting assets, but didn't resolve issue)

[cedar sand]

how does one pass a Texture2DArray into a HLSL function using a custom function node and sample it in HLSL?

[hardy juniper]

I dont think shader graph offers the ability to have array properties annoyingly...

[regal stag]

It does allow for texture arrays in the blackboard

[hardy juniper]

Oh i may be thinking of other types

I wanted once to have a vec4 array

[regal stag]

In custom function would use UnityTexture2DArray tex as the param, and SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D_ARRAY(tex, tex.samplerstate, uv, sliceIndex) to sample

Or SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D_ARRAY_LOD(tex, tex.samplerstate, uv, sliceIndex, lod) if sampling in vertex stage

[cedar sand]

Hmm good to know! When I tried this previously I got an error saying:

unable to unroll loop, ... (tl;dr too many iterations)

[regal stag]

Probably because i is based on a property. It's value isn't known so the loop can't be unrolled. Can use [unroll(n)] before the for statement with a value if you know a maximum length. But if you're using continue/break you might want a proper loop? Can use [loop] to tell the compiler not to unroll.

[cedar sand]

I do know a maximum length, so which would be preferred in that case? I was not familiar with the those tags

[cedar sand]

Sorry to bother you again, unfortunately the sampling always returns float4(0, 0, 0, 0). Am I missing something in terms of what this sampler returns?

According to this documentation page, SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D_ARRAY returns a float4

nevermind, it was an oversight on my end. Thank you for the help!

[muted laurel]

so I got this thing where I want to place various buildings - what's the best way to do a shader that highlights the preview green if it's a valid placement and red if not?

[hybrid flax]

I'm very new to HLSL. Is there a reason why const float pi = 3.1415; works inside a function but when I put it outside the function it acts like it is a zero?

[hybrid flax]

Ah.. got it. There is no const. Needs to be static. Got it.

[gilded nest]

Does anyone know the best way to approach if we have multiple small grass tiles, but we want to apply a single seamless texture across all of then (make them not look like individual tiles), what's the best way to do that?

My only idea was to sample from world-space rather than individual object position. This works great, but has the issue if the grass section object moves down in game, the texture looks statically painted on it.

The only workaround I can think of is to introduce a _WorldOffset into the shader, and then use C# code to change that accordingly to how the grass section object is moving down in game.

While it works, would there be any better way that wouldn't require any C# code?

[round geyser]

hi gang i am using a shader graph -> hdrp lit material; how does one do displacement?

i'm aware of the parallax mapping nodes but idk wth to do with the output

[amber saffron]

The output of the paralax are distored UVs that you use to sample your surface (albedo, mask, normal) maps.
You can also use the depth offset output (enable depth offset in the graph target) for better intersections with other objects.

[amber saffron]

If the issue is with moving up/down, using a world XZ coordinate shouldn't affect it.
Or are you also mapping vertical faces ?

[muted laurel]

how can I highlight objects? lets say... make them glow green or red based on whatever my mouse is pointing at?

[strange prairie]

If you have a bloom effect, you can make things glow with the emissive property.

[low lichen]

In which render pipeline?

[strange prairie]

That's URP - although I don't think it matters

[low lichen]

Okay, URP has a Renderer Feature called Render Objects, which can be used to implement a highlighting feature in a simple way.
The idea is to draw a second pass on top of highlighted objects to add a transparent glow on top. You can add fresnel or whatever you want to make it look interesting.

The Render Objects feature can be configured to draw all renderers with a certain rendering layer again, but with a different material. That would be your transparent highlight material.

[strange prairie]

What do you want the glow to look like?

[muted laurel]

ok - so lets say I can raycast and get the gameobject that I'm looking at in a variable like GameObject highlightObject, then I can add this second pass at runtime to the renderer of the object? or something like that?

[strange prairie]

It'd be a material property

[low lichen]

The renderer feature approach makes it very easy to mark a renderer to be highlighted, just change its layer or rendering layer.

[muted laurel]

right now it's pretty open ended... there's actually two spots in my game that would probably need a feature like this - one is just perhaps either outlining the object under cursor or literally highlighting it to be like 1.2x brighter or whatever, and the other is placing buildings in a grid, and if it's placeable it should be tinted green, and red otherwise

so nothing too crazy i think

[strange prairie]

Right. I'd just use the emissive property that's probably on your default material already. Then the bloom effect to make it glow.

But the renderer feature approach sounds more flexible

[muted laurel]

I am unfortunately still confused about render features

is it possible to make a shader graph and just apply it to a gameobject at runtime

[strange prairie]

Sounds like a good opportunity to learn then

[strange prairie]

Yes, you can swap materials

[muted laurel]

models can comprise multiple materials though right?

[strange prairie]

That's true. But you could swap them all

[muted laurel]

mm okay, that also sounds like I'll lose all the texture information and whatever if I do this

so like just brightening the object won't work that way (if I understand correctly)

[strange prairie]

It's better done as a property on the material, I agree

But you could theoretically assign the texture as well

[muted laurel]

ooo so ok

I've added this to my renderer

and I put the layer mask to the layer I want

and if I drop a shader graph into the material in the Overrides section, it'll use that instead? or on top of the previous pass

[strange prairie]

I think you'd want shader override mode. And if you want to retain the texture, make sure the name of the field is the same as in the non-glowing shader.

[muted laurel]

the field as in variables inside my shader graph?

[strange prairie]

Yes

It's probably _MainTex

[muted laurel]

oh wow it works

excellent

thanks guys

how would I add bloom on top of this? just by increasing the emissive intensity in my shader?

[strange prairie]

Yeah, bloom works with a threshold. If the brightness of something increases the threshold it'll glow

This requires HDR rendering

[muted laurel]

oh uh

how would I access the shader parameters from my script

[strange prairie]

material.SetFloat, material.GetTexture, etc. Unless it's a global property in which case Shader.SetGlobalFloat, etc

[unborn sable]

I get this error when trying to build with the full screen renderer feature. Does anyone know the solution? I've already tried:

• Changed the computer language and region.
• Tried it in another version (I'm using Unity version 6000.0.44f1).

[muted laurel]

I got it to work, but only with global parameters in the shader, which I guess makes sense. If I needed to have it work by individual object e.g. highlight one a specific color, another object a diff color (simultaneously) I suppose a renderer feature wouldn't actually work im guessing

[heavy sinew]

Hi all! Does anyone know of a way to change texture filter mode globally for all textures at runtime? I'd like players to get to choose between point and bilinear. I could not find any material on google

[glacial chasm]

Has anyone here had any luck making a wire frame shader for use on vr only projects (so compatible with android builds)? i've got one that works on pc builds, but when I do an android build, it is just green and white lines flashing around the screen like a strobe show. lol.

[compact bronze]

Hi, does anyone know how data from terrain layers is transferred to (HDRP) TerrainLit shader? I'm making a terrain shader from scratch and I cant find the math of fragment function as the TerrainLit shader is completely filled with #include directives. So, how do I get terrain layer data in my shader?

[amber saffron]

There is no magic math fragment function for that, you need to get the terrain textures.
They are declared using macros in here.

[strange prairie]

It uploads the textures to these properties

TEXTURE2D(_Splat##n);               \
TEXTURE2D(_Normal##n);              \
TEXTURE2D(_Mask##n)

You'll need to do it yourself though if you want more than 8

Texture2D is equivalent to:

#define TEXTURE2D(textureName)                Texture2D textureName

on DirectX

[compact bronze]

Thanks a lot!

[compact bronze]

(Also thank you!)

[harsh mirage]

can someone help me with this please

[solemn narwhal]

does anybody know why in blender my material looks fine but in unity all the vertical ones are stretched out? It is properly UV'd

[regal stag]

Try changing the Wrap Mode on the texture to Repeat

[solemn narwhal]

Where might that be under the material?

Oh on the texture itself, it is on repeat already :(

that's weird under the UV checker it's all messed up

bruh somehow there was 2 UV maps in blender it's fixed now

[ancient nebula]

I have gotten a odd problem. I was making a cool shader for all my materials and when I started and place it on things I saw a odd render bug. everything that shader is blocking you can see but it is getting black and that only happends when I using the volumetric light. someone that know why it could happen and how I should solve the problem?

The video shows example of the problem:

using unity 6 urp

[gilded nest]

For making a custom HLSL shader, what's the best approach to make it copy the same lighting as URP Lit/Simple Lit? Is there an easy way we can "inherit" from URP Lit shader, or pass it off to URP Lit at the end, to avoid needing to write extra lighting code to mimic URP Lit lighting?

For now I used https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/blob/master/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal/Shaders/SimpleLit.shader source code as a reference to implement into my shader, but just curious if there's any easier way.

[topaz swan]

hello, I am new to urp shader graphs and I was tryng to make a fullscreen shader graph that posterized the screen, but it just turbed pink and blue. could anyone help me with this?

[ebon basin]

What is this supposed to do? Just noise up the screen? You're probably needing the scene color node then

which is a render texture of the frame

[topaz swan]

do you know lethal company?

[ebon basin]

no

[topaz swan]

its like the camera effects there where it limits the amount of colors on the screen at once

i will try the scene color one though thanks

[ebon basin]

Ah, I've made something similar before. Not entirely sure how the node works, but I would just lerp a range of color values

[signal garden]

I am trying to raycast from each pixel in the fragment shader. Does anyone know how to calculate the ray direction for each pixel?

[tough lichen]

Hi, I have an issue with my UI shader in Unity that's supposed to generate a dot pattern based on the RectTransform size of an Image. It works fine when I use a sprite with Sprite Mode set to Single, but when I switch to a sprite from a spritesheet (Sprite Mode: Multiple), the pattern gets messed up and doesn't render as expected. Any idea why this happens or how to make it behave the same with sprites from a spritesheet?

[frosty linden]

Hi, using HDRP and building my game, is it normal for shader compilation to be so slow ? It's currently increasing by ~17 each 15 seconds... So so slow... Is this normal ??

now it moved to forward hdrp lit and again 17 each 15 sec. It's crazy slow!

[frosty linden]

I've canceled and restarted the build, why does it says 3m / 7m? what does those numbers represent ?

[grizzled bolt]

3 million out of 7 million I believe

[wispy abyss]

How do I fix this problem?

The shaders seem to be the problem, but I don't know how to fix them.

[grizzled bolt]

Either the shader has errors, or more typically it's incompatible with your project's render pipeline

[wispy abyss]

It's the second one, but is there a fix to it?

[grizzled bolt]

If it's one of Unity's built in shaders, Unity's material converter can swap it or you can swap it by hand to an equivalent default shader
If it's a custom shader, there's no conversion process so your first option would be to find a version of the shader made for your project's RP

Asset store assets often include a package inside them for specific render pipelines, if they officially support them

[wispy abyss]

Ok I'll try it thank you very much!

[grizzled bolt]

If it is a third party asset and there is no alternative shaders so it's simply incompatible with your RP, you are short on options
The only way to truly convert it would be to effectively make the shader from scratch for your specific RP
You can always swap the shader for one your RP's default shaders and it'll work but you lose any custom shader effects

[wispy abyss]

I know

Thanks

[frosty linden]

3m shaders? How is that possible?

And it's compiling the shaders again for each platforms, windows, linux and mac :/

1h each time to compile. On a small project using only built in shaders, that's really weird

My project is currently on a HDD but windows is on a SSD. Will it be faster if I move the project to the SSD? Or only unity needs to be on the SSD?

[amber saffron]

3M variants of the HDRP/Lit shader.

The number of variants is based on the keywords permutations and combinations of the shader. The HDRP/Lit shader is quite complex and has a lot of options, so depending on how you use it on the various materials in the project, the number of needed variants can increase exponetially.

[grizzled bolt]

Correct me if I have misconceptions but the idea is that a variant must be made for every combination of disabled/enabled shader feature
Because a shader must always run every calculation, a whole another shader variant is required to exclude unnecessary calculations at runtime

[amber saffron]

Yep

[grizzled bolt]

HDRP Lit is particularly hefty, but graphics settings lets you disable shader features and graphics APIs supported by the application to reduce the necessary variants

Also, it won't generate them from scratch for every build if you've built and generated the variants once already

Having the editor and/or project on an SSD is always more helpful than not but I'd guess this process is almost entirely up to CPU speed

[kind juniper]

Yes, moving it to SSD might help.

And in general, developing without SSD is a nightmare.

Compiling involves a lot of small read/write to disk operations, so hdd can be a huge bottleneck.

[strange prairie]

No, this isn't made to be extended. If you're interested in making lit shaders I'd recommend Amplify Shader editor on the asset store for now. Doing these in HLSL would require either duplicating or refactoring the underlying lighting code.

Well, you can share the actual lighting function but you'll need to duplicate a lot.

[strange prairie]

Yes, Unity projects should be run off an SSD. They are comprised of many small files so the speed benefit is tremendous.

That said, millions of shader variants is quite a bit.

[frosty linden]

The main issue is disk space... Unity is BLOATING the drive with its library folder and my SSD only have that much space to share with other 100Gb games from Steam lol... Or is it possible to have the project on SSD while having the library on HDD to save space?

[kind juniper]

Not possible and neither that would help, as most of the intermediate files that unity read/writes are in the library folder.

[frosty linden]

Built game is 1Gb. The unity folder is 14Gb :/

[kind juniper]

Developing has some requirements. Like disk space

[frosty linden]

And that's a small scale project :x

[kind juniper]

You're either using many complex features or targeting many platforms at once

Or maybe a lot of assets

But generally, 14 GB is very little in game dev context

Some projects could go to hundreds GB or even terrabytes

[frosty linden]

I guess so. I'll try on SSD next time to see how it goes. Thanks.

[frosty linden]

I hope so. I was surprised to see it compile again for each platform when switching build (I'm using Windows, Mac and Linux)

[kind juniper]

Different platforms require different binary code. This is true for all the compiled code. Not just shaders.

[hollow cedar]

What does the length function in HLSL do? There’s not great documentation on what it does mathematically

[hardy juniper]

should be the magnitude of a vec2/3/4 I think 🤔

[hollow cedar]

Gotcha, so if it inputs a vector 2, it outputs a vector 2 with the magnitude at each point?

[hardy juniper]

its return is size 1 so it would be float/single/half or whatever the num type was

[hollow cedar]

Oh interesting, so it does truly handle magnitude as a scalar. Thanks!

[hollow cedar]

Okay, follow up question then, does length get called for each pixel and it outputs the magnitude as a float of each pixel?

Particularly, I’m looking at the Polar Coordinates node in shader graph and it uses length to calculate the radius, but I don’t see how it manages to iterate through all possible radius values if length only outputs a float

[hardy juniper]

Per pixel you convert the pixels uv pos into polar coordinates and use that to complete the frag output.

[hollow cedar]

Fantastic, thanks!

[low lichen]

Everything you do in the shader is per pixel. What you're making is a program that will be executed for each pixel.

[hollow cedar]

Right, so the shader is effectively a for loop, where it is essentially for each pixel. Is that right?

[low lichen]

It's even better than that, a modern GPU has thousands of shader cores, so it can execute thousands of shaders in parallel.

[hardy juniper]

err not fully, the gpu can execute many fragment/vert shaders in parrallel

[vast quiver]

ok i think this counts as a shader thing, im trying to get this effect (1st screenshot) where i can see an object through a flat model with a fractal/kaleidoscope shader on it, but im having this issue where you can see another object with the same shader through it (2nd screenshot). what would be a good way to go about doing this

[hollow cedar]

I more or less mean the mentality I need to have when building shaders. For my own mental ability to convert CPU code to GPU code, my assumption it effectively works like a for loop?

Just coding side wise, even if that’s not how the architecture actually works

[hardy juniper]

The calculated UV for the fragment (interpolated using the uv value for the triangles 3 verts) is used to produce the correct output for this pixel. You need to just think that the fragment shader produces the colour for the pixel using the inputs given to it.

[low lichen]

If you treat every iteration of a for loop as completely isolated and the order of the iterations is effectively random, then sure. Unlike a for loop in CPU code, you cannot easily do things like "count all the red pixels in a texture" in a shader. There are ways to do something like that, but it requires a different approach than what you would do on the CPU with a for loop.

A better equivalent in CPU code would be Parellel.ForEach or a IJobParallelFor in Unity.

[hollow cedar]

I get that my “it’s a for loop” is an oversimplification, and outright wrong in many cases, but if all I’m doing is transforming each pixel to appear elsewhere, then it sounds like it would need to be built in the same way I would build it in for loop in a non shader language

[hardy juniper]

you are not transforming the pixel but i presume using polar coordinates instead a traditional 2d UV to sample a tex or do something different.

[hollow cedar]

I’m attempting to build my own Polar Coordinates node and trying to wrap my mind around how to do it. Because the polar coordinates node has the center of the UV being 0,0 when I need it to be .5,.5

[hardy juniper]

If you check the unity node code they correct the center in theirs to be 0.5, 0.5

the doc page for ALL shader graph nodes show the code they use

[hollow cedar]

The output UV coordinates of the center is 0,0

[hardy juniper]

oh sorry i miss understood

[hollow cedar]

So pixel 0,0 is the center when I need the output center to be .5,.5

I’ve built my polar coordinates equation on paper

[hardy juniper]

do abs(uv - (0.5, 0.5))

without abs if you want negative

[hollow cedar]

That’s the same code they use though without abs

Their code is UV - Center (where center is a vector2) so if my center is (.5,.5), it would be what the polar coordinates node defaults to

[hardy juniper]

you can correct it before, then correct back after

[hollow cedar]

So take the entire circle the PC node outputs and subtract it by .5,.5?

[low lichen]

Sure. A small improvement to your for loop equivalence is to think of it like this:

for (int x = 0; x < width; x++)
{
    for (int y = 0; y < height; y++)
    {
        Vector2 uv = new Vector2((float) x / width, (float) y / height);

        outputTexture[x, y] = MyShader(uv, inputTexture);
    }
}

public static Color MyShader(Vector2 uv, Texture2D inputTexture)
{
}

All of your shader code would be in this MyShader function, a static method where all the input is given and it must be a pure method, meaning it cannot mutate any state except in specific objects, like read/write textures.

[hardy juniper]

e.g. to scale a uv around 0.5, 0.5 but keep it 0-> 1 still:

float2 ScaleUV(float2 uv, float2 center, float2 scale)
    {
        float2 scaled = uv - center;
        scaled *= scale;
        scaled += center;
        return scaled;
    }

[vast quiver]

bumping this

[hollow cedar]

Is this for before or after the PC node?

I’m sorry too, I was really trying to figure this out without asking anyone for outright code, but I seem to have bit off way more than I can chew here 😂 I’m being driven mad by trying to figure out how to accomplish this

[low lichen]

Yes, this is a shader thing. It's a bit of an annoying problem that can be solved with the stencil buffer. Understanding the solution requires understanding the depth and stencil buffer. You can try looking up tutorials for stencil shaders.

[vast quiver]

alright

[verbal moss]

can anyone help me to create this type of shader in unity ?

edge blurry and black

wanted to use on 3D models

[grizzled bolt]

You don't need to make a new shader for it, Unity's default shaders can display that texture in many ways as desired

Unlit shader set to transparent will do the job at minimum

[verbal moss]

would you please explain ? it would be huge help.

i already have URP/Unlite material on objects

[grizzled bolt]

Assign your texture to the material's Base Map
Set Surface Type to Transparent

[verbal moss]

but it's too sharp

the character and railing itself is shadows so i dont wanted to be too sharper

👀

[grizzled bolt]

The material and texture are ok, but what kind of result are you expecting

[verbal moss]

see this railing

[grizzled bolt]

Even if the texture has something blurry in it, it's not capable of blurring the edges of your mesh
It will be wrapped around it according to mesh UV maps, like any texture

[verbal moss]

edges must be blurry corners

for player and railing

[grizzled bolt]

Blurring would be a whole different operation, you cannot achieve it with materials and textures alone

[verbal moss]

then how can i achieve that effect ?

[grizzled bolt]

The only included way is the Depth of Field post processing effect (note that it only works on opaque materials)
Beyond that you would have to go look for third party blur implementations, which usually are custom post processing effects or custom UI shaders

[verbal moss]

i think i can use post processing but it will breaks hyper casual visual ?

[grizzled bolt]

I don't know what you mean exactly but safe to say "hyper casual" or any other visual style does not exclude or necessarily include any style of post processing
Even if it did, post processing means nothing beyond processing the image after rendering in some way, it doesn't carry any inherent artistic style implications

[verbal moss]

I think I have to keep it as it is.

[flint hinge]

What unit is Material.mainTextureOffset in? I have a scrolling background that's moving via
bgRenderer.material.mainTextureOffset += new Vector2(0, scrollSpeed * Time.deltaTime);
and I wanna sync up a moving object in the foreground to the speed of the background so it looks like it's moving on the ground. But just using the same scrollSpeed leaves it several times too slow, so how can I relate the Texture offset to Unity units?

[grizzled bolt]

Not units, but UV coordinates so 1 means it's moved the full length of the texture
The size and UV map of the mesh determine how much that actually is in real terms

Which is not easy or practical to determine
If you know the exact length of your mesh and that area of your mesh covers the whole UV map exactly, then you can assume it's that distance

[flint hinge]

The texture is on a quad that exactly fills the screen, and exactly four times the screen height in pixels.

[grizzled bolt]

Then you know it's your screen's length or width
Assuming it doesn't change when the display size is different

[hardy juniper]

a quad scaled to fill the screen still has a uv range of 0,0 -> 1,1

[flint hinge]

So that means if my scrollSpeed is, say, 0.1/second, then it takes the texture 10 seconds to scroll in its entirety once?

[grizzled bolt]

Yes

[flint hinge]

Thanks. That helped me figure it out.

[hollow cedar]

Just a clarification on this, is that pre or post the PC node?

[hardy juniper]

Its how you scale normal 2d uvs around 0.5, 0.5.
The unity polar coordinate node automatically centres around 0.5 0.5 so you can input uv direct without modification, the previews should illustate this

[hollow cedar]

Except when I’ve tested it, it doesn’t. The center of the polar coordinates node is 0,0 even if you’ve put the center there as .5,.5. Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying

[hollow cedar]

This is what I’m talking about trying to accomplish

Excuse the fact that my circle looks more like an oval 😂 I’m not an artist

The r equation up top is what I’ve mathematically worked out to be the polar coordinates equation of that circle

Now I’m just trying to translate that over to shader graph

Looking through the documentation of the PC node, it seems like I’ll have to write theta in terms of x and y

[modern gazelle]

Hello, I started learning Unity last week, but I have some trouble getting around some problems I encounter. My project uses HDRP, I made a Custom Pass Volume using shader graph, and it is dependant on the "Scene Depth" node. Everything's working fine, except that transparent materials are not taken into account into the Scene Depth "pass" (sorry if I don't have the right lingo). Is there a way to make transparent materials visible into the scene depth? Here is a screenshot to show my problem

[hardy juniper]

transparent rendered materials usually do not write to depth so this is expected. Alpha clipping is opaque rendered so will write depth.
You could enable depth write for these but it will mean transparent objects cannot draw behind and will potentially cause visual artefacts

[modern gazelle]

Thank you for answering. I wanted to try that, but I didn't find a way to make it work. Maybe I'm not looking at the right place, but I cannot use alpha clipping on an opaque surface, and when enabling the "write depth" checkbox on a transparent surface with alpha clipping, it doesn't work either

[strange prairie]

You should be able to use alpha clipping on an opaque surface

[modern gazelle]

I've been looking for it for hours now and it was just under my eyes all along 😭😭 thanks

[ebon basin]

You can enable transprents to force pre-pass in the HDRP pipeline settings. Usually recommended if you are using deferred anyway

[hollow cedar]

Am I able to use if statements within shader graph's custom functions node?

[fierce wave]

Im trying to make an effect like in the video, a soul/flame 2d effect. I can't seem to get it to effect the whole orb with the mask that im moving since it is bigger at bottom and smaller at top. Would anyone be able to help me achieve this effect?

[fringe karma]

Is there a difference between the value returned by Shader Graph's Instance ID node, and Object.GetInstanceID()? I've been doing some testing but because the IDs seem to change whenever the scene is saved or materials are updated, it's hard to tell if I'm getting the same IDs

[ebon basin]

Probably better off using the editor asset IDs, or doing your own GUID at runtime as InstanceIDs are volatile and change each sessions

[fringe karma]

it doesn't matter that they're volatile

I want to write an array of data to a buffer for each renderer every frame, then have my shader search through that array for the bit of data that corresponds to it

I'm making a shader where the values update based on script data on an object the renderer is a child of, but I can't do it just by changing the material values because this is going to be an overlay effect

the IDs don't need to save between sessions

[ebon basin]

I would expect them to change when you do save the scene on the editor, or dirtying up some components, but otherwise I would expect them to stay similar throughout the runtime, but again i don't trust them ;p

[fringe karma]

I tried a test with 3 cubes in the scene, with a custom shader where the instance ID is directly read as the output colour (so they're all either black or white). Each one also has a script attached that prints the renderer's GetInstanceID() value. But while the rendered objects are one black and two white, all 3 of the printed IDs are well into the negatives. If those values matched up, then all 3 cubes would be black.

So I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, or if those two IDs aren't the same.

How would I figure out what the Instance ID node would produce for a particular renderer, but within a C# script?

[ebon basin]

Not enitrely sure about shader graph IDs, but if I ever want to keep track of renders using instancing I would always just send in my own IDs as a parameter to those buffers too and then have a struct of this information on the CPU side that I would keep track of

I do it a lot for the VFX graph so I can control everything independently if I needed to

[fringe karma]

but then how would you get the renderer to know which of your custom IDs in the buffer is the right one?

[ebon basin]

Well, I can selectively grab the renderer by matching IDs through some of the APIs unity provides, but otherwise vfx graph particles I just make some circular buffer and rotate the IDs

lot of tools for those graphic buffers

[fringe karma]

yeah the ID matching is what I'm having difficulty figuring out

which APIs?

[ebon basin]

Provided with vfx graph. It's such a good medium for general tooling even if not for particles

it's like blenders geometry node tool if I would compare it to something

Don't think it would be impossible to create some script to access those instances otherwise, I've been just content on what unity has provided lol

[fringe karma]

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/blob/master/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.core/ShaderLibrary/UnityInstancing.hlsl
I thought this might be something to do with it, but it's a whole lotta code and I haven't fully gotten the hang of referencing extra unity shader libraries within custom shader graph nodes

also hm turns out vfx graph doesn't have proper urp support yet, at least not on the version of unity I'm using

[ebon basin]

Unfortunate as it just keeps getting better... honestly one of the actual tool that unity has been updating consistently

[steel notch]

Hey just following up on this. I don't exactly know the implications of this. Is it a bad idea to use Enums in shader graph for performance reasons?

[neon mason]

How to get directional light realtime shadowmask texture in HDRP?

[tall chasm]

does anyone know what node is this in shader graph?

[grizzled bolt]

"Redirect" node
You can create one by double clicking a connection, or with ctrl + R on a selected connection

[tall chasm]

THANKS!!

[amber saffron]

"Realtime Shadowmask" ?
You either have the realtime shadowmap, or the baked shadowmask ...
Which one are you refering to, and what do you want to do with it ?

[neon mason]

realtime shadowmap. I'm making a Capsule Shadows effect, and I only need it to work in realtime sun shadows

[amber saffron]

Oh, so basically, that's custom lighting :/
You'll need to dig deep into the HDRP includes and light data to properly fetch this in the shader and mix it with your custom capsule shadows.

This might be a good start : https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/blob/master/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition/Runtime/Lighting/LightLoop/LightLoop.hlsl#L235

[neon mason]

I've included this file, but I don't have GetDirectionalShadowAttenuation and other stuff like LightLoopContext

nvm, I got the GetDirectionalShadowAttenuation, but I still can't find the context

[amber saffron]

I didn't say that including it would make it magically work. HDRP has hlsl functions is a lot of different includes for sharing code, you need to follow the breadcrumbs piece by piece to make it work.

[neon mason]

I think I found it

in "Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition/Runtime/Lighting/LightLoop/LightLoopDef.hlsl"

[amber saffron]

Typically, LightLoopContext looks like a struct, use github search for "struct LightLoopContext " and you should find where it is declared.

[fringe karma]

inspired me to try making one in 3D, obviously it's not perfect but I threw it together on a mad whim

[fierce wave]

It looks good! How’d you end up doing it?

[fringe karma]

A noise effect made from 3 spliced together voronoi noise values, that increases in intensity from the bottom to the top. Plus another vertex effect that raises the vertices on the top half (all calculated using an 'up' vertex'). Then the colour is calculated by lerping between two values, plus a proprietary stepping node that divides a smooth gradient into steps. There's also a wacky thing that uses the dot product and power to shift the centre slightly downwards

The noise intensity and 'centre' shifting downwards is obtained by taking the full dot product between the normal and up, and using inverse lerp to turn it to a 0-1 value

[fierce wave]

How do you make it increase intensity from top to bottom cause that’s what I’ve been trying to accomplish so that it’s not applying my noise to the whole things?

[fringe karma]

that 0-1 value is one minused then powered to affect the value determining the colour, which is then multiplied back up

one issue I have to deal with is that from the top it just looks entirely red

[regal stag]

Would likely depend on what code is running in each branch, and what keywords are used by materials/scene. If you have materials using different shader variants, swapping those keywords out for dynamic branching might work better (or no branch at all if the code isn't that expensive). Maybe something you'd have to profile per use-case

Personally I only really try to use keywords in cases where I'm designing a shader that might be reused in multiple projects and needs various toggleable features to alter the appearance - but only one combination/variant would actually be used in each project

[fierce wave]

Could I see a screenshot?

[fringe karma]

I did some changes but here's the fragment side

I'm still tweaking it to make it look really good, so I can put it on my portfolio

[fierce wave]

So my goal would be to take the top texture 2d and make the bottom texture 2d apply to that mask to the shape of the top one, would you know how to do that?

[hollow cedar]

@hardy juniper @low lichen I figured out the polar coordinates problem I was having, thank you both so much for your help!

[neon mason]

I made it

[hushed maple]

Hello, I am getting started in creating custom shader but i am stuck on a problem. I have a script attached to the camera and a shader that shows all red. When I click on the render texture in the inspector i see that its indeed a 256x256 red image but i doesnt show on the game screen when i press play. Any clues as to what I'm doing wrong ?

[plain urchin]

Hi all. I'm doing some stress test. Using ProPixelizer and GPUInstancer, shadergraph to make the swaying tree shader
The pic is when zoomed in (25 fps) and zoomed out (5-10 fps)
I'm looking into frame debugger, rendering debugger. But not sure where to start
I see some numbers change between the 2 views, but not sure which to tackle and how

I'm using URP

[hardy juniper]

first check whats causing all that cpu time. How many meshes/game objects are here?

[plain urchin]

There are 250 bamboo prefabs, each has 6 mesh renderers

They're registered in GPU Instancer

Without GPU on, it'd be 60 million tris

On play, with GPUI, it's down to 55k tris total

As i zoom in/out, there's a definite threshold where the fps just drops considerably

So it must be some object starting to enter the camera view

Among others, when zoomed close enough, there's only 14 shadow casters
Zoomed out just from this threshold, it jumps to 83

[hardy juniper]

but whats taking 85ms then when zoomed out?

check via the profiler

[hushed maple]

After adding lots of debug logs i see that OnRenderImage is never called, is this new which explains why this works in older tutorials ?

[plain urchin]

Semaphore.WaitForSignal, which is (from reading) the cpu waiting for the gpu

[fair lion]

so i only see this happen on standard lite

[hardy juniper]

I wonder if there is a lot of overdraw but something is making a frame take too long

[sudden jolt]

I am a complete noob in shaders. May I ask how can I get this editor and how to use it?

[hardy juniper]

shader graph: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@17.2/manual/Create-Shader-Graph.html

[fair lion]

this was because of vertex color problems (blender issue) i resolved it

[hushed silo]

wondering if anyone can help me with some optimisation. I have this in my graph.
The "reality" custom interpolator is any value 0-1. the bit in the red circle is applying a fancy blend between 0.05-0.95.... Essentially when reality value is 0 or 1 (full or zero), which is MOST of the time, I would like it to not even be thinking about this stuff at all.

like, early exit the realityborder subgraph if reality==0 or ==1

[hardy juniper]

you can branch but is not ideal as both sides get calculated still and one is discarded.
If the work is minimal it may be fine.
sometimes it just needs to be that a certain value is reduced to 0 to not have a visible effect

[round geyser]

I have a vfxgraph spawning a shadergraph mesh particle

It’s a big tornado

It gets derendered when the origin point (the centre bottom) of the mesh isn’t in camera view

I’m sure there is some culling setting somewhere

But I have no idea where to look

Whether it’s a mesh import issue, shadergraph issue, vfxgraph issue etc.

[ebon basin]

There's settings at the top of the initialize context to change the render mode / manage the bounding box size

[sudden jolt]

Thanks

[neat orchid]

OK so tessellation displacement destroys this mesh, but only on the inside

it works on meshes made with a different workflow...why?

[neat orchid]

nvm, fixed. Forgot to shade smooth in blender

[muted laurel]

I got this weird problem:

first is in game

second is in Scene view

so the object becomes invisible in game but I can see it in scene view and I'm not sure why

[civic lantern]

Maybe that object is on a layer that is disabled in the camera's culling mask?

[muted laurel]

how can I check if that's the case?

[civic lantern]

In the camera's settings. Don't know what exactly it is called, depends on your render pipeline

[muted laurel]

oh ah I found it

I think I found it

let me find out

ok thank you! you were right

[plain urchin]

It could be
Alpha overdraw from all the bamboo leaves. They're all cutuot leaf cards

Oh, this might be the time i implement an aggressive LOD ing

[grand jolt]

Hey does anyone know if it might be possible to create a shader or something like that for object specific pixilation?

[plain urchin]

Try ProPixelizer

[grand jolt]

Thanks!

[hardy juniper]

there should be a debug mode to visualise overdraw on urp/hdrp but yea could be a wise idea. Is a reason why imposters get used for distance trees.

[hollow cedar]

Anyone know how to recolor a grayscale texture using a gradient in shader graph?

I figured out how to do it by importing a gradient texture, by using the luminosity as uv values when sampling the gradient texture. But does anyone have guidance on how to do it using the gradient node?

Nvm, figured it out

[hardy juniper]

Hopefully you are learning it's all just numbers!

[daring wind]

Anyone here really good with the stencil buffer? This is driving me insane and tutorials online are not working for me.

I need to render a mesh ONLY when it is behind a plane. But I also only need to render the part that fails the depth test.

^ Only this part should render

Same here

[hardy juniper]

What are you doing rn for the plane and ball? I should remind you that transparent objects render after opaque which may be making things be out of order (i dont remember when stencil writes happen)

[daring wind]

The plane will be a liquid shader

the ball will be a transparent ice cube that suspends itself above the water

because of transparency sorting issues, I had an idea to fake the ice cube beneath the liquid by rendering an opaque version of the ice cube beneath the liquid

it would essentially be a duplicate of the ice cube mesh with a stencil for the liquid, and rendering only beneath the liquid as well

[hardy juniper]

I think it will work if you have another mesh write to stencil first, then draw the ball behind the water, then the water. As otherwise the order will just not work.
You could also try "clipping" the ball differently by discarding the fragment if its pos is past some defined 3d plane (in theory in my head this would work)

[daring wind]

The liquid will wave around and have vertex offsets so I cannot rely on referencing a fixed Y value

this is essentially what I want, except this happens (mind you this is currently without the stencil buffer)

This is just ZTest Mode set to greater

and the opaque sphere's render queue is 2850, above the plane which is 2800

I technically have another issue too, the effect I am using for my liquid shader - which is a depth fade, doesn't like working with transparency

That, and the transparent ice cubes act as if the liquid doesn't exist

Transparency sorting issues I believe

[hardy juniper]

transparent things dont usually write to depth so there is nothing there to use for the effect

You would need the cube to fade itself based on the frag world pos

[full socket]

does anyone know how to

implment

mutiple shaded

cel

like a 3 tone lit shader

[grizzled bolt]

Assuming URP, Shader Graph's importable Feature Examples sample has "cel shading" shader graph example

[full socket]

wait what

there is a cel shading

like preset

or sum

[grizzled bolt]

Yes
Might not include every light calculation but most of them, and demonstrates how such a stepped light ramp is implemented

[full socket]

how would i get that

[grizzled bolt]

The package manager window has a "samples" tab for packages that you have imported and which have samples available

[full socket]

oh i found it

[full socket]

this right

do you know which one contains the cell shader

[grizzled bolt]

Feature Examples, as mentioned
It has a scene that shows off and explains each included shader

[full socket]

oh ok

thank you

[full socket]

man shader graph are so complicated

😢

[grizzled bolt]

Most things are, before you know them well

[ebon basin]

Should be possible but you need to use an opaque mask if you want to cull the opaque geometry outside of the mask, then just overlap it with the transparent layer

[ebon basin]

And this like rob said that you're trying to blend using depth but won't work unless you specify which is rendered first, but you can probably manage something if you do the 'blend' inside of the shader itself

[full socket]

I spented

a few hour on this

I have no clue how to use shader graph lol

but i managed to make something

[grizzled bolt]

Sweet! Custom lighting is definitely one of the tougher challenges

[plain urchin]

Imposters is technically just billboard right?

[full socket]

ye thanks for the help btw 🙂

[grizzled bolt]

Basically yes, but the term often implies that it can also swap its appearance to show different angles of the original mesh

[neon mason]

I use stencil to draw my shadow effect only on layers I need, but the problem is that the shadows start to flicker for some reason. I use the HDRP DrawRenderersCustomPass and a simple Stencil shader with a Stencil block. On the first screenshot the block in the stencil shader, and on the second screenshot the block in the shadow shader. Why does this happen? HDRP

[stray orbit]

Is the depth buffer hyperbolic? I am trying to make a custom screen space reflections shader using some resources online but keep getting confused when i actually want to test my ray's z with the depth buffer i know i can use the lineareyedepth and linear01depth functions but i need to ensure my ray is also in the actual same space.

[hushed silo]

I'm trying to return two colors out of an hlsl shader graph custom node, which I guess is bad practice...? Anyway, it used to be a subgraph which allowed 2 outputs.

I think the outputting of both outputA and outputB isn't working, only one, can anyone see why?

[regal stag]

Custom functions should be void, not have a return type. You only need to use out parameters - and should be fine to have multiple

[plain urchin]

Is it normal to want to have billboard tree sway?

[grizzled bolt]

It's not unreasonable, if there's so much sway it would be noticeable if it was missing
Generally you can do it using the same techniques as with non-impostor trees, animate the vertices and/or animate the UVs of the texture
But it's important to note the sway will easily look different since the geometry will be different

I guess imposters don't have to be billboarded planes necessarily, I've seen some use the term for non-billboarded planes, octahedrons or other simpler geometry that captures the object's appearance

[gilded nest]

Here's the issue I'm talking about. The problem makes sense since it samples the texture from world-space, so individual objects placed together appear to have one seamless texture, but of course it causes a weird effect since I need the ground objects to move in-game.

My only idea to fix it, is introduce _WorldPosAnchor into the shader, and in C# have the parent that holds the multiple ground objects to update _WorldPosAnchor accordingly to in-game position. This works, but I'm curious if there's any more elegant solution to this problem.

[hushed silo]

cool thanks! and I'm trying to early exit with this but when I do the next line gives errorShader error in 'Shader Graphs/Master': syntax error: unexpected token 'scaledDepth' at RealityBorder.hlsl(63) (on d3d11)

[harsh marsh]

Trying to draw repeating 1 pixel width lines in a shader.

I can draw a repeating gradient across the y axis like this:

float2 uv = (IN.screenPos.xy / IN.screenPos.w)*30;
float2 l = frac(uv.y);

But I have no idea how to modify this to ensure it will always be 1 pixel line no matter the resolution or whether or not I'm using orthographic or perspective projection. I've tried using smoothstep, step, etc but can never get the lines to only be 1 pixel. It's also important that this line has no anti-aliasing at all.

I tried reading this https://bgolus.medium.com/the-best-darn-grid-shader-yet-727f9278b9d8 but it didn't help.

[hushed silo]

Never mind bypassed it by setting a bool and checking it

[amber saffron]

You can also either :

1. Use the object coordinates for sampling
   or
2. Offset with the object position in shader. You can get it from the ObjectToWorld matrix.

[gilded nest]

Wouldn't these solutions break the seamless texture considering they are multiple separate objects that make up one 'seamless' section? This is the structure.

I think the only solution that works is that the grass sections need to know the parent container object position, but I don't think that's possible in the shader, only with C# code which is what I'm doing currently.

[amber saffron]

Yes, indeed, if you want to have consistancy between objects of a same "group", you need to use c# to set the offset for the materials on the 3 objects.

[gilded nest]

However, I'm not sure how good this will be for performance. I think for each grass section parent in the scene, I need to instantiate a clone material to use for the children sections, to prevent the offset from affecting other unrelated grass sections in the scene.

So I'm thinking maybe I should abandon this idea and try to do something else? Perhaps the best choice is combining all the individual grass sections into one combined mesh, and then I think simply using object position will work?

[amber saffron]

Could also work, but adding a property on the materials shouldn't affect performances since it shouldn't break the batches

[neon mason]

anyone?

[harsh marsh]

still need help.

[harsh marsh]

I'm basing this off of this video. https://www.davidhol.land/articles/3d-pixel-art-rendering/pixel_water_waves.webm. This video is part of a larger blog post and it contains this texture (see image) that he says he used for the white lines in the video. Can anyone help me figure out deciphering the image? The r and g channels seem to encode positional data, while the b and a channels contain cell and cell center to edge distance

I just can't figure out what the r g channels could be used for. Using them for UV coordinates results in a glitchy mess

[hollow juniper]

HDRP here. Stack Lit shader

In the photo you can see the objec behind it (the interior)

for some reason objects unrelated to the car paint material can be seen through it.

Any ideas? I may have set up the material improperly but I am scratching my head at this point

[dusty temple]

anyone know how to fix this

i cant figure out how to combine the tree and the shader and when i put it in the terrain painter it has a black shade when i back up

[grizzled bolt]

Each horizontal line has its origin in the center of the cell in screen space
R and G store the vector to the center
Comparing the UV and RG per fragment can tell you exactly where the center is in screen space
Dot product can tell you how horizontal the vector is, to get a line instead of a circle
Comparing the vector's length to a variable that changes over time can animate the length
Screen space derivatives can ensure the width of the line measures in screen pixels, if necessary

[grizzled bolt]

Sure it has no transparency enabled? Seems quite odd

[hollow juniper]

It does actually. I learned it's a limitation within unity

[grizzled bolt]

Does that mean transparency was the cause of this particular issue
Or transparency is limited but the issue persists even without it?

[harsh marsh]

Not sure how I'm supposed to compare the two values. Do I have to get the world space position of the current pixel?

[harsh marsh]

no idea what I'm doing

float2 rg = waveTex.rg;
float2 uv = waveTexUV; // same UV used by the wave texture
float2 dir = rg - uv;

no clue if this is correct

[grizzled bolt]

There may be an error in my logic

And I don't fully understand what kind of vector the RG channels are storing
Might not be the vector to relative center, exactly
Nevermind I just don't understand vectors suddenly

[harsh marsh]

oh okay

anyway i emailed the creator and his response was "uhh idk i just programmed until it worked" man this is so fun

Is there a way I can convert the RG positions from UV-space, or whatever coordinate space they're in, into a more useful coordinate system?

here's a version of the texture with just the R G channels

[vernal nacelle]

this is the Minecraft of the sky

[harsh marsh]

amazing reply to a 2 month old post

[harsh marsh]

still just not sure what to do

[harsh marsh]

I tried opening up material maker and trying to remake the material to better understand it but I couldn't. Best attempt was this

THey seem to be making the UV coordinates spherical

the uvs seem to be polar coordinates in the original texture?

[keen hearth]

Isn’t what you’re looking for just Voronoi noise?

Sorry I don’t think I understand your question

[hollow juniper]

Oh no, sorry. Transparency was not the issue. The problem occurs when using a stack lit shader

[grizzled bolt]

Not polar coordinates, the channels represent a normalized 2D vector to the center of the cell
Alpha channel has the (one minus) distance to the center

I couldn't figure out the right math to compare the encoded vector to screen position though

[harsh marsh]

was able to get something slightly similar but only using the B and A of the shader

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/183899/how-to-render-a-grid-of-dots-being-exactly-1x1-pixel-wide-using-a-shader

draw a 1 pixel wide grid using the partial derivatives and then use the alpha and blue channel as a mask

Here's what it looks like without masking

float2 dx = ddx(waveUV);
float2 dy = ddy(waveUV);
float invDet = 1.0f/(dx.x*dy.y - dx.y*dy.x);
float2 toX = float2(dy.y, -dy.x) * invDet;
float2 toY = float2(-dx.y, dx.x) * invDet;

float2 fromZero = frac(waveUV + 0.5f) - 0.5f;
float2 transformed = float2(dot(fromZero, toX), dot(fromZero, toY));

float on = 1.0f;
on *= (transformed.y > -0.5f) * (transformed.y <= 0.5f);

return float4(on.xxx,1);

[harsh marsh]

My only issue is that it isn't aligned with the texture

[round geyser]

Hi gang I am trying to make a hitscan gun tracer using shadergraph -> vfxgraph

It would be easiest if I can just scale the output mesh to however long it should be until the shot hits something

But obviously that stretches the texture out and looks ass

is there any way to have it tile instead?

like... repeat the uvs along the length of the mesh

[harsh mirage]

i am using the the unity demo enivonment for hdrp and when running a build i am getting these errors

there is about 24 errors regarding speedtree_branch

Shader error in 'ComputeShader-VertexSetup': undeclared identifier 'varyings' at kernel VertexSetup at SpeedTree_Bark.shadergraph(1286) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(13465) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(13466) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(13473) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(13474) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(closesthit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(14016) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(closesthit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(14017) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(closesthit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(14026) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(closesthit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(14027) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(closesthit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(14027) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(closesthit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(14028) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(closesthit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(17177) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(closesthit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(17187) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(closesthit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(17188) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(closesthit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(17345) (on d3d11)

Shader error in 'HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree_Branch': Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(anyhit). Opcode CalculateLOD not valid in shader model lib_6_3(closesthit). at Assets/TerrainDemoScene_HDRP/ShaderGraphs/SpeedTree_Branch.shadergraph(17346) (on d3d11)

[harsh marsh]

||Rephrasing my question from earlier||

Given this texture, how can I draw lines going through the center of each cell

this is basically what I'm looking for

Some important things to note are:

• Line MUST be 1 pixel wide with with no discontinuities (gaps, etc)
• One line per cell

[kind juniper]

Well, you need to know the closest cell center position/uvs(or at least it's y) in every pixel, which might be difficult depending on how you generate that voronoi.

I guess you could try inferring it from the color of the pixel

[grand jolt]

anyone how to fix this

it says no cameras rendering but obiously the camera is there

[torpid vault]

Hoi hooo
Question for you shader folk. Any good recommendations on the best tutorial / learning series for getting started in HLSL shader coding?
I've found a few but everything I can dig up is either very old, unfinished, or just a single video going over the very basics

[ebon basin]

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

[tacit parcel]

1. this might not be the right channel, try asking in #💻┃unity-talk
2. are you sure the camera is there AND enabled?

[grand jolt]

yes

[tacit parcel]

show us the camera properties

[grand jolt]

ok

nvk fixed it

[still lodge]

Do materials and shader function differently in 2d and 3d

[languid prism]

Hey I'm super new to Unity but I was trying to set up a PCG script and everything and I'm almost done but I've encountered one final snag and I cannot figure out how to deal with it. It's regarding using a blank shader so that my heightmap gradient works. I can send more screenshots if need be.

[ebon basin]

Make sure you're targeting the correct pipeline in the shader setting there

[languid prism]

I believe i am

[languid prism]

I can show you the video I was following along with if youd like

[ebon basin]

Well, unless vertex colors break if the mesh doesn't have those colors, but I would expect it to be at least black

[kind juniper]

Likely targeting a different render pipeline.

[languid prism]

So what would the solution be here then?

[kind juniper]

To check if the shader is targeting the currently active render pipeline

[languid prism]

Sorry I'm still super new. How would i go about that 😭

[kind juniper]

Go through the shader graph manual and learn how to check the targeted rp.
Then go through the unity manual to learn how to configure and confirm render pipeline in the project

[languid prism]

Alright I'll see to it.

[trim forge]

i had some cool shaders but theyre now transparent, anyway to fix?

i thought opening amplify and saving might force a recompile and fix them or something

actually theyre purple not transparent

[keen hearth]

It’s helpful to send a ss of your code, instead of “i have a thing that is broken, what’s wrong?”

Or any context, like “I updated x”

[trim forge]

yeh sorry, its so hard to follow what i did, basically upgraded unity then downgraded

[plain urchin]

Hi all. What's this in shadergraph?

[regal stag]

Redirect node. Double click a wire to add it (or right-click a wire and should be on the list)

[wet frigate]

Hey! We're having an issue with a traffic light model in Unity. Instead of just changing the light color, the whole model changes. We're unsure if it's a shader problem, a scripting issue, or something with UV mapping and FBX export. If anyone has insights, please let me know (or DM me if that's easier). Thanks! If this is the wrong place to ask, I apologize in advance.

[hardy juniper]

are you using a custom shader to mask the light changes (or is it emission?)
Share a screenshot of the material properties

[wet frigate]

The model was created by someone else, I only handle the scripting part.

[hardy juniper]

Look if you are setting the colour property from code, knowing what the material/shader is doing is essential...
by default most included lit/unlit shaders will tint the whole model when you change the color unless you have a shader to mask it OR if its emission with a emission tex.

[wet frigate]

Since I can't DM you, is there another way to share the modeler's notes and the original vs modified version video? These details are important for troubleshooting.

[hardy juniper]

i already said and asked for what I think is needed to help so im good

share whatever you think you need to and someone can reply and help

[harsh marsh]

Voronoi isn't generated a runtime.

[grand jolt]

Im trying to restrict lighting to the individual pixels on my texture rather than screenspace. How would I go about that?

Ive asked chatgpt and it suggested using texel size

Trying to go for this look

[golden haven]

im new to unity and just downloaded a texture from polligon how can i apply it?

[grand jolt]

The image attached is an object using a pixelart texture, but what Id like is to be able to set a flat color or a flat colored texture for the object and then shade based on the texture's pixels to achieve a similar look

[harsh marsh]

https://discussions.unity.com/t/the-quest-for-efficient-per-texel-lighting/700574 sounds like this is what you want

[grand jolt]

Thats exactly what I want, thank you!

[royal hollow]

Hey folks. I am working in Unity 6 and trying to make a color replacing shadergraph for sprites. In the Shadergraph editor everything works great. I have exposed several colors and those correctly swap out the colors in the input texture and the Main Preview looks good. But in the editor it is not changing anything when applied to a spriterenderer. If I make the Range = 1 on one of the color replacers, the Main Preview shows the entire sprite changing to the input selected color, as expected. The sprite in the Editor however, only has some of its pixels change. I've done a Tint shader before which worked fine. I'm not sure what I must be missing here?

Here is how it works quite well in the Shadergraph editor.

In game however, nothing is changing.

[eager folio]

Does it work with other sprites?

Were there any errors in the compiled shader?

[lunar iron]

i created this shader gragh works fine. i created a material out of it and asigned it to a raw image and i get this

in game view

and this in scene mode what am i doing wrong

[royal hollow]

Best I can tell, no it doesn't work with any sprites.

I've been trying to recreate it piece by piece to see if I can sort it out. Short-circuiting the chain of color replacers also isn't working. How do I check for shader compile errors?

Also, would the Main Preview still work if the Shader wasn't capable of compiling?

[eager folio]

Check the inspector for the graph file

[royal hollow]

Looks fine to me?

This isn't working either. Seems too simple, I must be making a dumb mistake?

[hardy juniper]

Dont know if it matters but I name the texture MainTex so its ref becomes _MainTex

[royal hollow]

The ref is _MainTex

So if I make the RANGE=1 on the color replacer, most of the color applies to the entire sprite.

Its like something is just all mixed up with itl

So this makes sense. The Range=1 opens it up to most of the sprite outside of the white areas.

In the game though, its not doing that.

This is an unlit sprite so there shouldn't be any external influences.

[hardy juniper]

fyi vertex colors are applied always to sprite shader graphs

i experienced this bullshit today

[royal hollow]

I'm a total novice in this stuff, how might that be affecting me here?

[hardy juniper]

the sprite colour property is set as the vertex colours, and these vertex colours are multiplied against the colour after your input

[royal hollow]

So I'm not working directly on the texture that gets rendered to the quad? There's a post-step taking place?

[hardy juniper]

if you change the graph to urp unlit does it change?

(change it to transparent after too)

[royal hollow]

Well I began with a URP Unlit Sprite Shadergraph as my base

[regal stag]

I'm assuming the "ArmorOrig" here property is only set in the blackboard? If so, you should just hardcode the value with a Color node, don't use a property. Or at least make it exposed.
Unexposed properties are assumed to be global values and default to zero in scene/game, you would need to set via script with Shader.SetGlobalColor to actually assign a value.

[royal hollow]

Otherwise the fragment would contain quite a bit more things.

Oh. I didn't realize unexposed properties get zero'd out. No wonder.

Damn tutorials.

They mentioned you can choose not to expose them, and it helps making setting them easier by grouping them

[regal stag]

Newer SG versions kinda clarify it by renaming the "Default Value" field to "Preview Value" when set as global

[royal hollow]

That is likely the issue then. Much appreciated.

Yup, totally fixed it. ::shakes fist at the tutorials::

I anticipate doing a few dozen of these, one material replacer for each sprite sheet really. As such, it would help to have them all exposed on the side dock of the blackboard. Is there any performance impact by making them all exposed, even if I don't plan to change most of them?

[hardy juniper]

I do wonder if it will be noticable perf wise doing soo many colour changes per fragment 🤔

[royal hollow]

Yeah I look at old C64 games. The GoldBox games. And how they allowed you to change 12 color fields on each sprite. Granted, it wasn't fully animated or anything. But crazy how much effort it takes to do something similar in a modern engine today.

Thankfully this isn't a real time game so even if there is a performance hit it likely won't be noticeable. Saving memory/space is more important to be honest.

[hardy juniper]

old graphics hardware was tile based and tiles had "pallettes" due to not being able to show many colours
This made color swapping easy as you just changed pallette. Now we have graphics hardware and sdks suited for 3D with per pixel shading with many colours and many textures

A efficient way now would be to use a compute shader to change the textures when needed once

[kind juniper]

So the original texture is generated separately?
If so, then there aren't many options left. All you can do is try to infer the correct positions by color, but that might be extremely unreliable.

[harsh marsh]

Original texture was made in material maker according to original creator of the effect

https://www.davidhol.land/articles/3d-pixel-art-rendering scroll down to the water section

Direct quote:

One night I decided to stay up until 3 AM crafting a method for world-space, view-aligned, horizontal lines for the little animated waves. The texture below is the result of that journey. This was a time where I felt that I was truly doing technical art. Boiling it all down to a texture read, utilising all the color channels for aspects of direction, variance, and timing. I’d like to thank Material Maker for the excellent procedural tooling.

[kind juniper]

Well, this texture alone wouldn't result in the lines that you expect. It's how you use it. And they don't seem to reveal that in that article.

It looks like a normal map,so perhaps they get a dot product with the camera view direction, and perhaps they discard the pixel based on some other channel(alpha?).

[harsh marsh]

it looks like a normal map but it's absolutely NOT a normal map or anything similar

the B channel contains a 'random' value per cell, that's it.

[vast quiver]

i have this shaderforge grabpass shader i got from Github, and i'm trying to use it in VR, it displays fine in Single Pass Instanced and Multipass rendering, but doesn't display properly with Single Pass Stereo rendering. i want to make it compatible with Single Pass Stereo, but i'm not sure how

[shut remnant]

guys can someone tell me how to make the zoom come from the center of the material as it always zoom diagonally

[tacit parcel]

you are 'zooming' the uv, try 'zooming' the vertices instead

uv are in 0-1 range typically. zooming in/out will still result in the same origin (0) so it will be shifted diagonally

well, you can also try to shift the uv to the center (by subtracting with vector2(0.5, 0.5)), do the zoom, and shift back the uv by adding back vector2(0.5, 0.5), at least in theory its possible

[shut remnant]

what exactly the node that cantrol vertices ?

[shut remnant]

i already do that

[harsh marsh]

Was able to recreate the texture in materialmaker. Apparently the R and G channels come from two emboss filters with a 90 degree offset from eachother

Not sure if this is useful for understanding how to get the final effect better

[steel notch]

Does setting a new texture through material property blocks break batching?

[humble geyser]

did you set your offset property in the material to (0.5, 0.5)?

[steel notch]

How often are TextureArrays used?

Haven't really seen much of them.

[humble geyser]

No, I'm pretty sure objects of the same material are batched together

[steel notch]

Yes but let's say I set two different textures to two different material property blocks.

[humble geyser]

Oh, sorry I don't really know much about that

[kind juniper]

Yes, I think textures might break it. Though, it depends on how unity is binding them to the shader. If it's using bindless resources, it might work.
You should just try and see for yourself

[flat hedge]

Hi, I am working with the URP shader graph.
I was wondering if it's possible to somehow not render stuff inside of boxes/colliders etc.
Closest thing I can think of is this feature of the HDRP Fog Volume where you can hide parts of it:
https://youtu.be/gfzExrNySrw?t=220
I am not sure what to look into so I'd appreciate any info I can get.
Thanks in advance and please @ me!

[lunar iron]

hi this is my current shader gragh. can some one please tell me why this wont work on a ui raw image please unless i change my canvas to screen space camera? dont really want to use that option

[hardy juniper]

shader graph shaders don't work with canvas, it just happens to work in world space as the camera can just see the graphics + normal shaders

You can try changing this shader to transparent and disabling depth writing but i doubt it will work.

[regal stag]

Unity 2023.2+ has a Canvas Graph type

[ebon basin]

Did canvas shaders (w/ graph) not work before? I'm pretty sure I had them working on some android project with built-in

[hardy juniper]

in 2022 its not an option and the existing options are just not compatible with overlay rendering.
I just do shaders manually for UI

[dim yoke]

They sort of did but not fully. Any unlit shader sort of works on UI but it doesn't support UI masking at least

[brazen berry]

Hi, does anyone have any idea on how to properly use shaders for FX on UI Elements? I tried using a canvas shader for a glitch effect and as soon as I use stretching my Texture gets cut off because there is no vertex expansion in canvas shaders...

[lunar iron]

Thank i upgraded to unity 2023.2.20f1. what can i change to get this to work please

[hardy juniper]

Change the material format. Not sure if Built In needs to be added as a target to make it show 🤔

[runic oxide]

https://gyazo.com/b89e7f70bcc8f6ac806ce8ddfa72e0af

got this shadergraph for the yellow circle, which serves as some sort of cooldown period. It takes 5 seconds to go from 1 to 0 (full to empty) but instead of staying on 0 it jumps to 1 instantly at the end. I feel like this should be an easy one but I cant figure out why

[steel notch]

I think it might be because the value of Edge1 and Edge2 in that SmoothStep both hit a value of 1 at the end.

[runic oxide]

Im a bit new to this trying to pick it all up, I thought with the one minus it now goes from 1-0 so they both hit a value of 0 at the end

[woeful knot]

Unity 6 :
Is there a good Tutorial to create a Auto Tiling Shader with in input the Albedo, Normal map and Ambient Occlusion map ?

Thanks :D

[amber saffron]

WDYM "auto tiling" ?
If you sample the albedo/normal/AO textures, they will automatically tile depending on the tiling mode set in the texture importer.

[woeful knot]

like the texture auto tile depending on the Gameobject size, instead of needing to scale by hand

[hardy juniper]

tri plannar shaders would do this as they use world units, but you can also just sync scale to the main tex scale on the material

[woeful knot]

ok thx i will try

[harsh marsh]

Still trying to recreate this effect of view-space horizontal lines seen in this video, supposedly done with a single texture fetch and read

this texture was supposedly used "for all aspects" of the effect. Direction of the line, timing, and fading

What I currently know is that the B and A channels are masks used for fading the lines in and out. Still have no idea how the lines are actually drawn

[woeful knot]

Ok, i found something that work well for the ground, but for the walls it go crazy...
Any idea How to fixe it ?
(I can create another shader just for the walls of course)

[flat hedge]

bump

[hardy juniper]

With how R and G are I wonder if you can take their values as a 2d vector and use the dot product vs the 2d dir to camera (on the same plane) and use this to only draw a line in the center where the dot is 0?

My thinking is there must be a reason for there to be some kind of 2d vec in the tex