archived-shaders

[neat orchid]

i.e. time is already too high

[grizzled bolt]

Frac node also might eliminate the overflow issue with time node, but I don't recall for sure

Time is often multiplied to control the speed of time, but that makes it easier to overflow

[neat orchid]

so, to test whether this is true, I could set the shader to use time, then reset the editor.

If it behaves "nicely" for a second, then doesn't, I've got proof that this is how time behaves, at least in shaders?

[grizzled bolt]

Yes
However with un-multiplied time it may take a very long while before it naturally overflow
With multiplication it may be difficult to find the the value that's just close enough to the time threshold that's reasonable to wait for the test

[neat orchid]

I need at at a low value so it'll be fine

thanks anyway

that would explain why time didn't behave the way I expected it to

[snow forge]

Hi all,

I'm really hoping someone will be willing to help me out a little.

I'm trying to extend a free asset (Procedural Terrain Painter).

I've got most of what I need to do except the important thing, which is modifying the shader. 😕 I know nothing of HLSL Shader code (usually use ShaderGraph), so I don't really know where to start.

I'm trying to add in a Latitude modifier, and I know what I need to do, but I have no clue about the syntax.

This is how the shader 'rules' are structured.

Pass
{        
    Name "Slope"
    HLSLPROGRAM
    #pragma vertex vert
    #pragma fragment frag

    fixed4 frag(Varyings i) : SV_Target
    {            
        const float mask = SlopeMask(_Heightmap, i.uv, _MinMaxSlope, _Heightmap_TexelSize.x);

        return lerp(BASE, mask, _Opacity);
    }
    ENDHLSL
}

As for what I need to do.......

-Pass in a min/max value (I know how to do this)
-Pass in a reference empty object (world center as I'm using a floating origin system)
----these two bits could be done in the 'controlling' script I think and then 'actual' world unit values passed in as min/max values.
----Pass in 'actual' world z size in Unity Units
----convert the min/max values to 'actual' unity units?
-check to see if referenceobjectposition + worldsize/2 is between the min/max values and if true, paint the mask

I think that covers it. I may have missed something or gotten my logic wrong.

But, would someone be willing to give me pointers/point me in the right direction as to figuring it out?

Using the above example, it really can't be as simple as

const float mask = LatitudeMask(_Heightmap, i.uv, _MinMaxLatitude, _Heightmap_TexelSize.x);

right? lol.

[steel notch]

I'm making a heat distortion shader. It seems to work but the distance scale appears to change depending on the camera distance. Why does this happen and how can I fix it?

[primal hatch]

Maybe check against this https://youtu.be/CXCyVDEplyM?t=440

[steel notch]

Pretty much what I used to make this.

[urban pumice]

Hi, I'm having a issue with a shadow map shader. I tried adjusting the shadow bias in the directional lighting but it still has a slight edge of light which looks bad :/ How can resolve this type of shadow acne.

{
    SubShader
    {
        Tags { "LightMode" = "ForwardBase" "RenderType"="Opaque" }
        LOD 100

        Pass
        {
            CGPROGRAM
            #pragma vertex vert
            #pragma fragment frag
            #define SHADOWS_SCREEN
            #include "AutoLight.cginc"
            #include "UnityCG.cginc"

            struct appdata
            {
                float4 vertex : POSITION;
            };

            struct v2f
            {
                SHADOW_COORDS(5)
                float4 pos : SV_POSITION;
            };

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

            fixed4 frag (v2f i) : SV_Target
            {
                float3 shadowCoord = i._ShadowCoord.xyz / i._ShadowCoord.w;
                float shadowmap = tex2D(_ShadowMapTexture, shadowCoord.xy);
                return shadowmap;
            }
            ENDCG
        }
    }   FallBack "Diffuse"
}```

[low lichen]

This would be less of an issue if the shader also had shading implemented. A simple Lambert shading would do.

[urban pumice]

thank you I added basic lambert shading like you said.

[mild locust]

Can someone please explain how do i turn of this HRD based gradient and pick normal gradient?
Thanks

[rich tiger]

Is pre-warming shader variant collections the only way to avoid shader variant compilation stutters or is there another method?

[clear lichen]

can someone help me with a shaders on water? it doesnt show any material color

[solid scaffold]

pwease help, I have gotten this error before, forgot how to solve this, I dont know much about hlsl or custom functions.

[regal stag]

The docs explains the format the code should be in : https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@17.2/manual/Custom-Function-Node.html
At a quick glance I can spot :

• Don't return a value, custom functions should be void and use out parameters instead
• Function name in code needs to end in _float/_half to match the Precision set in the graph

[pearl glacier]

Hey, could anyone help me with something? I want to loop running a subgraph (a dynamic number of times). So first question is: Is there a way to do that other than a custom function?
If not: Is there a way to access a subgraph in a custom function?

[regal stag]

Only custom function, and cannot access subgraphs

[pearl glacier]

darn

that's pretty restrictive...

[ocean garnet]

The result of a month of my work on a game project, as a principal artist to define art style, color palettes, post processes + shaders based on Unity 6 render API, called Render Graph.

[stoic wraith]

Hi, i have no experience with shaders but im woundering if this one would fix my issue, Currently i have a main canvas set to screen space camera, which recieves post processing, my issue is the UI Follows the camera but i get flicker with my sprites, my thought was to set the canvas to overlap which stops the flicker but then my UI looks dull, my question is if i set the canvas to overlay can i apply a shader directly to it, to apply saturation and contrast? Sorry for the long Message

Or is there a simple way to just apply contrast and saturation to everything, without the need for post processing?

[dim yoke]

Never heard of such flicker. You should try to identify the reason for that issue rather than trying to make odd workarounds. Might the value of the Plane Distance on the canvas be such that the UI and some other sprites lay on exactlty the same z distance in which case it might be impossible to determine the correct rendering order for those?

[stoic wraith]

Thank you I'll look into this

[stoic wraith]

Fixed my issue by using a camera stack , camera overlay , uses post processing and renders just the ui , main camera renders the world 🌎

[rocky quarry]

whats stencil id for in ui/default?

i was looking for how to make set of objects interact with themself but not with other sets which also use ui/default

[hardy juniper]

I think its the stencil mask id used for masking

[dim yoke]

Might find this useful https://github.com/TwoTailsGames/Unity-Built-in-Shaders/blob/master/DefaultResourcesExtra/UI/UI-Default.shader

[rocky quarry]

yeah i already digged to the source since i tried figure out how i can make group filter for each object

[rocky quarry]

pretty much i just want mask object a with object b, here i have 4 boxes, one is pure white and one is smaller acting as a mask, but i cant repeat it with another box touching it, i wanted be able see both lines clipping through each other but best i can do is only see 1 line if i set same render queue or no lines if higher than transparency

[warm pulsar]

You may be able to use more complex stencil operations

Notably, one of the options is to increment the stencil buffer, rather than just setting it

This lets you count

I use this for a decal shader that's used on a particle system

I count up when hitting a front face and down when hitting a back face

if the result is non-zero, I know that the decal should be drawn on that pixel

I'm not sure if that would help here, though

[rocky quarry]

okay those ids do actually work just i also had to change render queues to very specific number too

thought they dont since different numbers created different mosaics

[quaint grotto]

does shader graph custom node support functions that use a custom struct as long as the inputs match in terms of types and order?

[kind juniper]

If the struct and the functions that use it are gonna be defined properly in the final shader code, sure.

[quaint grotto]

hmm it says it cannot convert to struct so i dont think it does support custom structs in the method signature

have to delcare each input one by one in the method signature

[kind juniper]

What exactly are you trying to do?

[quaint grotto]

void Calculate_float(_FragmentData data, out float3 color)

use a struct like this then i was hoping if my custom node inputs aligned with the struct's layout it would match

but it seems i have to delcare each variable so i end up with a giant method declaration 😦

[kind juniper]

Ah, that wouldn't work in hlsl. Even if you did that in code.

[quaint grotto]

would be nice if unity could change the struct to the full function definition when compiling though

[neat orchid]

OK so I have a trail renderer that's supposed to have a kind of a dripping effect from top to bottom

When I slide it to the right, it works as intended, but when I slide to the left, it flips such that it drips from bottom to top

I'm using UV as bottom-top mask. Any way to make it not flip in the trail renderer component or do I need to fix that in the shader?

[inner lion]

ignore the spaghettification but are node setups like these worth it in order to have better control over the output

or am i compromising performance

[snow forge]

You should have a look at some of the Unity 'official' stuff (demos and the like). What you have there is nothing compared to some of the stuff they have done.

[strange prairie]

I have some ASE shaders with hundreds of nodes. Lags like hell to edit them, still fast at runtime.

You need to do a lot more than this before you’re going to measure a performance impact.

[dim yoke]

The amount of nodes is not concerning yet, I would look much more so on the cost of each node. You don't seem to use any particularly costly nodes, the texture sample might be the most expensive although not anything special and often necessary. If you look at their implementation, some nodes like the procedural noise nodes are really expensive (lot of costly math). In a shader code form (to which shader graphs compile btw) this would be much less daunting looking, that's only some very simple math after all, computers are incredible fast at that.

[inner lion]

thanks for the reassurances, i was always confused about the impact on performance in doing these calculations in runtime.

[inner lion]

looking at cost of each node is a good point. i am not going to be diving deep into shader graph wizardry territory so i would be assuming minimal performance costs of these.

[dim yoke]

In general, the things you should be paying attention to are procedural noises, expensive math (log, powers, trigonometric functions, sqrt), and texture samples. I think partial derivatives (ddx and ddy) can also be comparable to texture samples in terms of performance. All of the basic arithmetics you generally don’t have to worry about. I remember seeing color indications for shader graph nodes corresponding to their expected cost mentioned in the roadmap somewhere but I don’t know whether that feature has landed yet or ever will, would be helpful though

[inner lion]

oh that would be like node timings overlay in blender. that would surely be helpful. thanks for the info tho

[neat orchid]

By the way, you can change the node color to "performance" (or something like that).

It helps you understand how expensive each node is. It will also make you realize things like the multiply mode being cheaper than power, even if you're doing the same thing with it

[snow forge]

Mornin all.

So, working on my terrain shader, and currently it's working great, I have my 'rule masking' set up and working perfectly, but now doing some cleanup and running into a brain fart with my Latitude 'rule mask'

Basically everything is repeated with minimal changes based on world position =>0 and <=0 (Latitude +/-)

The first part is easy Branch node before the One Minus node with a world position check for the predicate, but I'm struggling a bit with the subtract node inputs, could anyone provide a little insight please?

[steel notch]

How do I fade an entire particle system as one group?

Just mess with the material?

[grizzled bolt]

Yes
Unless you mean them to fade also without becoming translucent to each other, then it's a bit trickier

[smoky widget]

Can I somehow get the light position/direction in a shader graph? Or even better, the camera position during the shadow pass

I need the shadows of a billboard to be looking at the shadow camera so that their shadows are properly created

[regal stag]

Like this? #archived-shaders message

[smoky widget]

hahahha lmao, it was me also, and kinda doing the same things XD

Lol, How could I forget that I already tried this??

[snow forge]

Hi all,

I realise this is a long shot, but could anyone help me try and understand what is happening in this HLSL code please? I'm trying but it's a little beyond me atm.

https://hastebin.com/share/evogowotil.cpp

It supposed to be calculating the slope on a terrain, but the guy who wrote it (Free Asset) said this about it.

The slope calculates doesn't accurately represent an angle in degrees, but rather the difference in height at any given point. It is technically incorrect, but I've kept it as is for consistency. Fixing it means breaking everyone's modifier stack.

If I was handling everything manually it wouldn't be an issue, but I'm passing in data from elsewhere using 'real' slope values, so I'm not really how, or even if I can add in a calculation to my code for this part of the shader to behave as I expect it. 😕

[snow forge]

Holy crap, I think I fixed it. lol.

[vocal axle]

how do i make like basic materials

just tryna make a wood grain texture based on my blender one and it ends up looking like 1000 coffee stains

[dim yoke]

Is there some specific reason you are trying to achieve that by using custom shaders? Shaders are far from easy and efficient way to texture objects. If you have a procedural texture setup in blender already, why not just bake the effect into PBR textures and plug them into the default shader/material? Rendering complicated procedural material logic is costly for the performance and therefore baking it is much preferred (also writing the shaders is not trivial).

[vocal axle]

I really thought procedurals would be better than hundreds of different image sheets

I wanna make like accessories and i feel like baking textures for each when they might be swapped later could be taxing

[dim yoke]

In blender that's totally fine but there's no need to try to do that in realtime application, the memory cost of storing textures is significant but generally better than doing everything procedural

[vocal axle]

Alrighty thank you

[dim yoke]

Depends what kind you mean but if you really were to create all of that in a shader, that would become super complicated and expensive. You don't have to generate textures for each conbimination though. You can use a shader that combines the accessories (whatever you mean by that) in one shader but just not generate the materials procedurally. In practise you could have textures as properties like _ShirtTexture, _ShirtMask, PantsTexture,... and then use the mask textures to lerp between the textures. This would allow you to do most of the work on C# side beforehand by swapping the texture references as the player changes the accessories (something like material.SetTexture("_ShirtTexture", newShirt))

[vocal axle]

hmmm, is there a way to retain some of the benefits? like coloring?

like you could grayscale an image and just color it in with a colorize filter but if any part of the texture is even slightly different hue then it feels awfully flat, i feel like i need a hue mask

some parts are different colors or even lack hue

[dim yoke]

I don't think I udnerstand what you mean. You can do however complicated shader effects you like but all I'm saying is that the patterns themselves (like wood or fabric) shouldn't generally be created in the shader but should rather come from prebaked textures

[vocal axle]

if each part of the material is procedural then i can easily color each part differently, but if its combined you need some way to re-separate the different parts of the image

[dim yoke]

wouldn't you use mask textures for separate parts

[vocal axle]

wha

[dim yoke]

If you are using procedural textures, how are you you still going to separate the different parts in the shader? How are you going to know which part should get the shirt texture and which should get the pants texture?

[vocal axle]

well, blender lets you split up the shader and color each part seperately with stuff like colorramps before combining them back together.

[dim yoke]

Yeah but how do you know at which part of the object you are in the shader?

[vocal axle]

crevasse mapping?

[dim yoke]

I don't know what I'm looking at

[vocal axle]

ah forget it lol, ill figure something out.

[dim yoke]

All I'm suggesting is to prefer textures over procedural materials. I cannot think of a realistic situation at which procedural would be better or easier. Only if you need the procedural materials themselves to morph or change in some way dynamically, would I consider using them

[clever dragon]

Hi, I am trying to follow a tutorial on how to make a water shaders.
On this first part they make this depth calculation to pain shallow and deep water different colors. But my issue is that the depth value seems to be constant everywhere on my scene and so it only paints the water a constant color.
My scene is just a terrain with a hole and I placed a plane with this shader to fill this hole

[regal stag]

The raw Screen Position shouldn't be used as an input to the Scene Depth so unconnect that, and check the material type is set to transparent under the graph settings.
Also make sure Depth Texture is enabled on the URP Asset (or for Built-in RP might need to set Camera.depthTextureMode from a C# script)

Since the calculation relies on depth, you also need terrain under the water plane btw

[clever dragon]

Hi! I have my surface type as transparent and I also have my Depth Texture enabled on the URP asset

this is the scene

what should I do about the screen position node though? isn't that node's purpose to calculate the depth of the water area?

I didn't understand very well why I should disconnect it

[regal stag]

The Screen Position -> Split is fine. But you don't want it in the Scene Depth

[clever dragon]

but the lerp in the end outputs a color from what I understood

ah got it

I disconnected the screen position link with the scene depth node
but it still looks the same

[regal stag]

I'd also check the values of the properties on the material. Maybe the colours are both the same or _WaterDepth is 0

[clever dragon]

these are the values I see in the inspector

[regal stag]

0.2 seems quite small, see if other values makes the red appear

[kind juniper]

Wouldn't scene depth need a 0-1 range uvs? And screen position could be in pixels, no?

[clever dragon]

_WaterDepth <= 0 it becomes red
and > 0 becomes blue
my guess is that for some reason the value it is multiplying is very large?

[clever dragon]

wait I don't understand what you mean but the values being out of scale sounds a possibility

[regal stag]

What happens at higher values, like _WaterDepth = 40

[clever dragon]

still blue

i tried setting it all the way to 1000 but it doesn't change the color

I set it to 0.0007 and it is now mixing the colors

[kind juniper]

Ah, I guess the depth is not linear

[clever dragon]

do you have some idea of what a possible fix might be ?

[kind juniper]

Honestly, I'd look up a tutorial. At this point we're just making too many assumptions.

[clever dragon]

I got this error while following this tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILmSkM7yKD4

I am finding it really hard to find good tutorials of unity

[kind juniper]

I'd double check that your nodes use the correct modes/config and you're attaching the correct outputs to the correct inputs.

[clever dragon]

alright! I will try creating a new project too in case for some reason the one I currently have is messed up

[clever dragon]

well it worked now...
However, I have absolute no idea what the issue is in my original project

Thanks dlich and Cyan!

[quaint grotto]

Can some one explain how i use the world normals buffer in URP ? I have SSAO enabled and source set to world normals, in my shader graph (a transprent lit shader) i created a texture2D property and gave it the reference name _CameraNormalsTexture then i sample this with screen position node and i output it to base color - all i get it pure white on my object

frame debugger does show it creating the data

[kind juniper]

I don't think just giving that name to a property would automatically bind the normals texture to the shader.

[quaint grotto]

but isnt it a global thing? so you dont need to bind it to a material

[kind juniper]

There's no such thing as a global thing. Every draw call needs resources bound to it for them to be used in the shaders. Sometimes unity would do it for you, but I'm not sure this is the case.

[quaint grotto]

You can set set global buffers though

i would thought much like depth buffer its globally accessible without binding to a material

[kind juniper]

Anyways, you should look at what textures are bound to that even in the frame debugger.

[kind juniper]

Unity would look at such nodes as depth and bind the resources if a shader graph is using them.

For example, here, you can see that they are doing some config on the C# side to make sure the world normals texture is passed in.
https://discussions.unity.com/t/accessing-normal-texture-in-shader-graph/891823/2
Though, I suspect it might be different in different unity versions.

Here's some mention of where the normals are rendered in deferred rendering:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@13.1/manual/rendering/deferred-rendering-path.html

Honestly, without access to the full source code, this is pretty much a rabbit hole...

Chat gpt suggests that just declaring a property is enough for unity to bind it, however I'm not sure how true it is.

[quaint grotto]

ah i think i got it working

in the properties of the shader graph you have to set the scope to global or it just doesn't load it

[kind juniper]

The normals texture property?

[quaint grotto]

this here you have to set it to global

[kind juniper]

Ah, I see. That's neat.

[quaint grotto]

its hard to find this info in docs strangely i just pressed things to see if it worked until it did lol

[kind juniper]

Yeah. Engines don't usually document this kind of low level interactions very well. With many other engines you can just look at the source code, but unity makes it difficult...

[quaint grotto]

all soon to be likely outdated when they introduce the unified renderer anyway 😄

[kind juniper]

Who knows. Maybe some fundamental things wouldn't change too much.

[kind juniper]

To cover for my previous ignorance, unity indeed binds global resources by property name if they are available.
https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.1/Documentation/Manual/writing-shader-material-properties.html

[strange prairie]

The unified render pipeline has been canceled

[quaint grotto]

since when it was only announced 3 months ago publicly

[strange prairie]

https://discussions.unity.com/t/unified-rendering/1519264/270

[quaint grotto]

that doesn't really say its cancelled

[strange prairie]

It's corporatese for canceled

[snow forge]

Mornin' all.

I was just wondering if any one knew the following.....

I'm looking to integrate these hlsl fuctions into the URP Terrain Shader.

https://pastebin.com/sDrnzYxB

So, is it possible to do? And if so, where should I be looking?

[strange prairie]

Not deprecate SRPs with a unified solution in the short or mid term

A single SRP is still the North Star, but we want to get there iteratively, incrementally building up on URP and HDRP

Basically "might happen some time in the far future but not soon". Current efforts are definitely not going through. 7 will still have URP and HDRP. Possibly with built-in as a hidden option.

[quaint grotto]

interesting

[mild locust]

How can i set a gradient type from C# for a shader graph based shader. really confused , please advise

[regal stag]

Gradient can't be exposed. If you need to control it from C# you need to use Color properties & Lerp instead, or a Texture property & Sample Texture 2D, then can pass the gradient in texture form.

[proud hemlock]

How does Material Quality keywords work in shader graph? Is it just a enum and I have to set it's value manually through script or there's a way to make it change automatically depending on game quality or somehing? (I am using Unity 6.1.9, lastest URP and ShaderGraph)

[regal stag]

See very bottom of this page : https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@17.0/manual/Keywords.html

[proud hemlock]

Oh thank you!

[mild locust]

Thanks for your prompt reply. I’m new to shaders, so I’d like to know if gradient support will ever be added in your opinion. If not, should I remove the Gradient Node and Gradient Sample from my Shader Graph and switch to using a Texture Sample instead?

[steel notch]

Is there anything wrong with giving the Sprite Renderer an opaque material?

[hardy juniper]

you may get depth issues if writing is left on but its probably fine otherwise

[steel notch]

Well it's an opaque object now. It's going to render like any old opaque object.

[dim yoke]

Should only be an issue if you have sprites at the same plane potentially causing z fighting

[grizzled bolt]

No 2D sorting due to being opaque, and no tangents due to being a sprite renderer so normal maps won't display correctly half of the time

[fervent tapir]

so im trying to write shader code for unity and i've been trying to use some extensions to hopefully give more info about some stuff but it does nothing, i am using unity built-in render pipeline, 2021.3

i've been looking for any decent extension

that would atleast give info on some of the functions

shadeview for example, the page for it says it does display some info if you hover over with the mouse

assuming there is anything like this at all for unity .shader files

another question, is HLSL only avaliable on URP?

[twilit grotto]

Hlsl is there in BIRP too. Idk about hdrp.

It probably is.

Like 99% sure

[fervent tapir]

my only background in shaders is GLSL/godot and wanted to create retro graphics but the godot shaders r bit limiting

[steel notch]

With vertex streams is there any way to reference actual properties in the shader? Or do you just have to be careful with how you pack the UVs.

[lyric hill]

ngl if unity's macros were documented it would make things so much simpler

Also fellas, why is post processing through code done using custom renderer?

[kind juniper]

Might want to provide some context to that question. For example, documentation page.

[timid verge]

I have a particle system that has mesh particles. These meshes have vertex colors that I want to preserve and have be the color of each mesh particle (each particle type has a different vertex color set)

I have a simple shadergraph that passes vertex color into the color output. If I put this shader on a Material and apply it to a mesh renderer attached to a filter with the mesh i want in my particle system, the vertex color comes through fine

but if I put the same mesh, and the same material into a particle system, the vertex colors are all neon green/blue instead of brown and tan.

I've tried just about every setting on the particle system to get it to 'not' touch the vertex colors, to no avail. It seems I must be missing something rather basic or are particle system just not built for meshes that supply their own vertex colors?

[quaint grotto]

what am i not understanding here, i made a texture its jet black with a white + symbol.

i sample the texture and put the output into emissive... base color of the object is red, why is the black part of the texture being used as emissive? shouldn't 0,0,0 be no emissive?

i don't know if it matters but my shader is urp, lit and set to transparent. i just want the white part to show in emissive, the black parts should show the underlying color of the object

[snow forge]

If I'm understanding correctly, plug the rbga output of your SampleTexture2D into the Alpha (I think)

[quaint grotto]

into alpha?

[snow forge]

Can you show your graph?

[snow forge]

Sorry, think I misunderstood what you meant. No need to set your shader to transparent

[quaint grotto]

i need it to be transparent though i want the black to be no emission

im not home at the moment to check it so will report back later

[snow forge]

Yeah, look above. the black has no emission. It's the 'base' colour.

[quaint grotto]

yeah but as you can see in my picture - that isn't what occurs

i have similar setup as yours except i use scene color node in to base color

[snow forge]

Okay. I've never used that node tbh, so no clue what it does 😕

Just did a quick test, and it outputs black, so it's using that as the base colour.

[quaint grotto]

what do you mean

its using the emissive as the base color?

[snow forge]

No, it's using solid black colour as the base colour.

When you can add a preview node to the output of the Scene Colour node.

[quaint grotto]

can you show your setup so i can compare it to mine

[quaint grotto]

can you set yours to transparent shader

and put scene color as your base color

see if that works

[snow forge]

1 sec

as transparent

Yeah, looks to work.

For this one I changed my light colour, and the colour change filters through.

[quaint grotto]

hm interesting

ill have to look into that again later

[deep ridge]

How do I fix it?

[strange prairie]

Fix what?

[deep ridge]

the colour/texture issue?

that rainbow area.

[strange prairie]

What's wrong with it?

[deep ridge]

well, it is peculiar!
odd!

makes the portal looks dirty!

[strange prairie]

I think emissive would be a good thing to use here. Right now it's shadowed and IMO it'd make more sense if the portal kinda glows

[tacit parcel]

either something is wrong with the texture or uv mapping. I kind of doubt its shader problem

[deep ridge]

yes, I do plan it to make it glow but not now. In the future.
And only when it's night time.

[deep ridge]

somebody said it is, so I am here.

[strange prairie]

Try the emissive anyway

[deep ridge]

It will fix it?
I think it will make the rainbow part glow as well.

[hard moss]

anyone knows whats the name of the tiling and offset properties in the tesselationLit shader

[quaint grotto]

for some reason every time i click a material asset or click a game object - unity compiles a shader again its driving me crazy and slowing me down - why is it doing it all the time

another issue i have noticed is this: my textures in my material go black but in the asset folder they are correct. i have to refresh my asset folder for it to fix it, its happened a few times now

[warm gate]

Does anyone know how to achieve this effect with the eyebrows and eyes visible under the hair? I've been searching nonstop for an answer but couldn't find anything. Some people say it is transparency, but if that is so, how do they get only the eyebrows and eyes visible but not the face?

[pearl glacier]

at least in this case it looks like transparency to me...

I've seen similar effects using stencils before...

but in this case I'd assume it's just adjusting the transparency when the hair is between the camera and the eyes like you'd do with objects blocking the camera

[tacit parcel]

could be rendered twice, one with depth test LessEqual and one with Greater, although stencil might still be needed to prevent the eye & eybrow from appearing on other objects

[warm gate]

Oh ok. That method would probably be too expensive for the game I am working on

Because of having to render these objects twice per player

[pearl glacier]

I've got a weird one. So I set a property in my shader graph to default to 16. It's not exposed. In the shader graph it works fine but in the actual game it doesn't work, it seems to be set to something closer to 0. If I change the declaration override to per instance it works but on global it has the same issue. It's not exposed so nothing is changing it, why is it defaulting to the wrong number?

works as a workaround to just set it to the same number without the property but I don't understand why this was an issue

not sure what number it was showing up as but it was definitely less than 0.004

but I feel like 0 would give different issues since I was dividing by it...

[regal stag]

Non-exposed properties aren't serialised anywhere, so the value is 0 until you set it from code via Shader.SetGlobalX functions.
(Newer versions of shadergraph make this a bit clearer, with a scope dropdown instead - Local vs Global, with the latter renaming the field to "Preview Value" instead)

[snow forge]

Hey @regal stag please forgive the ping, but I was looking into loops again in ShaderGraph/CustomNode and just a quick question, do you think it would be possible to keep the loop in the c# and use Enum nodes? Or am I thinking wrongly about how Enum nodes work? 😕

[pearl kraken]

Hi everyone,
We’ve created #1390346776804069396 to better organize and display your posts, and to thread any discussions.
This channel will remain here briefly so you have time to move posts to the forum channel, or keep them visible here in the interim.

[compact dawn]

Hey, I need a help with compute shaders. I want to use them in a little project to simply change texture colors. I used to work with texture2D and setPixel/Apply methods. So to render it to the screen I just created sprite from a texture. Now with renderTexture it's not that simple. So Is there any way to do that ?

[lone thunder]

@compact dawn you can change the colour of a texture inside the frag method of a shader

if you can provide specifics I can be a bit more help

[compact dawn]

So basically I'm simulating simple pixel physics on cpu side and wanted to hand over rendering to gpu, just to get rid of setpixel and apply methods. I'm passing texture and colors array for each pixel to compute shader and it changes color of each pixel on the texture based on colors array

[lone thunder]

....not sure I entirely follow, can I see the code? Might help (of the shader)

[compact dawn]

RWTexture2D<float4> Result;
RWStructuredBuffer<float4> colors;
[numthreads(32,32,1)]
void CSMain (uint3 id : SV_DispatchThreadID)
{
    Result[id.xy] = colors[id.x + id.y * 1024];
}``` texture resolution is 1024x1024

[lone thunder]

ok I think I get it

so what is it about this that's not working?

[compact dawn]

my problem is rendering it to the game. I tried changing texture of a cube or creating canvas with image but any of those ideas doesn't seems right

Maybe using compute shader here is not good idea, but i just wanted to get rid of texture2D methods.

[lone thunder]

i mean this kind of sounds like a regular fragment shader would be fine

a compute shader doesn't operate like a traditional one, strictly speaking

what's wrong with the original fragment shader?

[compact dawn]

Umm, I didn't try it in this case

[lone thunder]

then just write it as a fragment shader

if you don't know why you're using a compute shader then don't use one

its asking for trouble

[compact dawn]

Yeah, it's probably better for more complex problems. Thanks for help

[lone thunder]

Compute shaders are programs that run on the graphics card, outside of the normal rendering pipeline. They can be used for massively parallel GPGPU algorithms, or to accelerate parts of game rendering.

TL;DR not this

and no worries 😄

[safe whale]

Hey, I'm just starting out. Can someone explain me how UnpackNormals work? 😃

[lone thunder]

you mean the method?

or?

[safe whale]

The method. 😃

I don't really understand the concept of packed normals.

[lone thunder]

ok

well

that's important to get

Unity stores normal maps in a format where only the G and A channels are used - i.e. a packed normal

it then reconstructs the x from the A channel, y from the G channel, the z value from x and y, and the space from 0 - 1 to -1 - +1

UnpackNormal() does all the maths to unpack it for you

that's the gist anyway

[safe whale]

I think I understand most of it, so 'w' would be a predetermined range?

[lone thunder]

w in the packed normal you mean?

[safe whale]

yes!

Or is it just xyz?

[lone thunder]

honestly not too sure, I'm not that deep into shaders yet

I'm in the middle of changing disciplines, so i'm just kind of sharing what I know

albeit kind of limited

[safe whale]

No worries, I'm the same tbh. xD

[whole citrus]

Whats great about shaders though is that you can download the source of a lot of this stuff.

[safe whale]

I'll take a look on the web for now. Thanks for explaining me how normals are packed. 😃

[lone thunder]

this is true

and no worries

[safe whale]

Yup, @whole citrus. I can download but I'm really looking forward to understand it. 😄

Thanks for the code, btw!

[ashen sand]

Anyone know how strict these restrictions actually are? https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Rendering.BlendOp.html No idea how up to date any of this is

Most of them are marked D3D11.1 only but they allude to there being equivalents on supporting OGL hardware
So I have no idea how this crosscompiles
Also I take it DX12 didn't pull them out but Unity suggests that it's only implemented for that version
Basically I need to use a LogicalOR blend and have it work on modern PC/Mac/Linux hardware

[whole citrus]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/d3d11_1/ne-d3d11_1-d3d11_logic_op

You could check if there are other equivalents

[ashen sand]

There are https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/d3d12/ne-d3d12-d3d12_logic_op

I just don't know how Unity handles any of them

There are also similar ops for OGL

[marsh fern]

I made a thing using Compute Shaders - Realtime 2D Fast Fourier Transform https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/adqd9o/realtime_2d_fast_fourier_transform_using_compute/

here's the mp4

im still in the process of porting it to iOS

[rustic dragon]

@marsh fern nice, computer shaders are crazy, had a project of my own where I was making a material/texture editor in unity with a bunch of photoshop filters and blend modes, it was amazing how much faster it was than doing the math on the cpu

I am currently looking for a computer shader way of doing flood fills and things like cellular automata, stuff that requires more of an ordered sequence of events, I found one but the code was hidden behind a paywall

[marsh fern]

It took a while for me to think in terms of compute shaders. Basically, i implemented FFT in 3 ways. C++ serial, C++ parallel on CPU threads, Unity3D C# + DirectCompute

[rustic dragon]

here is the toy I was making https://vimeo.com/274833522

later I got height to normal working and stuff like that, convolution kernels working too

[fervent tinsel]

@still orbit nice to see you on board here too 😃 I try to not pester you too much but I do have one really specific question since you work on shader graph: is the renaming of sub graphs output pins on the table? 😄

this is a huge painpoint when working with subgraphs with lots of outputs, as you can't label what is what

[fervent tinsel]

you can do it already?

[still orbit]

its not released yet

I did it last week

[fervent tinsel]

ah, cool, I posted about this on the forums a while ago as well but nice that it's indeed on the table 😃

and thank you for swift reply 😄

[still orbit]

i was actually posting something directly related in another channel at the exact same time...

[fervent tinsel]

heh, I actually wondered if this should go here or in #archived-hdrp

[still orbit]

crosspost. This is the other side of the same work.

[fervent tinsel]

I do have lots of other painpoints with SG, but that's like most glaring one when it comes to sub graphs

this was my post about it https://forum.unity.com/threads/feedback-wanted-shader-graph.511960/page-33#post-3934549

[still orbit]

ah yea, stuff gets buried i nthat thread xD

[fervent tinsel]

but like, stuff like this really bug me:

if you want to use subgraph for reusable code, it's not really easy to expose things from it directly

you end up doing a ton of duplicate work on it

it's totally possible I miss some obvious way to use it smarter

I'm pretty noob when it comes to SG

oh and that custom node thing is great

while it's nice to have something on text editor, if you just have few lines of shader code, it's way easier to put it in such node instead (like UE4 materials and ASE do)

[still orbit]

yea its nice if you just want a relatively simple expression

ok read your post, some good points.

Ill discuss it with the team, we are doing some refactoring of sub graph stuff atm.

[fervent tinsel]

the collapse ref thing seems like straight up bug

others are just design related things

like, if you have same ref using two wires to nodes that you collapse, you get two inputs on the new sub graph for it

instead of one like in the thing you collapsed

[still orbit]

yea, thats just a bug

that i hadnt noticed...

[fervent tinsel]

people probably don't do that much 😄

[still orbit]

we appreciate bug reports for stuff like that fyi 😛

[fervent tinsel]

but I'm good at breaking things

yeah I know 😄

I've reported some bugs on betas, not much for SRPs and related as they've been pretty WIP state and moving around much

but I know SG is already marked out of preview on 2019.1 so I guess I should do that more now

[still orbit]

yes please, we know theres a lot to do adding functionality and improving workflow. But we are aiming to get what we have to be stable for 19.1

[fervent tinsel]

yeah, that's totally understandable

[steel notch]

when you notice a thing was made by a Unity Staff member

and that means it's likely ACTUALLY going to be a part of Unity >_>

[fervent tinsel]

yeah, I love these insider peeks

I mean, I do dig up the Unity git changes a lot, especially the SRP repo to know what's going on there but you still miss a lot + some things don't immediately show up there

[steel notch]

now you get to talk to them directly

and call them bad when they do a goof

[fervent tinsel]

well, I hope it's a lasting thing and people will not bug them too much to scare them away

most of the unity staff here atm are evangelists and community managers, actual devs are smaller portion of that list atm

[fading zealot]

Just bother @hardy pier about it , he loves being tagged by people to solve issues in code he probably didn't write 😄

[steel notch]

Eventually it becomes a meme where Matt is the reason behind every Unity bug

[hardy pier]

It's the dream 😄

[hoary forge]

You know how games cull models not visible to the screen? Is it possible to do the same thing with individual polygons too? For instance, how Crash Bandicoot culls hidden objects like crates, only through shaders?

[blissful atlas]

What do you want to cull by?

Unity has lots of built-in culling, like frustum culling, distance culling with LODs, occlusion culling with Umbra etc

[hoary forge]

@blissful atlas I'm not sure which one, but I do know it applies to objects hidden behind others, and that every individual polygon would be visible or disappear, and not as a single object.

[blissful atlas]

Not sure how that would be done on modern hardware, as now that we have lots of triangles to render, that type of culling could end up being more expensive than just rendering it

It'll still be Z-rejected and such!

Depending on game, triangle density and artstyle of course

[lone thunder]

based on my understanding of shaders, its doable

but I don't recommend it

you might end up sacrificing parallelism or something

[hoary forge]

It wouldn't be performance-friendly?

[blissful atlas]

As usual it depends on your case

But generally it seems like a bad idea from what I can tell

Given how dense games are with triangles these days

So if you have per-triangle culling, that in and of itself would be extremely expensive

You might be able to do something like bounding box occlusion culling and whatnot, but, that'd probably be more of a CPU solution

[lone thunder]

@hoary forge well it sounds like it might need a condition

which would kill parallelism

immediately making it loads more expensive

[plucky bone]

Depends if you can discard it early enough

[still orbit]

Sounds like you're talking about hardware occlusion culling?

Very performant if your HW supports it

[whole citrus]

So we're using shader variants and assetbundles, but this makes building extremely slow. I have no idea what its doing either, it looks to me like its adding this shader and all its variant in each and every assetbundle. Eventhough we've assigned it specifically to one.

https://gfycat.com/HappyGreatCoelacanth

This goes on for hours, does anyone have a clue on how to convince the build system to hurry up already? Maybe the new addressables would help here...

[elder briar]

hi mates! I have a question: I'm trying the hdrp and I have a question: I import an assetbundle created with 2017.x and it imports, but I wish replace the materials with standard shader to the HDRenderPipeline/Lit

how can I do this? thanks

[frigid zinc]

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

of course you'll still have to convert any textures to the new channel mappings yourself

[fervent tinsel]

there's barely any new channel mappings tho

the mask texture has small change

[frigid zinc]

it's substantially different

[fervent tinsel]

it's almost identical

[frigid zinc]

they compacted a lot compared to legacy

[fervent tinsel]

it's just not as obvious it is, as the old standard shader let you input different textures to different effects

but it was designed with same channel mapping in mind

[frigid zinc]

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/09/24/the-high-definition-render-pipeline-getting-started-guide-for-artists/

[fervent tinsel]

this has the mapping too https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/wiki/lit-shader

[frigid zinc]

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

[fervent tinsel]

yeah, like mentioned, mask has small difference

but the other textures are same

[frigid zinc]

so metallic, AO and detail are all now combined

[fervent tinsel]

for basic inputs

[elder briar]

thanks, but I need to do this witout recreating the assetbundle

[frigid zinc]

anyway, just making you aware, not everyone is 😃

[fervent tinsel]

yeah, I'm doing the same, most don't realize the mapping is almost same

once sec

[frigid zinc]

well almost the same != the same

there are difference to explore

[fervent tinsel]

albedo 1:1 same

[frigid zinc]

not to mention the implementation of PBR and BDRF have changed

so really it's best to remaster the textures completely for best effect

but I know most won't be doing that

[fervent tinsel]

metallic red, smoothness alpha, just like on HD Lit

[frigid zinc]

yes, but i'fe youre importing assets that use a seperate AO or detail map, you need to know it's now merged

[fervent tinsel]

occlusion green just like on HD Lit

well but why would you

that would be just wasting the rest of the channels for that texture

this is designed to be packed in single file

[frigid zinc]

you're assuming everyone knew they could put AO in the green channel of the metallic

i guarantee you very few did

if you've ever bought anything off the asset store, nobody does it this way

[fervent tinsel]

yeah but it doesn't change that it's the same packing except the one channel diff on mask texture 😃

[frigid zinc]

doesn't change the fact there's a differnce to be made aware of either 😃

[fervent tinsel]

in HD Lit, the mask goes to blue channel where in old standard it goes to alpha

but most dont use detail mask

also, I'm not totally convinced on the PBR texture reauthoring

the materials people use are prepared using certain safe values for PBR people will not just start redoing all that

if anything, they'd just make custom shaders that do the tweaks rather

the whole point on PBR materials is that they have data setup specifically, every tool we have now for this uses this info

[frigid zinc]

right but unity's standard pipeline had several implementation bugs for PBR. so it wasn't standard.

they fixed those bugs in LWRP/HDRP so there' are now differences

could be minor, but it really depends on your level of anal retentitiveness 😛

[fervent tinsel]

well, main issue on standard is the shadow falloff

they actually fixed that on baked shadows now if you use progressive lightmapper

but dynamic shadows are still off

but yeah, there's definitely a visual difference

[frigid zinc]

yeah. I saw a thread at Allegorithmic once where they talked about the problems with Unity's implementation, there were a few problems with the BDRF

but i'm not even sure i could find that thread again

[fervent tinsel]

there's been issues with the old Unity spec gloss approach

but I don't think many use it anymore

I could actually remember the problematic one wrong

it's been a long time since I've looked the old renderer closer

[frigid zinc]

yeah, at one time Unity didn't use GGX but that was fixed in 5.3

[fervent tinsel]

but I do remember there being some cases where Allegorithmic, UE4 and Unity all rendered some case all differently

[frigid zinc]

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/01/25/ggx-in-unity-5-3/

but even their implementation of GGX was a bit off

[fervent tinsel]

at least we now got live link on painter (if one actually uses painter for texturing)

[frigid zinc]

yeah

[fervent tinsel]

I don't have faintest idea if that works on HDRP tho 😄

like, I don't know if it forces the materials too

[frigid zinc]

i have to confess i haven't tried it either

[fervent tinsel]

and knowing Allegorithmic, they probably don't stress direct HDRP support until its out of the beta at the end of this year or next year

[frigid zinc]

yep. That's really the main reason i've not done more than toyed with HDRP. i want to see it finalized first

[uncut karma]

Substance works with hdrp, just need to have the pack/mask map setup in the sbsar as an output, same as when exporting textures

[mental sentinel]

our artist said it wasn't working with HDRP 🤔 maybe the shader part is not updated with the HDRPLit?

same for Houdini, it kinda works, but with some workarounds

do you guys have any experience with this? https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SparseTextures.html

I would like to know if I can use them as a big render texture for a massive world (2500x2500units)

[viral nebula]

Anyone got experience writing text shaders? i am trying to make a simple one for my UI that inverts the colors based on what's under it. Already have it working on sprites. but for text it just renders it black

i assume im missing something simple

[mental sentinel]

I always uses Amplify Shader Editor, which is capable of making UI shader. Have you look on built-in UI shaders? It might be a good start point.

[frigid zinc]

Yes, pretty sure that's what Sparse textures is for.

it's basically the same idea Tech5/Tech6 engine uses, where the whole level is textured with one very huge texture.

I've always been a fan of Id's Megatexture tech, i didn't know Unity had added something similar.

[mental sentinel]

good to know, will try to do something with it, thanks !

[frigid zinc]

i don't know if it would be good for large open world scenes though, if there is a potential for most of the world to be seen at once.

Tech5 handled it by aggressively mip-mapping using a Quad Tree lookup table.

but I don't know how fancy Unity's implementation is.

i'll have to play with it myself 😃

[mental sentinel]

I want something like a range of 50/100 units of precision, above that I don't mind losing my data and anyway LOD objects will not use it.

[still orbit]

It's used prinarily for a terrain texturing impelmentation, which is also a quad tree and doing the same thing

But obviously it has other use cases :)

[coral otter]

Hello there. Does someone know a good stereoscopic mirror shader ? The one i bought is all broken when i resize my character camera to fit my models

[fervent tinsel]

huh, I didn't know Unity supported those sparse textures

when did that get added?

[whole citrus]

2017 https://docs.unity3d.com/2017.1/Documentation/Manual/SparseTextures.html

[fervent tinsel]

must have forgotten they added that, I didn't use much Unity 5 cycle but did use more Unity from 2017.1 again

[blissful atlas]

Anyone know why infinitely thin meshes still cast a thin shadow?

As in, the triangles have zero area

Yet there's shadow being cast

I could solve it in a few ways, just curious as for why that is a thing!

[modern tangle]

Maybe because shadowmap resolution is low and mesh not enough thin?

Its just version, I dont know correct answer 😃

[blissful atlas]

Each triangle has 0 area, which is pretty darn thin in my book 😄

But! I noticed a thing

[modern tangle]

if triangles have 0 area move it in some "far far away" 😃

[blissful atlas]

Haha

So, research results

If I used a fallback of one of Unity's shaders, the shadow pass is borrowed, and then it was visible, but not when I let Shader Forge generate a custom shadow pass! In the custom shadow pass it supports going so thin that it is invisible

I'm guessing Unity's shadow pass may have some offsets based on normals or something similar

Whereas the custom one doesn't touch the verts at all

[modern tangle]

Hm good point. Unity shadow passes its tricky thing 😃

Maybe some biases settings of light source make changes?

Especially normal bias

[blissful atlas]

Seems likely yeah

This mesh is a bit of a special case, so it might be good to let it be unaffected by the bias settings

Not every day you collapse triangles into 0 area intentionally, hehe

[modern tangle]

I think that bias its "correction" aproach and some times its not correct 😃

Some time ago Unity use only distance bias as I remember...

[safe whale]

Hey guys, can anyone explain me a basic thing? 😃

What's happening here:
dot(s.Normal, lightDir);

Is it multiplying 2 vectors?

*2 Vector3's

Nvm, just found out. 😃

[modern tangle]

its basic algebra operation...

[blissful atlas]

It's lambert shading! In shader/lighting terms

Basically it's 1 when the light vector and the normal vector are pointing in the same direction

0 when they are perpendicular

-1 when they point in opposite directions

For shading purposes you usually want to do max(0, dot(N,L)) to clamp all negative values to 0

Which results in something like this

@safe whale Also sorry for potentially overexplaining, haha

[safe whale]

Thanks, @blissful atlas ! 😃 No need to say sorry.

Actually, I did understand that but...

I didn't understand the math behind it. How does it return a value from -1 to 1 by multiplying 2 vectors?

[blissful atlas]

Mathematically, dot(a, b) is a.x × b.x + a.y × b.y + a.z × b.z

[safe whale]

Ok, but what if the result is greater than 1?

[blissful atlas]

Then the vectors aren't normalized

For the shader rules I mentioned above with the range -1 to 1, they have to both be normalized

[safe whale]

I think I get it. 😃

[blissful atlas]

Yay dot products!

[safe whale]

Thanks for being so patient. 🙏

[blissful atlas]

No worries

[safe whale]

Just sent you a friend request if that's ok! 😄 I met Jenny while I was in Sweden. I've been wanting to play your game. 😃

@blissful atlas

[blissful atlas]

Oh hey, neat!

Well, the game exists, feel free to play whenever 😃

[safe whale]

Yup, I just need to upgrade my VR PC to run it. Last time I tried I couldn't go past the main menu screen for some reason.

But even there the material shading is super cool. Amazing job. 😃

[blissful atlas]

Haha, thanks~

[tame topaz]

Quick (hopefully) question about shaders. Given a random value (0-1), what would be the theory behind masking out a texture with only that value?

[amber saffron]

@tame topaz That would require more explanation of what you would like to achieve, and what your mean by "masking"

[tame topaz]

Sure. I'm using Amplify for this, but here's the idea:

1. I've created a random range value node which outputs a number from 0-1 based on a seed

2. I have a tiling texture of hexagons with various grey values

3. Given the output of the random value node, I want to mask the hexagons such that only the ones who's grey value is equal to the random value are visible

[blissful atlas]

step(a,b) would give you a mask

[amber saffron]

Ugh, that's a tough one. Possible, but not easy...
Easy solution would be to have an other map with the hex centers UV coord, so you can use it to check the noise corresponding value, to mask the hex

[blissful atlas]

Wait is the noise per fragment or per mesh?

[amber saffron]

All in fragment, and hex is not a mesh, but a hex tiling texture on a (quad?) mesh

[blissful atlas]

Just wondered if it was a value per instance of mesh, not the tiles

[amber saffron]

oh wait, I'm dumb

Just use a step node 😄

I tough the random value wasn't uniform.
For a uniform value, use step to make your mask. It take two input : value and threshold. if value>thresh, result = 1, else 0

[tame topaz]

:D

Right, so I thought about using step, but what I understand (I'm terrible at shaders), the threshold value is the minimum.

In the case where the output is 0.5f, I only want hexagons of exactly 0.5f grey to appear. Step would make all hexagons of 0.5f-1f to appear?

[amber saffron]

I missed this equal part ... Well, what you need (for easy node setup) is a comparison. Compare the two values, and if equal, return 1

[tame topaz]

Ugh, right, you can do IF statements. >.<

It's still being a bit funky, but I don't know if it's just my texture. We sort of just took a low res one off the internet for testing.

[amber saffron]

I hope it works fine, 'cause that gif only shows the hexagons when the input is 1 ^^

[tame topaz]

No, that's what's happening. It's only showing hexagons on value = 1. But I don't know if that's because my texture is crappy (not sure why though). Logically, what you explained makes sense though. I'll keep tinkering!

[amber saffron]

Wild guess : when scrobling, you're missing the exact grey values

isn't there something like an epsilon setting for the comparison, to have some threshold ?

Else, you have to do it by hand : step( abs( A - B ) + epsilon , 0 )

[tame topaz]

Ah yeah, you're totally right

So there is no epsilon in Amplify that I know. Technically I guess I could do all these calculations in a script and feed it in. Alternatively, we can just make a lookup texture of all the shades used in our hexagon texture. It's pretty hacky, but at least it would work. lol

Yeah I think that's what we'll do for now, just to get it working. Thanks for the help Remy! 😄

[regal stag]

If there's no epsilon can't you just use a small float value like 0.01 or 0.1 or something

[tame topaz]

Maybe? I'll try it out. But we're essentially comparing floats which is like, the thing you're never supposed to do. >.< Giving it a shot now.

[amber saffron]

My texture is even crapier than yours, but this should work

[still orbit]

Should use derivatives instead of step to get rid of the aliasing :)

(if you don't need this in vertex shaders)

[tame topaz]

It's beautiful, in an ugly sort of way. 😅

[amber saffron]

@still orbit But derivatives would need a sort of distance field from the hexagons, right ?

[still orbit]

I suppose, generate them from distance fields instead :P

[amber saffron]

Depending on what's the goal, I think ddx/ddy is overkill here 😃

[steel notch]

https://gyazo.com/c63681ea25029a3d4d077c3328993967

so I've got this little guy here
and I want his "ears" to look like they slowly dissolve into those particles
how would I go about achieving this?
or at the least I want them to have a whispy effect at the tip

[desert orbit]

You could emit particles in the shapes of ears.

[still orbit]

@amber saffron neverrrr 😛

[desert orbit]

@steel notch Something like this...

[steel notch]

@desert orbit Hmmm, this is true but I would like them to sort of stay solid at the base :/

[desert orbit]

Could have several layers, begin with solid object, some cover emitter (for the transition) , then higher more loose emitter

[steel notch]

I could do something ridiculously complex just for the sake of some cool looking ears/antenna things 😛

in all honesty though I kinda want to learn how to create a "Whispy" effect anyway just for things in general

1 moment let me try to find an example

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6y0rUnY4TU

[tame topaz]

Would trail renderers work in this case?

[steel notch]

Idk >_>

[desert orbit]

For the wispyness it could work. For more particle effect ideas I always like to browse this asset. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/tutorial-projects/unity-particle-pack-127325

[steel notch]

pretty sure I have this

(also the gas effects are a bit weak but the rest are good just saying)

if you could try to break down that whispy effect though, I'd really appreciate it

visuals is a very "black magic" realm for me

[desert orbit]

Yea, I often use their setting as a starting point and work to how I need it to look.

[steel notch]

I'll give those systems a look though

see how stuff like that is put together

[sly trout]

hello! does anyone knows if there is documentation to implement unity's "wind" in custom shaders?

[obtuse lion]

Hey @sly trout unfortunately, no.

It's a feature that has never had proper scripting support.

[sly trout]

[obtuse lion]

including on shader scripting; as far as I know, the feature requires custom shader variables which are injected by the tree and terrain system when those components are attached only.

HOWEVER, I'll do you a favour - the system is infact quite simple! 😃

[sly trout]

woah!!

[obtuse lion]

The algorithm they use is very straight forward - it's two 1D Perlin Noise functions (or similar, they might be using Simplex) per Wind Zone in the scene.

The algorithm roughly speaking looks like this:

sum wind = Vector3.zero; (or float3(0,0,0), your pick...)
foreach wind zone
wind += directionOfWind * (noise(freq * position) * magnitude) * (noise(freq * position) * magnitude) * falloff (if applicable)
end

[sly trout]

awesome!

[obtuse lion]

The first noise is the normal noise frequency; the second is the pulse magnitude/frequency.

[sly trout]

will give it a try!

[obtuse lion]

It very likely wont look exactly the same, but that's broadly speaking the algorithm they use.

and in the meantime, feel free to ask for proper support for it. 😃

[sly trout]

thanks @obtuse lion !

[obtuse lion]

Currently the only programattic way of accessing the data that I know about is creating a particle system affected by wind, with a single particle.

Set the particle position manually, call ParticleSystem.Simulate(1) then measure the new position.

Which is shall we say, stupidly round-about. 😉

works tho. We use that technique for our boat scripts.

[digital shuttle]

@sly trout The Book of the Dead environment sample they gave out has examples of wind shaders

[sly trout]

ohh! ty!

[obtuse lion]

@digital shuttle I believe they still used the tree system

I don't believe the wind data is populated unless the shader is attached to a tree or terrain

[digital shuttle]

oh...

[obtuse lion]

Yeah it's a really long standing issue

I think I filed a bug report on it in Unity 2.x when they introduced the new tree system

[digital shuttle]

😮

[winter needle]

One message removed from a suspended account.

[ashen sand]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/blendop-logicalor.611932/

Would appreciate any GLSL guys taking a look at this

[obtuse lion]

@ashen sand it's been a few years since I had to touch that for a client project, but my recollection was that only worked on DX, there was another set which only worked on GL as well.

Yeah there you go: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Rendering.BlendOp.html

[ashen sand]

Thanks, I guess you just saw the post intro 😛

[obtuse lion]

Ah sorry. 😛

Skim reader.

[ashen sand]

I'm trying to build a workaround for it by pinvoking OGL calls, I'm just not sure why it isn't working

[obtuse lion]

but yeah, I have a strong feeling it outright just doesn't work on GL.

I'd be careful about P/Invoking the call; two reasons

1. Invoking in Unity's render thread is serious 'here be dragons' territory. There is a way to do it, but you need to do it in C.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/NativePluginInterface.html

That's how ^

2. I have a feeling that if these ops work, they're in the realm of GL Extensions, and might be fragile; i.e. don't work on AMD/Intel/etc/etc.

(and don't even think about the mobile chipsets, their driver support is somewhere between 'we hired the lowest bidder' and 'we hired the lowest bidder, and it doesn't even work.')

[ashen sand]

Thanks, that's really helpful actually, I wasn't even thinking of having to sync it

Worst case I will just go native next, I do recall OGL having a function to pick up from the current thread though, I'll see if that at least forces the calls to go through first

[obtuse lion]

Yeah I've been through this recently

because Unity's texture uploads are sloooooooow from managed land.

(not normally an issue, until you have runtime procedural textures that are 2/4K and suddenly you've got a 100ms stall)

[ashen sand]

Yup, the joys of black box engines, I'm also going to have to do a native plugin for mesh vertex buffers for similar reasons

So I can see this going that direction anyhow

Ugh, it's such a headache though, I literally just want to set a damn blendop 😄

[obtuse lion]

Honestly, we've debated a source license, but I don't think it's worth it - having to maintain that fork is probably even worse. 😉

Yeah haha

I don't know, I've never tried it

but can you compile the GLSL shader yourself?

A guy from worlds adrift did a Unite talk a few years ago about hacking up light probes by making 'fake asset bundles' containing the data.

I'd wager there's a strong chance you could do the same.

Might also be 'here be dragons' territory though FWIW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7LjsabD4V4 <--- that's the talk in question, was fascinating to watch. I had a brief twitter exchange with the guy afterwards debating it'd be better to use ref probes.

[ashen sand]

To be clear, I'm not a graphics guy, I'm just having to go head first into all this so I'm 100% missing a lot of info, first time I'd written a functional shader was about 2 weeks ago

[obtuse lion]

Ah!

Can I ask, how much stuff is getting these effects?

Because, the other option, would be our friend, _GrabPass

(waits for Unity devs to spring in here and yell at me.)

[ashen sand]

So unless I totally missed something, while I could compile the GLSL (actually already tried that), I don't think it was possible to force those ops in, like you had to do it when binding the texture

Hah, I'd considered that actually, thing is, I'm not blending with the rendertarget per se, I'm blending continuously

Basically I have a shader which builds metadata, and there are overlapping fragments (no depth testing), so the same pixel will be written multiple times per pass

So I need to OR all of those fragments together

[obtuse lion]

What's your target - mobile or desktop?

[ashen sand]

So even with grabpass, or splitting it into separate textures, I'd have to stagger it into multiple passes

It's for an asset, so for my case it's desktop only and it works perfectly with DX11/12, I just had a few people ask about OpenGL support, so potentially mobiles

[obtuse lion]

Ah. Okay nevermind.

Was going to suggest could look into moving it into Compute.

[ashen sand]

I'm just trying to get it working for a general use case without having to split it all up

Yeah it's not looking all that promising right now, other than making it for heavier platforms only

Big thanks for all your suggestions btw 👍

[obtuse lion]

np!

I think then the answer is probably going to be multiple passes.

Or just yell at Unity asking for the blendops. 😃

(* that might not work.)

[ashen sand]

Haha, there's an idea 😄

It does seem to be pretty fundamental stuff tbh

[obtuse lion]

My experience yelling at Unity for features is about 1/10 gets through.

[ashen sand]

I read in their docs that there is a macro for requiring the support of advanced GL blending options- did a verbatim search and literally the only place it's mentioned is on their docs page

Yup, copy that

[obtuse lion]

I was overjoyed the other day that my request for Texture2D.CompressAsync was accepted to be added. 😃

(and that I am really happy about...)

[ashen sand]

Haha, well Unity's idea of async seems to be dumping things into coroutines, hopefully they go all the way with it

As I found out from assetbundles

[obtuse lion]

yeah; right now texture loading is -very- synchronous.

Almost nothing to do with textures is non-blocking.

Weirdly however there is some non-blocking methods internally.

For instance, UintyWebRequest can do it.

One of the hacks we've tried has been using UnityWebRequest with file:// URLs to temporary assets.

(and yes, that is horrible.)

[ashen sand]

Yup, at their mercy with features like that unfortunately

Still, promising that they're at least doing something with your suggestion

[obtuse lion]

Yeah, I'd like to have more options for texture loading tbh.

They have been doing a lot with that though in 2018.X

The new async texture uploads and mip streaming are great features I'm happy we're getting

Just not much in the way of scripting access to that yet, but I'm hopeful that comes.

We're super I/O bound since we stream an open world user generated MMO, so compression techniques matter a lot.

and crunched DXT, JPEG/PNG don't cut it.

We've been investigating using FLIF, which is a really neat compression algorithm; but integrating that requires some really deep access that's not exposed

[ashen sand]

Yeah that just sounds painful not having source access for, it's bad enough as it is imo

They do seem to be moving a lot on that side even from my limited experience with it though, especially the new graphics formats

Hmm, this was the one https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/OpenGL_and_multithreading

Gotta shoot off in a sec but I'll try that one later just to confirm, probably won't make any difference but it might at least show me if the current command are being consumed

[obtuse lion]

Yeah, I think you will need to do the C plugin

otherwise you just don't know when your stuff is getting executing.

A few years back it might have worked

but I don't think it'd work today

[ashen sand]

True, eh it's probably a good thing tbh

As mentioned, I knew I'd eventually have to move to native for my vertex performance, I already do all the work on unmanaged memory in C#, it's just the interop cost on the unity side

So I could kill two birds with one stone with the plugin anyhow

[still orbit]

_GrabPass
You rang? 😂

[obtuse lion]

Hi.

😛

_GrabPass is simultaneously very useful, and also terrible.

[ashen sand]

I was kinda surprised that you can't grab a single pixel from the FBO

[obtuse lion]

I've actually always wondered if that's just a API limitation, and if it'd be possible to do a faster 'just grabpass this pixel' rather than the whole frame.

heh

[ashen sand]

Yeah that's just it, I mean surely there's no technical limitation

[obtuse lion]

99% of grabpass usage is really the pixel, or maybe the surrounding couple.

[ashen sand]

Hell if you could do that I would have already gone down that route

[still orbit]

oh its totally doable

the problem with grab pass is that its not well defined on the engine side

[ashen sand]

Oh yeah I guessed it was a Unity problem 😄

[still orbit]

"give me the contents of the framebuffer at an arbitrary point of the render pipeline"

is not very sustainable 😛

[ashen sand]

right, gtg, thanks again @obtuse lion

[obtuse lion]

Is there a replacement planned?

Seeya! 😃

[ashen sand]

I'll probably just jump right into that later on and get it out of the way

[still orbit]

well in LWRP we have _CameraOpaqueTexture

which is more limited, but much more consistent and reliable for its intended use case

its just a copy of the framebuffer at a very well defined point in the pipeline

[obtuse lion]

What'd be nice would be something ala a "currentColor" parameter ala worldPos and others, in surface shaders.

only would work in forward obviously.

although yeah, SRP I don't know about - my investigations there have only been surface deep since they're not quite ready for us.

[still orbit]

im not an authority on this by any means but i believe some platforms are unable to arbitrarily read the target values

[obtuse lion]

That wouldn't surprise me at all

[still orbit]

Unity has to work on em all so...

[obtuse lion]

Yeah; I've dealt with the panoply of awful android chipsets.

I might be slightly bitter about it.

[still orbit]

Hahaha me too, me too

[obtuse lion]

I -reallly- don't understand how quality can range so much, even from the same manufacturer

The Adreno 305 is baked into my memory as being truly, absolutely awful, but something like the 310 was perfectly fine.

[still orbit]

Yup, i used to work for an Amazon 2nd party studio. We targeted our games for only Firephone and Kindle Fires. It was one, well defined hardware set.

Then we ported those games to general android/iOS

O. M. G.

[obtuse lion]

Haha

To be honest, Apple drive me up the wall for many, many reasons - but driver support isn't one of them.

Their stuff mostly just works; but Android in general .... O______O.

[still orbit]

its better than Android for sure

apart from their texture compression, which has caused me many headaches in the past 😃

[obtuse lion]

Yeah I can see that. Texture compression is an interesting kettle of fish.

[still orbit]

had to write a full texture post-processor for that

[obtuse lion]

I don't like any current GPU compression algorithms. I like what Binomial is doing with Basis.

but that's not ideal either.

it's that whole 'has to be able to load' quickly that we run into.

I don't mind burning more GPU/CPU in a background thread to do texture loading, if we could cut the filesize by 20-30% (which is quite achievable)

the other problem is of course colour banding and such - BC7's a nice improvement, but it's still not great.

[still orbit]

agreed 100%, this has been a huge factor in defining art style for my current procgen project

"lets just not have textures"

[obtuse lion]

Yeah, see that strikes me as the answer, but also not a good one.

I don't know how much of the scrollback you read, but we're doing an open world streamed user generated MMO.

[still orbit]

its not a great restriction to have forced upon you 😛

[obtuse lion]

and I REAAAALY want to get texture streaming in - i.e. loading mip maps one by one as the network downloads them.

It's doable, but the unity scripting API is ... very not designed for this.

(although a Texture2D.UploadAsync / UploadMipAsync would solve that...!)

[still orbit]

yea, thats going to be tricky 😛

thats why you were talking about native plugins then

[obtuse lion]

Yup

Because they can.

The problem with native plugins though is, native plugins.

[still orbit]

yea, at some point you have to go native

[obtuse lion]

To be honest, I'd be overjoyed if I could avoid them.

We target a lot of build platforms, and native plugins just turn that into a mess

[still orbit]

yea youd have to maintain your own build system id imagine

[obtuse lion]

Yup.

I know Unity has added support for async tex uploading internally - the new stuff in 2017.3 and 2018.2

It'd just be nice to get some script access to that

I guess it'd just be ApplyAsync

[still orbit]

cant say ive looked at it

[obtuse lion]

Yeah I won't harp too much more on it, Unity is a cool engine

and we do what we can with what's available.

[still orbit]

Yea im going to go out on a limb and say that streaming user generated MMO content would have its difficulties on any engine, third party or not 😛

[obtuse lion]

Oh yeah haha

It's gonna break just about any application. 😃

Unity actually works surprisingly well for the job, it's one of the few engines that don't really mind if you totally garble the scene graph from one frame to the next.

The other one is CryEngine/Lumberyard.

But almost everything else doesn't like you doing that - Unreal looks prettier (sorry!), but makes de-allocating resources somewhere between difficult and impossible.

(HDSRP might change that - but I can't quite upgrade to that yet, as much as I'd like to.)

[broken field]

https://github.com/Gaxil/Unity-InteriorMapping

Would love to see this working in a HDRP (or any) SRP really. Haven't looked too closely but it seems doable 😄

Robert Cummings (@SquaredApe)

@Gaxil Thanks a lot!

Twitter

[obtuse lion]

It's been asked a lot ... but is there a chance of getting surface shader support in SRP officially?

I've been looking into writing a converter manually

[fervent tinsel]

people will probably keep asking for it for a long time still too 😄

[broken field]

Yeah it seems doable in graph

[obtuse lion]

Hrrrrrrm.

That's an interesting point.

Graph has support for custom nodes, I wonder if you could write a 'Surface Shader' node.

Ugly as hell, but it might just work.

[still orbit]

Ah yea I was going to port that (or write my own) interior mapping to LWRP

[obtuse lion]

assuming you skip stuff like finalcolor: and so forth.

[fervent tinsel]

I'm sure Unity graphics guys have noticed the requests

[still orbit]

its totally doable for sure

[fervent tinsel]

I faintly remember some staff response on it, but will not quote my horribly bad memory on it 😄

but in the nutshell, even if they'd do that, they'd probably want SRP out before things like that happened

like, out of preview

[still orbit]

19.1 hopefully 😃

[fervent tinsel]

on the other topic, here's a short article from the guy who originally invented the interior mapping technique: http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2018/09/interior-mapping-real-rooms-without.html

[still orbit]

as for surface shaders. We know people want it, we are listening. Were always evaluating it. But you need to understand that the precompile step for surface shaders is pretty horrendous.

[fervent tinsel]

Simon also has two articles about similar techs: https://simonschreibt.de/gat/windows-ac-row-ininite/

[obtuse lion]

Oh I know it's grade A nasty, a subset supported would be fine though

A lot of the complexity of surface shaders I'm willing to bet is supporting only a minority of the features.

[still orbit]

If/when we provide "surface shaders" for SRP they will be very different 😛

[obtuse lion]

Plz, plz backwards compatibles.

I have to write a bazillion updaters for things which aren't backwards compatible as-is. 😃

[fervent tinsel]

I dunno about that

people would be thrilled to get them in any form

and backwards compatibility usually means compromizes

[obtuse lion]

That is true

Even in a basic form, would make my own cross-compiler easier to write.

I am now curious to see if it could be done as a custom shadergraph node tho.

At least for the basic functions - we'll ignore custom lighting paths, and such.

[still orbit]

i dont see where youre going there?

shader graph essentially generates surface shaders

[obtuse lion]

Yep, but they're compatible with SRP.

I'm thinking procedural tool; reads surface shader, generates custom SG node, and makes a SG graph shader all in one step.

[fervent tinsel]

heh, if you look at that simon's article I linked, last "Update 5" on the bottom of the page contains Shader Forge version... should be somewhat trivial to port that to Shader Graph (there's also UE4 material graph for this somewhere on the web too)

[obtuse lion]

Hacky, but it could work.

[fervent tinsel]

and sorry for jumping between topics :p

[obtuse lion]

Yeah heh

Discord needs threads. 😉

[charred hill]

If you're interested in interior mapping, I got a full project available on Github, it's a surface shader and it allows curved buildings, corridors, walls decals and it's absolutely free to use in any of your projects ...
https://github.com/Gaxil/Unity-InteriorMapping

[fervent tinsel]

@charred hill I think someone linked that earlier

just hoping it would work in SRP / HDRP

[charred hill]

Oh ok, sorry 😃 ... I was not there yet probably

[fervent tinsel]

that's actually where the discussion started

[charred hill]

Ok, fine ... I still have to take a look at the SRP/HDRP to port that shader and some other to the new system

Thank you for the notification!

[fervent tinsel]

np, thank you for sharing the project 😃

[charred hill]

My pleasure

[broken field]

@still orbit Yeah actually I don't really see the point of surface shaders given that they are basically a graph. Anything more in classic unity involved digging so deep it was a wonder anyone ever came back alive

[tardy hazel]

I imagined with the shader graph the hope was that they would totally supersede the functionality that Surface Shaders provided

Like there shouldn't really be anything you can do with surface shaders that can't be done with the graph

(assuming the use of custom snippet nodes etc)

Though I don't know if that's the case just yet

[fervent tinsel]

some people will always prefer code tho

besides, the more advanced thing you do on graphs, more custom nodes you need

or I guess it's not about being advanced but just out of the scope of what people usually use the node graph for

[still orbit]

Hypothetical: how would you feel about writing it in C#? This could then generate a graph.

[fervent tinsel]

Why not if the workflow would be nice?

We often seek in minimising the time spent on tasks so what ever makes the process most streamlined could be an easy winner

[tardy hazel]

I feel like that does have a chance of producing situations like "I can do it in the C# that generates the graph but not in the actual graph", or vice-versa

Since the custom snippet nodes are already written in C# it might not be too bad though

It would solve the issue of graph-based stuff not being super diff-able for source control purposes

[broken field]

Some people will prefer code, yes - but the graph is not actually designed for people who prefer code. The primary use of such a thing, and indeed, shaders in general are an artist's day-job and thus the whole thing really needs to be art led.

Plus if you can code, and the graph is insufficient then perhaps thats the natural signal for a deeper drive, a copy of the HDRP core shaders and a custom job.

*dive

[fervent tinsel]

code vs graph is very different in this context tho (SRP), modifying and keeping up-to-date custom HDRP shaders in code can be really time consuming, where in shader graph you just open the graph in new version and save again and it just works 😃

if we got surface shader kinda approach to text based srp shader code, it would level that field

and still let people to make fully custom shaders by doing the whole thing as well

[broken field]

I wonder what Unity means by a shader graph paradigm that's rather departed from the one we know with built-in pipeline. Sounds rather modular to me

[obtuse lion]

Also keep in mind what a gigantic spaghetti mess graph systems can be the moment you get anything remotely complex (i.e. loops.)

I can't imagine how horrifying a raymarching shader would look in a graph.

but it'd be pretty bad.

[broken field]

would you want surface shader level abstraction though? If you are delving into raymarching, I am not sure you would have all that much use for the existing lighting

[charred hill]

Raymarching is not the only case where the graph is not adapted. It's not possible with graph to use geometry shaders, (and btw, it's not possible with the surface shaders either).
You can't access a simple compute buffer using the graph, and it's even worse if you want to use a structured buffer having a complex struct.
And there are many other scenario where the graph is not the best choice in its current form ... and I agree with Adam about the spaghetti-like mess with complex graphs : Something that is basically free syntaxically with code like casting or swizzle automatically require a couple or more nodes to be done in graph.

[ashen sand]

@obtuse lion just wanted to say the native plugin was 100% the way to go, gotta do a lot of crossplatform building work but the core is all plumbed up and I can directly issue all of those blending calls I needed

[obtuse lion]

@ashen sand awesome.

[steel notch]

how do you go about converting shaders to be usable in the LWRP

I want to convert this

https://roystan.net/articles/toon-shader.html

[fervent tinsel]

hmmmm, PBR Graph is still broken in HDRP's forward

well, at least it works in HD Lit Graph

downside of all this is that ASE doesn't support HD Lit yet

SG works obviously but almost all 3rd party HDRP integrations I got are shipping custom ASE nodes

shouldn't be impossible to port those to SG though

[steel notch]

w

wut

0lento plz I am but a farm boy

[fervent tinsel]

HDRP has two different Lit shader graph types: PBR and HD Lit

HDRP can render in deferrerd, forward only rendering or combined.

When you use HDRP in forward only mode, that mentioned PBR shader graph gives messy artifacts (it always had done that in foward), where HD Lit shader graph gives same correct results regardless the mode you run HDRP in

I dunno if that was any more clear :)

[amber saffron]

@fervent tinsel Hey, thanks for noticing that. Could you maybe send me a screenshot of the artifact you have so I can identify it ?

[fervent tinsel]

@amber saffron just enable forward only on hrdp asset and make pbr graph with like plain red color and apply it to any plane in the scene

[amber saffron]

For the moment we have some issues to adapt our automated test framework to be able to work with multiple RP settings (deffered/forward/both), and that's typically an issue that it could have spotted ...

Okay, thanks 😃

[fervent tinsel]

This has always been broken btw, hence being happy that you guys made HD Lit graph :)

hmmmm, it actually works at default settings on 5.2.3 using latest alpha =/

I'll check the latest github version with default settings, see if its some specific setting combo that breaks it

to me the artifact I was seeing yesterday looked like some shadow filtering issue

but I'm not really educated on these matters

ah, it does happen on latest hdrp-master branch

it's more clear when you set shadow filtering to High (but also happens on Low)

high (PCSS)

[amber saffron]

Ok, thanks for the hints

[fervent tinsel]

and for the comparison, same using HD Lit graph on forward:

well, the HD Lit graph wasn't 100% same, it had smoothness of 1 where PBR has 0.5 apparently but changing that will not affect the artifacts

makes one wonder why different graph types use different defaults tho

both albedo and smoothness are 0.5 on PBR graph but full 1.0 on HD Lit

(when you make a new node)

that's no big deal, just inconsistent

[amber saffron]

I agree, and this can be easilly fixed

[amber saffron]

@fervent tinsel We identified the issue you showed, and fixed it (one liner fix 😃 ). This will come in the next release

[fervent tinsel]

well, that was fast 😄

thank you

@amber saffron btw, any idea on the SRP batcher issue on #archived-hdrp ?

I try not to bug you too much tho, I know you must be busy

[amber saffron]

Well, tracking bugs on HDRP is my job anyway, 😃

[fervent tinsel]

oh!

you'll probably regret you let me know that, I'm really good at breaking things 🤔

[amber saffron]

You can also use the bug reporting tool instead 😄

[safe whale]

Hey guys, can anyone help me with a basic question? What's Clip Space and why is it called like that? 😃

[vocal narwhal]

It's a box-like space that easily defines what is inside and outside of the view for "clipping" which is just discarding coordinates. It's the transformation step right after perspective where depth is still encoded

[safe whale]

Thanks, @vocal narwhal !

[vocal narwhal]

https://learnopengl.com/Getting-started/Coordinate-Systems really does a better job explaining it than me. There are some terms which overlap so it can be confusing learning about all the spaces in context of a shader at times.

[safe whale]

Neat! Thanks a lot. That definitely helps. 🙏 💦

[solar ridge]

Hello guys, so i saw this short clip of a "grass geometry shader" and the grass looks amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Wo9eFw_eI
So my question(s) is as follows: Can you create and render grass with a shader? and is it even good practice when considering performance?
And can it be applied to terrain directly?

[broken field]

That's on the slow side for sure

It's better to have bunches of quads rendered efficiently

[solar ridge]

Are shaders on quads a bad idea as well then ?

like using both Ambient occlusion and normal maps

[fervent tinsel]

the fix for the banding issue we talked about earlier is now on hdrp-master: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/commit/918819b0a88700c8616e7e82d2a296756397cd7e

Just tested it and it indeed fixes the issue, I added similar changes to ASE's HDSRPPBR.shader and it fixed that one too

[still orbit]

Cookz, draw mesh indirect is going to be a load faster than this imo. Calculate the proper geometry directly on the GPU and draw it in one go.

[solar ridge]

Thank you

[charred hill]

@solar ridge A problem with grass geometry shader is that it requires a quite dense base mesh, otherwise you'll have just sparse blades of grass. You can always add tessellation but it's heavier on the performance side. The generation of the geometry is also computed every time it is rendered, that mean 4 times when using high quality cascade shadows + 1 time in forward with 1 light ... and that can escalade quickly. But don't get me wrong, geometry shaders are awesome and very helpful, you just need to be careful about their usage.

[solar ridge]

Thanks @charred hill , just means i won't invest time into doing this, so i will figure something else with grass. Basically i'm i want to achieve grass that doesn't look like small islands of quads as it so often happens... but i don't want to just pack the quads so densely that you don't notice, as that would also quickly eat a ton of resources...
Which is why i want to find out if i can somehow implement shaders to hide these quad islands so they aren't too obvious.
Would love to achieve grass like in Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

[charred hill]

You can also go for the instancing approach, create your grass patch mesh and instanciate it on the terrain, which is a quite common way of doing it. Advantage of that, you have more control on the shape of the grass as it's a mesh, but if you still need a shader to animate it.
I've not tried it, but you can also use polybrush to place the meshes on the terrain.

[plucky bone]

Look at this https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0011

[solar ridge]

Not a bad read Navi, thanks

[obtuse lion]

Yeah fascinating article

[mental sentinel]

@charred hill polybrush instantiate gameobjects on your scene, using it for every single grass object is most of the time a performance destroyer. We went with a GPU instancing solution, which is far more performant.

[charred hill]

@mental sentinel Thanks for the note. Indeed if it's just gameobjects instancing it's less interesting ... maybe with bigger patches of grass, but it's less flexible, so ...
Do you have grass casting shadows by the way, as it's pretty heavy on the performance side, I was wondering if, in practical use, it was a viable option?

[mental sentinel]

Only for the LOD0...1-ish, which is quite close to the player. After that a fake AO should do the job to "ground" your grass.

[charred hill]

Ok, fine, good to know

[broken field]

I put in a request for polybrush to use gpu instancing for PB so I'm happy it's a thing

might be usable now for a lot more things

I'd have had to add it if not

[fervent tinsel]

yay, ASE finally added HDRP HD Lit template

[broken field]

I'll be sticking with the built in shader graph. I have ASE, but I require minimal external assets

[fervent tinsel]

I have some 3rd party stuff that relies on ASE and I'm too lazy to rewrite all that on SG + I still feel ASE is more flexible on many scenarios

biggest benefit with SG right now is that it gets all new graph types immediately when third party tools only implement them later on

[still orbit]

Ooh I'll check that out :D thanks

Does this mean support for the other HD shader types do you know?

The ones we only support via shader graph like fabric etc

[fervent tinsel]

they only support HD Lit, PBR and Unlit graphs for HDRP

[still orbit]

What's the difference with HD lit and PBR in their context?

[fervent tinsel]

same as with SG

[still orbit]

Does theirs work on both pipelines like ours?

Oh, interesting

That's funny, they made the same decision/mistake we made haha

[fervent tinsel]

yeah, they support LWRP too

you can swap their templates on the fly tho, but it's a bit different workflow

you always create new ASE shader same way and only then can pick what template you want to use for it

it's more like how UE4 materials do it

[still orbit]

So how do they generate the master node slots list?

I have used ASE since when they only had LWRP support

I should probably have another look

[fervent tinsel]

I haven't looked at the implementation, I only know they mirror basically SG's templates on their own shader template

[vocal narwhal]

Sorry for the random question, but (if it's not already) is there planned support for nested subgraphs? Last time I tried it just failed completely

[still orbit]

Oh they're in for a shock then lol

[fervent tinsel]

you mean the recent change on master?

[still orbit]

Upcoming changes

[vocal narwhal]

sweeeeeet

[fervent tinsel]

ah, rip ASE 😄

[still orbit]

Vertx, I suppose I can say that nested subs are being actively worked on right now

[fervent tinsel]

anyway, this must have been the easiest way for them to implement the support so far

they can't really predict what you guys do there 😃

(Unless they got direct connections)

[still orbit]

If you really went diving in branches you could find clues for it :P

Haha we talk with them a bit

We have a decent friendly relationship

But yeah, makes sense for them, just means they have to react to our changes

[fervent tinsel]

You can no longer attempt to convert nodes inside a `Sub Graph` in to a `Sub Graph`, which previously caused errors.

[still orbit]

Ha

[fervent tinsel]

yeah, I spotted that on github earlier today

[still orbit]

Stop spying on me plz :P

That's just a temporary safety precaution. You can null ref the graph right now.

[fervent tinsel]

I used to maintain experimental SRP on the forums for a while in past where I merged all experimental branches from you guys so people could try it out 😄

yeah, I can totally think many reasons why you guys wouldn't like that 😄

[vocal narwhal]

Yeah it destroyed your work when you did it if I remember correctly, wouldn't register an undo

[fervent tinsel]

but it was fun, especially when all bigger new fancy things were on different branches for HDRP

[still orbit]

Exactly, non recoverable nullref needs a bandaid :P

[vocal narwhal]

How does your team work with the other teams using graphs? Is there someone central who manages the graph API, seeing as there's now... shaders, scripting, perhaps audio?, etc

I want to find a use case for it in my work as it's becoming an tool with some affordance inside of Unity

[still orbit]

without getting into too much detail about how our R&D org is structured... 😛

yes, the underlying graph UI system (Graph View) is developed and maintained by a separate team

[mental sentinel]

@broken field we worked for the team behind the asset, definitely something doable !

[errant rampart]

Currently materials created with the Shader Graph have very limited customization of the inspector. Sliders, range sliders, expandables, enums, etc. are not possible.

With C# and HLSL, we get fully customizable inspectors, which are very useful.

Any plans on this inspector customization coming to Shader Graph?

[amber saffron]

I suspect that they have something in plan for this ( @still orbit ?)

[regal stag]

It is actually possible to have a Slider in the material inspector from a shader using Shader Graph, there's a mode dropdown when editing the property. More customisation would be good though.

[tame topaz]

Can anyone confirm if the Depth Fade node in Amplify is the equivalent to the Depth Blend node in Shaderforge?

[fervent tinsel]

you mean in shader forge and not shader graph?

in which case if you have both, it would be trivial to just wire the node on both and peek into generated shader code

@tame topaz

[tame topaz]

It's shader forge 😮

Which I don't have on this PC (if anyone does and can check the node, I'd love you)

[mental sentinel]

it is !

you can use this node to make soft particles kinda effect

[tame topaz]

Sweet, thanks for the confirmation. 😃

[still orbit]

Yeah more customization is on the roadmap. Can't speak for when though, we've reached the limit of what we can do without significant work.

[lost oracle]

Any recommended basic approach for skin and hair shader? The character is modeled a bit anime-ish but not rendered in cel, and the environment is pbr-ish. Thank you.

[broken field]

Some kind of ramp shading plugged into emission ?

[still orbit]

Recommended as in recommended lighting models?

Dual specular lobe kajiya Kay is a time tested classic for hair. Not current AAA but scales nicely and results are decent.

[fervent tinsel]

that's the thing used by HDRP Hair, right?

I hope Unity will come up with some simple example how you'd set it up 😃

this thing

I could swear there used to be some switch between two hair shading models in past but seems like the other got cut, now curious which one

[still orbit]

LOL that node

[fervent tinsel]

I pretty much toggled every setting on, it doesn't look that intimidating normally 😄

[still orbit]

Huh, what do you know