archived-shaders

[dusky tusk]

Hey there, I use Tangent space when unpacking normals and also in frag normal space. I use World Space normal vector when making a time value for lerp. The time value is the steepness of the terrain for the cliffs. Do I need to convert the time from world space to tangent space? Or do I need to convert normals from tangent to world space? Also you mentioned Normal Blend node, I need to lerp the two normal maps depending on the steepness, can I do that using blend node? I also use Tiling and Offset for the sample texture2d array UV input. The only thing I changed in that node is the tiling

[eager folio]

It is basically a polar coords node feeding into a gradient to make the segments, and then compared to the fill value multiplied by the number of segments

[regal stag]

Hey Sphax, You shouldn't need the Transform node there as the View Projection matrix will convert from World to straight to Clip space. Inputting the Vector3 Position into the Multiply should also promote the vector to include 1 in the alpha channel automatically.

Once you've got the clip space position, Split and Divide it by it's A component (known as perspective divide). Then might need to remap from -1 to 1 to 0 to 1 depending on what coordinates you expect.

[noble steppe]

I'm still beginning on the shader stuff on Unity, is there a way you send a screenshot of it? Otherwise it's okay, I will try to do as I can with the informations you gave! Thanks!!

[eager folio]

screenshoting node networks is so hard to make readable, will see what I can do

Do NOT directly copy this because it is shit. You can do better. But if it helps get you started then 😄

I honestly used like, twice as many nodes as needed because I just threw it together without thinking it through

[noble steppe]

I don't want to directly copy it, since I want the effect to be a little different :p . I have experience with Unreal but not so much with Unity so I was just wondering how it's working in Unity. Thanks a lot of the help 🙂

[shadow kraken]

Most of the time it's pretty easy to translate UE4 materials into ShaderGraphs @noble steppe. So if you find a tutorial for UE4 it can still be valuable in unity

[noble steppe]

I see that now. Thanks!

[fast remnant]

Hey, I'm sorry... might be losing my mind here. This should convert world space normals to camera/view space, right? mul((float3x3)UNITY_MATRIX_V, normalWS.rgb) ... so, if I give that the gbuffer normals in a fragment shader, something other than the exact same normals should come out, right?

gbuf2.rgb vs mul((float3x3)UNITY_MATRIX_V, gbuf2.rgb) -- am I just doing something silly here?

And UNITY_MATRIX_V isn't empty... like, it'll put out up and forward as green and blue respectively

[elder minnow]

Hello, not sure if this is shaders, but I am trying to develop a 2D game, and a not much tutorial has popped up to how I can do lighting, Most of them are either outdated, or I wasn't able to replicate.

Could you guys maybe help me?

[low lichen]

But that sounds like it isn't doing anything. If it just outputs up and forward as green and blue, then it's not modifying the values.

Are you doing this in a deferred post process shader?

[fast remnant]

I meant when I probed with UNITY_MATRIX_V[1].xyz and UNITY_MATRIX_V[2].xyz. Yes. This is a blit render feature in URP, using a post shader. Deferred rendering.

[low lichen]

Could that blit not be rendered with a camera that has different matrices? I don't think a blit will use the same matrices of the last camera.

[fast remnant]

@low lichen I just verified with shader graph, and it looks like the transform just isn't working. If I put it on an object, works as expected, but for whatever reason in full screen shader, neither UNITY_MATRIX_V nor _NormalMatrix nor TransformWorldToView do anything.

[low lichen]

It's probably just an orthographic camera facing forward

[fast remnant]

I'd just kind of assumed that it defaulted the main camera, since I was able to get camera position and so on.

unity_CameraInvProjection, unity_CameraToWorld, _WorldSpaceCameraPos.xyz, etc

those all work

[low lichen]

How are you doing the blit? Graphics.Blit?

[fast remnant]

custom render feature

command buffers, and the kosher, SRP way of doing it, under the hood, I think

[pale tapir]

Thank you so much for your answer!
Thanks to your awesome explanation, I've been able to setup exactly what I wanted!
I'm not sure to understand all the steps though... 😅
Here is the result for those who want to do that:

[low lichen]

@fast remnant All I can think of is that UNITY_MATRIX_V isn't the same matrix as the camera that rendered the gbuffer

I think your blit renderer feature will have to pass in that matrix from the camera data. @regal stag does something similar in their Blit renderer feature for the inverse matrix
https://github.com/Cyanilux/URP_BlitRenderFeature/blob/master/Blit.cs

[pale tapir]

btw I had to invert Y... not sure why

(and I love your blog Cyan btw, as many here I'm pretty sure 😉 )

[regal stag]

Nice glad I could help. I also think rather than multiplying by -1 you can use the Z Buffer Sign output of the Camera node to help make sure it works properly on all platforms.

[pale tapir]

so I need to input zbuffer sign into Y instead of the -1 I manually set?

[regal stag]

Yeah, Z Buffer Sign into Y on Vector4 node (with other ports set to 1) then into Multiply.

Into Y not Z 🙂

[pale tapir]

oups XD

Here it is 😄

this is so cool

[fast remnant]

You were absolutely, 100% correct. Thanks a ton!

still got the perspective distortion to deal with, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it

[grand jolt]

Hey guys, I want to send a matrix of 0..1 to a shader. To swap texture based of the value of the matrix. I'm going to modify the texture in a C# script and send it back to the shader. I don't want a precise shape, that's why I'm thinking of some kind of matrix. The effect desired is to swap to a ground crack texture when the player will run over it. And of course on terrain with hills, and floating plateform.
I'm trying to get the texture3D doing what I want, but I'm struggling a lot. Maybe because I'm using the shader graph for now.
Do you have any advices, tutorials or whatever?
Thanks 🙂

[low lichen]

When you say matrix, you are talking about a 2D grid of values?

I assume you're not talking about Matrix4x4/float4x4?

[grand jolt]

Yes and No, a 3D grid but no need of float4 just float

And honestly it looks like i can't even apply the color of a procedural 3D texture on a simple unlit shader :/ thoses experiments are going to be a nightmare

To be fair I guess I want to do a simple decal system 🧐

[low lichen]

So you're thinking about making a 3D texture that encapsulates the whole scene and each voxel says how much decal to blend in at that world space point?

[grand jolt]

nono, I was going to apply it only around the player. So a limited area with the player as the center

but otherwise yeah

[low lichen]

Sounds like you would have to update every pixel in the texture every time the player moves so you can move each pixel in the opposite direction.

And most pixels won't be near surfaces I imagine, so that's a lot of wasted data.

[grand jolt]

yeap, doesn't really look that scary to apply a transform on them though

I probably would move only active pixels

and erase when they got out

[low lichen]

Is your scene lightmapped?

[grand jolt]

honestly I'm not even sure of what it means ^^
just experimented on a small tile right now
although it's gonna be cell shading, so light calculation would be in the shader, does that help?

[low lichen]

I mean baked lighting

[grand jolt]

not from unity at least, full procedural is the goal

but I could make a custom system later, if needed

[grand jolt]

xD I just forget to apply texture changes, that's working as expect so far now ^^ (which mean really far from the result I explained)

[marsh venture]

hello guys, i want to till the lerp image , how can i do that?

[grand jolt]

like creating a tilset from it? or tilling the result?

[marsh venture]

@grand jolt Tilling the result of lerp

[grand jolt]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@6.9/manual/Tiling-And-Offset-Node.html
Use it as the uv to sample the lerped texture?
Just a guess, never tried

[amber saffron]

You don't tile the result of a node like this, you tile UVs for inputing into sample nodes only.

So : tile the two samples before

[marsh venture]

There is no any other way?

[grand jolt]

sampling the result with the tilled uv won't work so?

[marsh venture]

But I want to create the seamless terrain material so what i do now?

[onyx jungle]

hey guys, say I have a cube, how could I make it so the interior of that cube is completely white (using a shader), kind of like a fog effect but only within the cube.

[shadow locust]

volumetric fog perhaps?

[onyx jungle]

but I only want it to be restricted to the interior of the cube

volumetric fog could work yes

but how

[shadow locust]

yep

try volumetric fog

[onyx jungle]

yea, how would I write volumetric fog

[shadow locust]

it's called "volumetric" because it occupies a particular volume of space

Try this? https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/creating-volumetric-fog-19#

[onyx jungle]

this is HDRP only

I said I wanted to program it

[shadow locust]

which pipeline are you using

[onyx jungle]

standard

I write all my shaders

[shadow locust]

try to find a tutorial for volumetric fog in builtin render pipeline then

[onyx jungle]

smh

🤦

[jaunty thorn]

is there a node that can drop the opacity of a texture?

like lower it from full opacity to like 20% opacity

[shadow locust]

Just take the color and multiply the alpha component by .2

[jaunty thorn]

thank you

[grand jolt]

hey

whats the best shader in Universal Render Pipeline for base color , roughness , AO and normal maps?

[onyx jungle]

PBR graph my friend

[dapper pollen]

can I put a StructuredBuffer<T> inside of CBUFFER_START?

[tame quest]

Idk why this is happening but the lights aren't supposed to flicker (the light on the coloured balls flicker when ever i shoot)

can anyone help

[grand jolt]

Hey guys, do you know a way to check a point is inside a cube with the minimal amount of branches?

[shadow locust]

can the cube be rotated?

Or is it always axis-aligned

[grand jolt]

yes it's a cube around the player which can do 360° rotation

[shadow locust]

I guess you'd do something like rotate the position vector to the cube's orientation and then I don't think you need any branches at all

it's just like x < min.x && x > max.x && y > min.y && y < max.y etc

[grand jolt]

yeah I'm stupid, I counted comparative as branches ^^" Thanks 🙂

[woven violet]

Hi guys!

In Shader Graph, how does one make the ellipse from an Ellipse node, a gradiant? I'll take full answers and hints/directions

[regal stag]

As in a radial gradient? You'd have to handle the calculations yourself instead of using the ellipse node. Use the UV node and Distance with a Vector2 set to (0.5,0.5). Maybe then One Minus to invert it, multiply to scale it and Saturate to then remove any negative values.

[woven violet]

Mmmh ok imma check this !

uh wait I'm guessing Distance with the center of the screen right? @regal stag

[regal stag]

Uh, idk. You didn't mention anything about the screen before

[woven violet]

Right yes sorry xD

You know what, I tried to go and just ask for pieces of my puzzle but I've been at this forever so let's just explain everything instead of just a piece

I'm trying to make a shader to allow the camera to see through a wall and keep LOS to the player.

I'm trying to achieve this by combining a noise circle to have a nice clear center but have some fuzziness around the edges.

I have my noise generated and tuned to my liking but I'm still struggling making a "Circle mask" that would allow me to have a big circle close to the camera, making it easy to have a general view of the scene. But a small circle near the player, allowing the rest of the environment to stay undissolved.

I currently have this graph (see picture) which gives me a nice circle that meets my requirement, if the object is close, it's big, if it's far, it's small. But the issue is the edge is 0 1 straight up and I'd need the edges to have a bit of a gradient to have my noise poke through and shape the transparency

If that helps, I'm trying to replicate the effect in this article: https://glowfishinteractive.com/dissolving-the-world-part-2/

Like many people I'm gonna guess x')

[regal stag]

Ah okay, you're using the Screen Position rather than model UVs, then yeah you'd use the Distance with that same node instead.

[woven violet]

Yes! Ok! I'm going to check if I can figure that out ! ^^

[fossil cloak]

Hey Guys, does someone have a clue, how its possible to get the backside of a plane also get lit correctly?
In my case, its always weird lit or unlit

Front

Back

[woven violet]

Thank you very much! That was really easy and does what I need! My tiny beginner brain thanks you very much! Have a good day ! 😉

[regal stag]

You need to flip the normals for the back faces. If you're coding the shader look into VFACE or SV_IsFrontFace. For Shader Graph there's an Is Front Face node. (Can only be used in fragment stage)

[fossil cloak]

Im doing it with shadergraph

[regal stag]

Then yea, Is Front Face node into Branch with Normal Vector and Negated version. Input into Fragment stage Normal port. Use the same spaces on the nodes as what the port is set to

[fossil cloak]

oh man..i think i have to do some tutorials before understanding your message xD

[fossil cloak]

So i need a texture for Front and one for Backface?

[regal stag]

Hold on, I'll get an image

@fossil cloak Okay, this is what I meant

[fossil cloak]

The Normal Vector gets the Normal from my object?

[regal stag]

Yeah, from the mesh. It's used for lighting which is why the back faces is shaded wrong

[fossil cloak]

ill give it a try 🙂 one sec

[fossil cloak]

i guess, thats not correct 😄

ffs. i put it into tanget space

[regal stag]

Yeah drag it into the other port. It defaults to tangent but unless you're applying a normal map it's not really needed here

[fossil cloak]

Cool thank you 🙂

[grand jolt]

another shader question: I'm trying to test a custom shader that uses indirect global illumination (GI) in a custom way. on the left sphere, blue represents the intensity of indirect specular (UnityIndirect.specular). There's no blue, meaning there's no specular reflections. How do I make a specular reflection? What can I put on the scene to generate a specular reflection? The sphere and material on the right is what I tried (legacy specular with specular set to 100%) but it doesn't make a difference https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/717572614167592992/836791429665128488/unknown.png

the sphere on the left is implemented using a custom lighting model; here's my full shader file:

[somber snow]

Can you generate a 2d texture with a shader graph?

[brittle owl]

are there any free methods for volumetric fog in urp?

[grand jolt]

How can I make only the fresnell effect show up and the rest to be fully transparent?

[amber saffron]

Use the color for emission, and fresnel for alpha

[grand jolt]

Oh okay

Thanks! 😄

[grand jolt]

hey

does anyone still know how to code custom shaders?

hlsl

[fast remnant]

So, uh, Unity's transform matrices are kind of a Kafkaesque nightmare. Need a world to view matrix? Well, there's UNITY_MATRIX_V, unity_WorldToCamera, TransformWorldToView(), _ViewMatrix, _NormalMatrix, camera.worldToCameraMatrix, as well as numerous deprecated macros, mostly undocumented and different in just subtle and nuanced enough ways to fuck you over.

[eager folio]

That's unity for you

[fast remnant]

I'd like to propose another naming convention, just to liven things up because there's not enough of them. All variables, functions or macros start with a random base-32 hash, three underscores, and then AlTeRnAtINgCaSe.

upercase, lowercase, repeat, except for one random repeating character.

Example: JQSLMD___WoRlDtOcAmErAMaYbE

[left stump]

das someone know how to change a color to a Render Texture?

on a shader

[royal gazelle]

Hey, not even sure how to ask this question. I'm making a fake shadow that's just a semi-transparent gradient around stuff, and it works fine. I'd like to have the shadow's colour be a little more realistic. If I change it to the colour of the object it's on it kind of works, but not really..

Is there a way of making a shader multiply by whatever's underneath it, like you could in photoshop?

'Underneath' being whatever's rendered to screen then you'd do that at the end, I guess?

[regal stag]

I think what you want is a different blend mode for the transparency. See https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-Blend.html. Multiply should be Blend DstColor Zero according to that page.

[royal gazelle]

@regal stag oh yeah, this looks really promising, thanks!

[vague yacht]

Hey, how would I achieve this effect

https://imgur.com/a/XrBlnlg

[shadow locust]

gaussian blur or bokeh

[vague yacht]

first it blurs the screen, but also resizes the screen?

because at the end there is only one color

[shadow locust]

not seeing the screen resize

??

The coloration would just be a color grading effect

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.postprocessing@3.1/api/UnityEngine.Rendering.PostProcessing.ColorGrading.html?q=color g#UnityEngine_Rendering_PostProcessing_ColorGrading_hueShift

[vague yacht]

well, the blur I'm using does something like this

which is OK

but this still doesn't help me, because I can still see the fish

the effect above also (I think) scales down the screen, so that eventually it is one pixel?

not sure If I'm thinking correctly

[shadow locust]

I think it's just a blur

[regal stag]

I think at a certain point beyond the blur it just lerps to a solid colour

[vague yacht]

it picks the colour from the screen, in the video I point at the mouth so at the end it is pink, but if I point at the body it will lerp to red

[shadow locust]

certainly also doable

[regal stag]

Then sure, it samples the center of the screen (0.5, 0.5) and lerps to that

[vague yacht]

so I'd have to tint towards pixel colour from middle of the screen?

[shadow locust]

this is honestly all just postprocessing, not really shaders related

[vague yacht]

yeah, I get it now

thanks for pointing in the right direction

[shadow locust]

The user taps the screen, you sample that color, then start the blur effect, then start the color grading effect towards the sampled color

[topaz schooner]

Hi! I'd like to re-use some shader code in the build-in renderer and in shader graph. Basically import some .hlsl file as a custom function in shader graph, and as a file in the built-in shader. However, shader graph takes in UnityTexture2D for accessing texture data, which is unknown to the built-in renderer. Any ideas which type I could use that works with both the built-in renderer and shader graph?

sampler2D works for built-in but I can't figure out how to transform my texture into sampler2D in shader graph.

[runic frost]

is it just me or are there more tutorials for shader graph than shader lab

[woven violet]

Hey, I need a hand converting some code I have from a regular shader to a shader graph. I thought I had it figured out but turns out, I didn't. Could someone spare some time? I already have something done but it doesn't work like it should

[brittle owl]

hi! im the unity sobel filter for my game to get outlines. Problem is, the shader doesnt even have an outline color option! Any suggestions for modifying the code to make the outline white?

            {
                UNITY_SETUP_STEREO_EYE_INDEX_POST_VERTEX(input);
                
                float s = pow(1 - saturate(sobel(input.uv)), 50);
#ifdef RAW_OUTLINE
                return 1-half4(s.xxx, 1);
#else
                half4 col = SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D(_MainTex, sampler_MainTex, input.uv);```

this part seems to control the output color but i cant for the life of me figure out how to change just the outline to white

or alternatively, could someone link me a urp compatible outline shader that can change color and only renders the outer border of an object

[tacit parcel]

try to change this
return col * s;
to
return col + (1 - s);

[brittle owl]

that did give me a very faint white outline, but it made the whole screen black :(

[tacit parcel]

thats weird...
how about return col; ? is it giving the screen without outline?

[sly breach]

I'm trying to edit keyword in runtime but there is not change once i hit play , what am i doing wrong here ?

/// [ Mono ]
public bool Geom1 = true; 
void Update() {
  var mat = GetComponent<MeshRenderer>().material; //  *
  if ( Geom1 && ! mat.IsKeywordEnabled("GEOM1") ) mat.EnableKeyword("GEOM1");  
  else if( mat.IsKeywordEnabled("GEOM1") ) mat.DisableKeyword("GEOM1");
}
/// [ SHADER ] 
Pass {
    // ... 
    CGPROGRAM
    #pragma multi_compile GEOM1
    #if defined(GEOM1)
    #pragma fragment frag
    struct v2f { float4 pos : SV_POSITION; };
    half4 frag(v2f i) : SV_Target { return half4(1,1,0,1); }
    #endif
    ENDCG
}

[meager pelican]

You should use .sharedMaterial.

[regal stag]

Multi_compile usually has two keywords, the first specifying the "off" state. Try #pragma multi_compile _ GEOM1 instead

[meager pelican]

And that ^^ 😉

[sly breach]

i see , thanks will try this

[sly breach]

i do have a script attached to each GO so they should be different

my guess shared material will have effect on the asset rather then the individual GO attached mat

[sly breach]

adding _ seem to give me shader errors saying that shader kernel 'frag' is missing

is there a way to turn on / off a pass instead ?

[regal stag]

I don't think so, but you could include the pass in a separate shader/material and toggle that by adding/removing it from the MeshRenderer.
Or if you're in URP, use the RenderObjects feature to render the additional pass instead. That feature can then be toggled on/off.

[meager pelican]

If you need to clone the material for each one, do it once, IMO, like in start(). But I wouldn't do it in every update. Talk about overloading the garbage collector! You're creating a new material once per frame for each object every time!

[sly breach]

im just testing shader collisions

[regal stag]

Doesn't .material only generate an instance the first time it's used?

[meager pelican]

Not that I'm aware of. But that would be interesting new info.

[teal breach]

Just out of interest, would this case be better for shader_feature_local? My understanding was that it should be from the intended use of shader_feature_local, but I think because you are setting in script Unity might not include all shader variants in the build (as there are no assets using all keywords at build time). I couldn't tell if that was a bug or me misunderstanding the difference between multi_compile or shader_feature

[sly breach]

shader_feature is very similar to multi_compile. The only difference is that Unity does not include unused variants of shader_feature shaders in the final build. For this reason, you should use shader_feature for keywords that are set from the Materials, while multi_compile is better for keywords that are set from code globally.

[meager pelican]

The old instance would be GC'd though, but you still end up doing the clone and GC.

[regal stag]

shader_feature would get stripped from the build. multi_compile is safer for editing at runtime

[teal breach]

Thanks both @regal stag and @sly breach

It was the global bit that confused me - because these are per material/object, rather than a global variable

[sly breach]

i'm thinking* to make 4 shaders and just add/remove them since its a build-in RP

[regal stag]

I'd look into toggling the objects or materials rather than trying to do it with shader passes

[sly breach]

something like this for each GEOM index

not sure if a pass "scope" even needed here ...

[regal stag]

I wasn't aware of this. I've always thought it only clones the material once, even the docs mention :

If the material is used by any other renderers, this will clone the shared material and start using it from now on.
(https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Renderer-material.html)
Though it's a little unclear how it knows if the material is used by other objects or not, I guess if there's checks going on that might be expensive still. Caching the material is still definitely safer tho.

[meager pelican]

Huh, I don't remember reading that. And I looked back all the way to 2018, and it all reads the same. Meh.
Thanks, I'll remember that.
Probably keeps a ref-count.

So did he get his question answered? @sly breach

[sly breach]

this is what i ended up with

seems to do the trick

[regal stag]

Make sure you also destroy the material instances once you're done with them (e.g. in OnDestroy)

[sly breach]

true that

[regal stag]

Also I think OnValidate is editor only stuff, you might want it in Awake/Start instead if this needs to run during runtime

[sly breach]

it is - testing some stencil collisions

[drowsy wren]

Hey,
Anyone got advice for someone who's a noob at shaders?

I'm looking to create a shader effect similar to the Star Craft hive growth effect.
If I place a object in the game world then it should slowly grow a hive/infected "texture" over the terrain and static elements nearby.

I can't seem to find anything similar online to base this on, and I have no idea where to ever start.

[sinful shuttle]

I'm using Unity 2019 LTS with the built-in rendering pipeline, and Mudbun, an asset which renders metaballs via Graphics.DrawProceduralIndirect.

Mudbun normally doesn't support light probes, which is a problem when all your indoor lighting is baked, and the only reflection probe it seems to sample is the skybox regardless of where I position the transform, which also looks wrong indoors.

I was able to get light probes working with the following code:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/getinterpolatedlightprobe-interpreting-the-coefficients.461170/

But I've been scouring the Unity docs, and the include files for the shaders, and I can't seem to find any hint of how Unity sets up or uses the reflection probes. I would have thought if you can specify the light probes a mesh should use with MaterialPropertyBlock, that there would be a way to specify the reflection probes, or the transform to use for it to select the reflection probes to use as well, but if there is, I can't find it.

[low lichen]

Unity sets the unity_SpecCube0 property with the cubemap texture for each renderer, based on where the reflection probes are placed

If blending is enabled, unity_SpecCube1 is also used.

But I don't think there's an equivalent method for getting the nearest reflection probe given a position, like there is for light probes.

[grand jolt]

How do you set shader proeprty bools to true or false?

[low lichen]

@grand jolt Boolean shader properties are just floats that are 0 when false and 1 when true

[spiral bay]

I'm trying to update an URP 7.0 shader to URP10

is there some resources that can help me?

I'm having errors likecannot implicitly convert from 'struct BRDFDataAdvanced' to 'struct BRDFData'

[spiral bay]

Right sorry guys but it seems this isn't a Unity problem it would take an actual genius to solve it

[brittle owl]

hi guys! is there an already existing free shader for volumetric fog that reacts to lighting (in urp), or a tutorial somewhere for urp?

i used the volumetric fog shader that cyan made, but while it does look great it doesnt really react to light which is the effect im going for

[grand jolt]

I created a pixel image effect shader and disabled antialiasing in my quality settings and camera, but the resulting image is still antialiased. why?

Shader "Custom/DownsamplerShader"
{
    Properties
    {
        _MainTex("Texture", 2D) = "white" {}
        _VH("Vertical resolution", Int) = 240
    }
    SubShader
    {
        Cull Off ZWrite Off ZTest Always

        Pass
        {
            // ...

            sampler2D _MainTex;
            int _VH;

            fixed4 frag(v2f i) : SV_Target
            {
                float pixelSize = _ScreenParams.y / _VH;
                half dx = pixelSize / _ScreenParams.x;
                half dy = pixelSize / _ScreenParams.y;
                half2 uv = half2(dx * floor(i.uv.x / dx), dy * floor(i.uv.y / dy));
                return tex2D(_MainTex, uv);
            }
            ENDCG
        }
    }
}

[sinful shuttle]

Well, I was thinking if there isn't such a method for getting nearest reflection probes then what I could do is have a proxy mesh for which Unity will automatically pick the nearest reflection probes, and then I could grab the first two from the array, and then feed that into the shader for the procedural mesh.

[grand jolt]

Is it possible to send already existing vertex to a pbr graph ?

[modest zealot]

Hey guys, I need a shader for footprints. Basically: I need it to have a normal map, but be otherwise transparent, AND also receive shadows. Like this, but without the specular:

This is the shader I used for the image above: https://pastebin.com/9Ywmq5c7

[meager pelican]

Do you care if it has actual depth, or just looks that way? (AKA, do you need vertex offsets or just shading/color tricks?)

[modest zealot]

Just looks that way.

[meager pelican]

And one of the things you can do is to remove the gloss setting on that shader.

[modest zealot]

Then the whole thing diappears

[meager pelican]

lol crap.

Sec

Well, IDK. Your problem is that you want it transparent, so there's no color, but you don't want gloss, so there's no shine.
You could try actually assigning a color, like some grey to dull it down in the shadows, and then clip anything that isn't a shadow, but that won't pick up the highlights on the edges then.

And make that grey like 75% transparent (25% alpha or something).

[modest zealot]

This is basically what I want:

but this is just an illusion, since the print and floor are the same color

[meager pelican]

You kind of want two mutually exclusive things.
Yeah, that's the darkening shader. but see the highlights?

You can try reading the background color, adding to it or subtracting from it, but no specular. IDK.
I'm just spitballing.

[modest zealot]

Not caring much about specular.

I just want the print to react to shadows in realtime, and be transparent so it shows the texturr/color underneath

[meager pelican]

Then you need to darken in shadow, and lighten in light-facing edges.
And do it dynamically, so that it reacts to changing light, right?

[modest zealot]

Yes

[meager pelican]

Can you give me your footprint and normal map and settings to play with? I'll use that shader and screw with it.

For fun, because you stumped me and I'm feeling stupid.

[modest zealot]

sure.

[meager pelican]

You might not even need the footprint, just the normals. IDK.
I'll @ you.

[modest zealot]

That's the ideal

[meager pelican]

What settings for the numbers on the material are you liking?

New project in unity is so slow for me. IDK if it's the new versions or what.
What version are you in?

[modest zealot]

2020.1

[meager pelican]

Did you have any particular settings you want besides defaults?

[low lichen]

If you're using a deferred renderer, the decal could modify the normals buffer before the lighting pass

[grand jolt]

why not use the standard shader with albedo 0?

[meager pelican]

He doesn't like the gloss. But if he removes the gloss, it all vanishes.

lol

[modest zealot]

OK, so I think I might have found a workaround

[grand jolt]

hmm you can always tone down metalness and smoothness but yeah it gets hard to see

[eager folio]

What render path are you using?

[grand jolt]

you can also modify the lighting info in forward rendering using a custom lighting model

[eager folio]

If you are using HDRP there's a built in deferred decal shader, I believe

[low lichen]

But lighting in forward is calculated per-object. So the ground object will have to know about this footprint.

[modest zealot]

So I ended up making the albedo semitransparent and blurry, and then the normal map had something it could cast shadows on:

so the albedo itself is transparent in the middle

[grand jolt]

oh true

[meager pelican]

Yeah, and playing with metallic and gloss got rid of the highlights. That's on a quad, and I clipped transparent pixels by alpha-0.001

I added this to the quad and I'm using it as a stencil type of thing with a floor y+0.001 offset to avoid z-fighting.

The code was modified to do a fairly early clip for fun.

    clip(c.a - 0.001);
    float dist = distance(_WorldSpaceCameraPos, IN.worldPos);```

[brittle owl]

Hi! currently making a custom lighting shader with shader graph that uses an unlit graph. how do i remake normal map functionality?

[meager pelican]

@modest zealot So is what you did good, or do you want ^^???
There's lots more possible stuff to do if you want to play with it. Reading the background texture, for example. Or doing additive or subtractive blending.

[modest zealot]

If there's a better solution I would love to know.

Can you tell me about reading the background texture?

[brittle owl]

^ (anyone?)

[brittle owl]

actually, this seems to have worked, but let me know if im doing something wrong

wait nvm this doesnt really work

[tacit parcel]

I think he maybe means the Grab Pass

[primal nova]

is there a way to scale uvs from the center and not from the bottom left corner?

[regal stag]

Can try setting the type on the Transfrom to Direction but that is the correct way to handle it afaik

[regal stag]

Subtract (0.5, 0.5), then scale (multiply by some value) and Add (0.5, 0.5) back. That should scale it from the center

[thick fulcrum]

if that's not working, one thing which springs to mind is after the dot product are you clamping with a saturate node?

[feral kite]

Someone experienced with command buffers and blit shaders? I'm looking to copy paste the colors of one camera to another, before the camera that gets pasted to renders anything

[meager pelican]

There are few "standard solutions" in shaders, only results and maths. 😉 If it looks good, it is good.
That said, you have 100 options, and it's all fun, and all up to you.
As far as the background color goes:
There's blending that you can use to blend with the background without having to know what it is, and then there's the grab pass that @tacit parcel mentioned, that "grabs" the background and captures it into a texture for another pass to use.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-GrabPass.html

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

[meager pelican]

For example, two pass blending would allow you to increase or decrease the tone of the color by some value. There's an additive mode and a subtractive mode for blending, but I think you have to do that in two passes unless you can manage to get negative color values to work in additive passes, and even then that may not work on all platforms. Others would know more about than I do. Blending takes a bit of getting used to, but it's not bad once you get it "decoded". Google around for videos on it, and see Unity's blend doc above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfM-yu0iQBk

Multiplicative blending may work to lighten/darken in one pass too. I think. I'd have to mess with it.

So <1 would darken, >1 would lighten, 1 would keep it the same.

[tacit parcel]

Got a few free time to play around with shader, here's what I got

Shader code

Shader "Custom/TransparentNormalForShane"
{
    Properties{
        _BumpMap("BumpMap", 2D) = "bump" {}
    }
        SubShader{

            Pass{ ColorMask 0 ZWrite On }

            Tags { "RenderType" = "Transparent"  "Queue" = "Transparent"}
            LOD 200

            CGPROGRAM
            #pragma surface surf SimpleSpecular alpha

            half4 LightingSimpleSpecular (SurfaceOutput s, half3 lightDir, half3 viewDir, half atten) {
                half3 h = normalize (lightDir + viewDir);

                half diff = max (0, dot (s.Normal, lightDir));

                float nh = max (0, dot (s.Normal, h));
                float spec = pow (nh, 48.0);

                half4 c;
                c.rgb = (_LightColor0.rgb * diff + _LightColor0.rgb * spec) * atten;
                c.a = abs(s.Normal.r * s.Normal.g);
                return c;
            }

            struct Input {
                float2 uv_BumpMap;
            };
            
            sampler2D _BumpMap;
            
            void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutput o) {
                o.Normal = UnpackNormal(tex2D(_BumpMap, IN.uv_BumpMap));
            }
            ENDCG
            }
            FallBack "Diffuse"
}

this part is a hack lol
c.a = abs(s.Normal.r * s.Normal.g);

[meager pelican]

Yeah, I was thinking before that (s)he wouldn't even need the albedo texture. Just normals to modify lighting.
Is that on a quad, or on the "floor"?

[hasty holly]

how do i get this to do something

[shadow locust]

make a material and choose your shader as the shader for the material

[coarse widget]

Hi, I'm learning how to write shaders and I was wondering about one of the built in shader variables https://docs.unity3d.com/2019.3/Documentation/Manual/SL-UnityShaderVariables.html
What exactly is _WorldSpaceLightPos0? I see it says it's either the position of direction of a light, but how does it work if there are multiple light sources? (i.e. which light will it choose?)

[sly breach]

is there a way to have bitwise value evaluated inside a stencil scope or am i doing something wrong here ?

Pass
{
  Stencil 
  {
    WriteMask 0xf~f
  }
}

[wide delta]

Hey all, I'm working in URP shader graph, and I'm getting this error:

Compiling Vertex program with LIGHTMAP_ON _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS
Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_USE_DITHER_MASK_FOR_ALPHABLENDED_SHADOWS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_ENABLE_DETAIL_NORMALMAP SHADER_API_DESKTOP UNITY_COLORSPACE_GAMMA UNITY_LIGHT_PROBE_PROXY_VOLUME UNITY_LIGHTMAP_FULL_HDR
Disabled keywords: DOTS_INSTANCING_ON _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS_CASCADE _SHADOWS_SOFT _ADDITIONAL_LIGHT_SHADOWS INSTANCING_ON UNITY_NO_DXT5nm UNITY_ENABLE_NATIVE_SHADOW_LOOKUPS UNITY_METAL_SHADOWS_USE_POINT_FILTERING UNITY_NO_SCREENSPACE_SHADOWS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF2 UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF3 UNITY_NO_FULL_STANDARD_SHADER UNITY_HARDWARE_TIER1 UNITY_HARDWARE_TIER2 UNITY_HARDWARE_TIER3 UNITY_HALF_PRECISION_FRAGMENT_SHADER_REGISTERS UNITY_LIGHTMAP_DLDR_ENCODING UNITY_LIGHTMAP_RGBM_ENCODING UNITY_VIRTUAL_TEXTURING UNITY_PRETRANSFORM_TO_DISPLAY_ORIENTATION UNITY_ASTC_NORMALMAP_ENCODING SHADER_API_GLES30```

I'm new to working with custom lighting functions, so I'm not really sure where I should start looking at to resolve this... if anyone has some info or any references surround this, it would be much appreciated

[uncut valve]

Probably a simple question but I can't seem to figure it out - how can I make a shader graph shader not cast/receive shadows?

is it the hacky _RECEIVE_SHADOWS_OFF keyword thing?

[sly breach]

so apparently this is webGL syntax and resolves to the following : 0xffffffff but in unity the max value would be 255

[tacit parcel]

on a quad, rendered on top of the cube floor

[wide delta]

I figured it out, I didn't have shadow cascades set up on my render pipeline asset 😓

[uncut valve]

I also figured out my problem, turns out I could disable receive lighting in the meshrenderer in the inspector, did the trick

[timid minnow]

I've created this rather simple shader in shader graph...

Here's the graph itself:

Few questions... what would be the best way to have this effect, but be able to tweak the colors in the inspector?

Maybe sample a black and white texture, but how would I map one color to the shadows and another to the highlights?

Second question, you can see that from the top, it radiates outwards, but from the bottom it radiates inwards... what would be a good way for it to get it to radiate outwards on both sides?

(there's no requirement that this be mapped to a sphere... if I could get this effect on a quad or something I'd be just as happy)

[tacit parcel]

Maybe sample a black and white texture, but how would I map one color to the shadows and another to the highlights?
interpolate (lerp) from color1 to color2 using sampled color value

what would be a good way for it to get it to radiate outwards on both sides?
reverse the UV? the easiest way is to delete the lower half, duplicate the top, flip z (or y depends on the model orientation), and flip normal too if necessary

[sour crow]

can someone help me with a shader

basically i want a transparent shader with a fresnel outline, but i cant seem to figure out how to make it actually transparent isntead of just black

ohh figured it out

its in the options for pbr

[silver cipher]

heeey guyss

i'm curious as to how to learn to make smth like this with shaders or where to get started

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf0_FfiQ2Y0

[cosmic prairie]

by the looks of it there are 3 different objects, the fruit/food itself, the peel that is still on the fruit and the peel that you are peeling off

the peel that is still on it probably has a texture that tells the shader which areas are peeled (clipped by the alpha clip threashold)

you will probably have to make a script/(compute shader?? I'm not sure about the support for it on mobile) for drawing on that texture

[grave sedge]

Hello,
I need to create a freezed lake, here's the upper layer of ice on the lake.
My ship must broke the ice layer, so I created multiple gameobject of ice layer which have a hinge join.
My question: How can I have the texture for each object to have a continuous look like the sprite above?
Should it be done with shaders? If yes how?

[cosmic prairie]

the peel that came off is probably a 3D mesh generated by a script

so if I were you, I would try to just paint on a texture and try to make the painted areas transparent first if you are a begginer

then, try to paint on a 3D object (a bit more difficult)

and when you have that, try to get into procedural mesh generation

[cosmic prairie]

is there like a UV offset setting in your material? if yes, try to wrap the textures correctly by tweaking that

or there is probably a setting on the sprite if not in the material

[grave sedge]

I use only spriteRenderer ans SpriteEditor at the moment. Ok, I need to create a material specific with UV, I 'll try to find for that, thank you

[grave sedge]

I can't see.... my first sprite above is just tiled. It is here just for the example of what I need to the gameobject below.
I don't know how to make each gameobject with texture have the same render as above, a continuous texture

[sinful shuttle]

I'm using MudBun, a metaball renderer which generates the meshes procedurally. It normally cannot support light probes and reflection probes, but I have found it's possible to copy light probe data to a material property block which is passed to drawProceduralIndirect, and the mesh will then take them into account.

However, reflection probes are proving more difficult.

            LightProbeUtility.SetSHCoefficients(transform.position, m_materialProps);  

          // Get reflection probe indices.
            int[] specCube = {
              Shader.PropertyToID("unity_SpecCube0"), 
              Shader.PropertyToID("unity_SpecCube1") 
            };

          // Grab game object's reflection probes and pass them to the procedural object's shader.
            List<ReflectionProbeBlendInfo> m_blendInfos = new List<ReflectionProbeBlendInfo>();
            GetComponent<Renderer>().GetClosestReflectionProbes(m_blendInfos);      
                 
            for (int i = 0; i < m_blendInfos.Count; i++) {  
              m_materialProps.SetTexture(specCube[i], m_blendInfos[i].probe.bakedTexture);
            } ```

This is what I tried to do. I'm very new to scripting in Unity and this is some complicated stuff that delves deep into Unity's undocumented code base, so I'm really lost, but the above seemed like it should work. I have no idea if is actually is working as intended though, or to what degree. All I do know is that the metaballs are still reflecting only the skybox no matter where I position the transform of the game object which this script is on.

This is the mesh filter and renderer I added to the game object that this script is on to force Unity to update its reflection probes, but that data isn't automatically carried over when callling drawProceduralIndirect, and my efforts above to copy it over via the same material property block I'm using for the light proves, have thus far failed.

[thick fulcrum]

the suggestion is to tweak the offset, usually seen like this in the material

if your shader does not have the offset parameter, you will either need to find another suitable one or create one 😉

[grave sedge]

Than you Draydak, I saw that on the material, the offset. Which shader I must use to have the minimum of CPU used?

[thick fulcrum]

if your using the default sprite shader, that will probably suffice. depending on if your using URP or built in renderer you will probably need different approach to handle instancing and batching.

[grave sedge]

When I use default sprite shader, I lose offset/tile sprites, I don't have fields to change them

[thick fulcrum]

ok then the basic unlit will probably be next best match

if your in built in you may need to look into material property blocks to allow same material with different offset. This is not something I've had to look into, as I'm in URP it handles all the batching for me.

[grave sedge]

ok I'll try that and I'll say to you, thank you Draydak

ok it works! BUT.... All of my gameobjets have their texture changed.... I can't dissociate them

I'm using URP

any idead how can I use same material with different offset?

[thick fulcrum]

🤔 instancing, but that's more runtime
material property blocks might be what you need to research

[thick fulcrum]

if you don't have too many of these, multiple materials.. but not ideal solution

[grave sedge]

yes multiple material i though but not a good idea..

[thick fulcrum]

a better way might be to chop up your image and consider using a sprite / texture atlas. This I believe this would have better performance in long run and you should be able to use a sprite shader.
Something else to consider / look into

🤔 still means multiple materials, probably no getting away from it.

[grand jolt]

Is PS1 style vertex snapping/texture distortion possible in shader graph and URP?

[meager pelican]

Some discussion:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/closed-is-it-possible-to-create-ps1-vertex-snapping-shader-in-shader-graph.683860/

IDK about the texture distortion specifics of PS1, but there's probably discussion on whatever that is too, and there's some sample old-school shaders in that thread. As far as duplicating it all in SG, well, welcome to bleeding edge, SG and new pipelines.

[tacit parcel]

The first thing I have in mind is using world space coordinate for uv mapping

[meager pelican]

@sinful shuttle IDK if this post helps or hurts, but....
Problem definition:
CommandBuffer.DrawMesh and Graphics.DrawMeshNow does not setup reflection data per object. Only Graphics.DrawMesh* schedules intermediate renderers and those get fully per object setup.
https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/urp-object-rendered-using-drawprocedural-is-not-getting-reflection-from-reflection-probes
Probably true for standard built-in pipeline too, not URP specific, I'd guess.

Discussion:
So that's what you're facing. You've said you've gotten light probes working, but not reflection probes. You seem to be setting that in your code.

So I guess I have some questions.

Have you used a debugger and/or renderdoc and looked into what data you're getting for the instanced calls? What's going on?

I feel your pain, but I cannot tell from your post what the data looks like. This is a case for debugging, on both the c# side and on the shader side. There are dedicated debuggers for the GPU side too, but hopefully you won't have to resort to that, RenderDoc should tell you something.

I'd start with finding out what data actually ends up being selected on the C# side, with a debugger or even some debug.log stuff.
Then I'd check what's passed through to the shader. And further, trace it through.
IDK what you're doing in your shader code either.

I know this isn't very helpful. Maybe someone will have an "I hit that before" epiphany.

[meager pelican]

I'd ask Long Bunny Labs in their support thread or discord too.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/mudbun-volumetric-vfx-mesh-tool-official-thread.1038529/

[sinful shuttle]

I'm using the built in rendering pipeline in Unity 2019 LTS.

[sinful shuttle]

I don't know how to use a debugger in Unity to do that, I'm pretty new to scripting in Unity. I've been using DebugLog to debug so far. And yes, I've seen that post about objects not getting a full setup, which is why I'm trying to set that stuff up myself for the procedural call. It worked with the light probes which also were not set up.

[sinful shuttle]

I have. They're not very experienced in this area themselves it seems.

[plush oasis]

someone here that is good in shader graph and can help me out ?

[meager pelican]

@sinful shuttle Oy. Well it's their system/shader.

OK, so if you think the C# side is setting it up properly and it's filled with data, and set on the material. Try RenderDoc first to look at what comes in as set by Unity's engine and passed to the shader. You can see the draw calls, and look at textures.
You can get more info here: https://docs.unity3d.com/2019.4/Documentation/Manual/RenderDocIntegration.html
See the two notes at the bottom, one is that you have to modify the shader to have debug symbols and the other is that you have an option to also use Visual Studio debuggers.
I'll add a third thing that you can use dedicated graphics-card debugging tools too. But before you do that, check the other easier routes first.

*** And make sure that the shader you're using is even checking for reflections in the first place. ***

It sounds like it may NOT be, if LBL isn't experienced with reflections themselves. So you're into custom-mod territory here on the shader source side. That means that unless you've modified the shader, or LBL put it in already, no matter what you send it it won't work. Looks to be a custom material, not a standard unity shader.

Wishing you the best.

https://www.bitshiftprogrammer.com/2018/11/reflection-probe-custom-shader-tutorial.html

[outer shuttle]

Hi guys, i need to compute a heightmap of my scene geometry with a compute shader, any pointers on how to do that?

[topaz hemlock]

The shading language used in Unity is Cg or HLSL or its own kind that's the mix of both?

What's the difference between using HLSLPROGRAM and CGPROGRAM declaration?

[outer shuttle]

http://developer.download.nvidia.com/cg/

[topaz hemlock]

That doesn't really answer any of my question.

[outer shuttle]

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

I am not more educated on the subject than this answer

[topaz hemlock]

I found an answer on some other documentation page:

HLSL program snippets are written between CGPROGRAM and ENDCG keywords, or alternatively between HLSLPROGRAM and ENDHLSL. The latter form does not automatically include HLSLSupport and UnityShaderVariables built-in header files.

[meager pelican]

@outer shuttle I'd say you can reconstruct the worldspace position from the scene and use the Y value or whatever offset you need.

Maybe google "worldspace position of scene pixel Unity" or some such. There will be shader code.
It ends up being similar to a post processing pass or another camera. But you'd want to avoid having to render the scene twice to get it.

The other way is to have all your shaders in the scene construct that as they go, but then everything needs a custom shader to do it.

You'll have to render just the height to a texture, maybe with a stacked camera and render texture.

Spitballing.

Similar for a compute shader, you'd pass in the render texture (depth buffer in particular) and output to another texture of the same size.

But probably just a "red" texture (1 value vector for one float).

[outer shuttle]

@meager pelican Thank's 🙂 Will look into that. I was actually looking into the "Shader.GetGlobalTexture();" and pass it to the compute shader.
Basicly i have a simple Gerstner waves shader, and i want to modulate the wave speed and amplitude depending on the depth of the ocean at a certain point, so i thought i would just pre-compute the height into a texture.

[sinful shuttle]

Its definitely doing something with reflection probes because the material can be metallic and will reflect the skybox, though someone on their discord reported it reflecting a random reflection probe, which is not my experience in spite of having many in the world.

Also their shaders are made in Amplify, so I assume that is what's taking care of this for them.

[sinful shuttle]

I found the Frame Debugger and tried using that because I don't know if I can even edit the shader they're using in the way your tool describes, and while it didn't allow me to look at what was going on for the procedural mesh itself, its parent object which I have my script on and which is trying to grab its reflection probes is there and I could see a bunch of the parameters for reflection probes in the data, so that was somewhat useful in getting a better handle on what's going on. I may need to set the HDR parameter for example, eventually, if I can even get the texture to change. I also wondered if maybe my code specifying the parameter names was messed up. So I tried to pass the new parameter by name... And that's when I discovered part of the problem. The code that's supposed to be grabbing the nearest reflection probes doesn't seem to be getting any at all. The list is empty. So it would never even set the parameter on the shader...

And that code is here:

            List<ReflectionProbeBlendInfo> m_blendInfos = new List<ReflectionProbeBlendInfo>();
            GetComponent<Renderer>().GetClosestReflectionProbes(m_blendInfos);      
                 
            for (int i = 0; i < m_blendInfos.Count; i++) {  
              m_materialProps.SetTexture(specCube[i], m_blendInfos[i].probe.bakedTexture);
            } ```

Hm, scratch that. I just noticed it wasn't actually showing any probes in the inspector. I must have fewer probes in that area than I thought and the skybox doesn't count as one...

Now it's showing one probe. So back to testing I guess...

Okay, so bypassing all the rest of that code above and just doing this still produces no results:
m_materialProps.SetTexture("unity_SpecCube0", m_blendInfos[0].probe.bakedTexture);
But it's not erroring and reporting that I'm trying to access an element of the array that doesn't exist any more. And it's not complaining about bakedTexture being null, which it did a while back when I tried swapping it out for customBakedTexture. But hm,I just noticed there is also a texture property... Surely that can't work since the other one didn't override the skybox probe...

Well no dice there. Still skybox.

[calm jolt]

hi guys, i want to create an outline shader in shader graph for my toon shader. Does anyone know how to do that without duplicating the object?

[brittle owl]

check out alexander ameyes outline shader

https://alexanderameye.github.io/outlineshader.html

[calm jolt]

I've already restarted unity... can someone help?

[hasty holly]

How would I recreate this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg0L9aCRWPE

There's no PBR graph

Where would you find that?

the lit shader

?

oh

nvm

[hasty holly]

wait do i need this though

yeah no the brackeys tutorial isnt gonna work

[hasty holly]

this one

yeah

oh

[brittle owl]

how do i fake skybox rendering in a blit shadergraph?

I've got an outline shader that outlines the edges of objects, and ive created a fake fog shader thats rendered with blit, but the problem is, the fog renders over the skybox. if i make it so that the fog doesnt render where the real world skybox is, then the outline shows, which defeats the purpose of the fog

it makes sense, but i'd like the skybox to show over the fog

[lucid sluice]

How do project a blob shadow on a surface without linear fall off that does not pass through the surface?

[brittle owl]

or instead of this, is there a way to make sure the outline shader doesnt render over the skybox?

im using the alexander ameye outline shader

[meager pelican]

Change it to a queue that's before the skybox? But you won't be able to outline transparents.

[sly breach]

is it possible to load a remote shader file during runtime or does the shader compiler only works in editor ?

[knotty juniper]

shader compiler is only in the editor.
you can use a assetbundle to deliver a compiled shader to the build

[sly breach]

thanks

[brittle owl]

question, how do i access the cameradepthtexture without redefining it in shadergraph?

or is there another way to see whether some part on screen is the skybox

cause previously i was just using a branch with a comparison node that checked if the scene depth was past a threshold

[brittle owl]

anyone?

[knotty juniper]

sorry no idea 🙂

but accessing the allready existing depth textrure and and using that for deciding sounds like the fastest way to do that

[brittle owl]

Doesnt work

gives me an error in shader graph about redefining 😔

[knotty juniper]

does the scene depth node work for you?

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@6.9/manual/Scene-Depth-Node.html

seems to do under the hood what you are trying to do

void Unity_SceneDepth_Raw_float(float4 UV, out float Out)
{
    Out = SHADERGRAPH_SAMPLE_SCENE_DEPTH(UV);
}

[brittle owl]

gives same error

something about redefining

[knotty juniper]

URP or HDRP?

[brittle owl]

urp

[knotty juniper]

mmm let me try it

[brittle owl]

basically its being used in the same graph as a custom node that accesses the _CameraDepthTexture

and i guess under the hood scene depth probably accesses the _CameraDepthTexture

[knotty juniper]

so shadergrap is probably defining the _CameraDepthTexture in 2 places

[brittle owl]

yep

how do i make it not do that lol

[knotty juniper]

mmm might be work a look in the generated shader code

[brittle owl]

for the custom node?

[knotty juniper]

the whole shader and see where its defineing the _CameraDepthTexture variable

[brittle owl]

error goes away when i delete scene depth node so it’s definitely that

[knotty juniper]

or your custome node code

[brittle owl]

or wait, is there a way I can make the custom node pass the scene depth as an output :o

[brittle owl]

yeah it accesses the _CameraDepthTexture

[knotty juniper]

or can you use SHADERGRAPH_SAMPLE_SCENE_DEPTH(UV) in your custom node?

[brittle owl]

oh okay

but doesn’t that do the same thing under the hood?

[knotty juniper]

if you use the depth node it will incude int eh shader a include file that contains the SHADERGRAPH_SAMPLE_SCENE_DEPTH function
if you use that function again it does not redefine the varibale

[brittle owl]

oh sick i’ll try that

wait what does it return it as, vector3?

[knotty juniper]

no depth is a float

[brittle owl]

oh sick

oh my custom function uses the depth as a texture

how would i adapt that to use the shader graph code

[knotty juniper]

in the end you sample the texture a at some coordinate and use one of the channels for some calculation
you just replace the one vector3 values with the float you get from SHADERGRAPH_SAMPLE_SCENE_DEPTH

[brittle owl]

it worked!

thank you so much!

[meager pelican]

I'd just fix it up the normal way, and feed the scene depth into the custom function as an input. No "redefining" required. There's different ways to encode depth value, so if you use the node, it is "situation aware' across platforms.

@brittle owl

[fervent thunder]

Hey, do you know of any outside glow shader? Free? Is it hard to make one? Is it hard on performance?

Like a border glow shader, with the object visible with a glow ontop

[dusky cobalt]

Outline Shader + Bloom post processing

[fervent thunder]

Is there a performant way to create an effect like this?

I want to show the user my item is collectable, and thought outline shader would be good, but any idea?

[fervent thunder]

Im going to try 'Quick outline' asset

[humble inlet]

does using multiple time nodes, for example, cause lag, or does unity cache it all as one? asking because I keep seeing people saying that multiple nodes doing the same thing has a higher overhead. I always assumed that it would only calculate it once, and paste all the values in...

[grand jolt]

What shader does the line renderer use in Unity 2020 LTS URP ?

[shadow locust]

Whatever shader you want. You can assign any material you want

[sly breach]

is there a way to auto-update the shader in editor via _Time ?

[meager pelican]

I'd assume that for most cases of using _Time (a built-in passed shader variable) it's going to be the same. That's not to say that the calcs you do with it don't add cycles. But unity passes a _Time variable into shaders, whatever it's called for SRP, it's still passed in for each frame as a global shader variable.

@sly breach Turn on animated materials, it should animate using _Time.

[humble inlet]

ahhh... i'm an idiot, i didn't state shadergraph! but yeah, i agree with you haha, it should be the same

[meager pelican]

You said nodes, so....that's going to be SG, or one of the others.

[sly breach]

can't find it

[meager pelican]

https://answers.unity.com/questions/1177720/animated-shader-preview-in-scene.html
YMMV depending on version, but...yeah.

[sly breach]

that's a new one for me, cheers

[humble inlet]

ah, i'm an idiot times two, then!

[coarse widget]

https://docs.unity3d.com/2020.2/Documentation/Manual/SL-VertexFragmentShaderExamples.html I can't get the lit shader examples to work in my project (using Unity 2020.2). I copied the code exactly. When I download the project from this link it works fine. I'm comparing side by side with my project, but I can't see the difference. Any help?

I'm about to just use their project as a base lol

hmm it's working now after I swapped the shader back to standard and then back to my custom shader

no clue why

[grand jolt]

Hello everyone I was learning about unity shaders and encountered with some problem can anyone help me with it
Shader warning in "'Paint1G_WAnim_Shader" ': implicit truncation of vector type
Thankyou so much

[grand jolt]

Hello!
Some time ago i had a problem integrating an alpha mask into a shader to mask out some areas which should not be affected with textures and should remain transparent.
I could solve this with some work in a simple version.
Now I have the same problem with another Shader which is more complicated and I have no idea how to solve this problem.
Since I am no programmer and no shader programmer I do not understand what to do here.

Is here someone, who can solve this problem for me and integrate this alpha mask into my shader?

[meager pelican]

@grand jolt You're probably assigning a vector4 to a vector3, or 3 to 2, or any of them to a float. Whatever.
You should use the .xyzw or .rbga channels to specify what you want. Like:

float2 fl2;
float4 color;
...
fl2 = color.rg;```
then you won't get the warning.

@grand jolt That's not quite clear to me, but
If you're using alpha clipping (like with a threshhold) then you'd use a clip() command to discard the pixel (or you could make sure the alpha is set to 0 if you're worried about discards on tile-based (mobile) gpus.
You should also explain what pipeline you're using, and maybe use pastebin to post the shader. Someone may feel like digging in.

If it's shader graph, there's an alpha-clip threshold you can use built into the master node/stack.

[grand jolt]

it is already present in vector4

It showing this issue in every asset I import

[meager pelican]

No way for me to tell from here with just an error message. Either something is screwed up for your install, or your shaders have a problem.

[hasty holly]

I tried upgrading to urp and it seems like the custom shaders from some of the assets are broken

at first it was all purple

[spare wedge]

Hello, I would like to highlight the borders of my object but every tutorial that I've seen was with the unlit shader is there a way to do it with the lit shader ?

[grand jolt]

Can you join me on stream via discord and check whats going wrong I am not getting anything helpful on google.

[past nexus]

Hello,

I am trying to use tex2D(s, t, dx, dy) in a custom function in shader graph. Reference here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3dhlsl/dx-graphics-hlsl-tex2d-s-t-ddx-ddy
In the discussion here https://forum.unity.com/threads/lwrp-custom-function-with-tex2dlod.674674/#post-4517542 they say that tex2D is a "Direct3D 9 thing" and shader graph is written with Direct3D 11 in mind. Therefore you need to use texture2D.Sample() instead (or even better a Unity Macro SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D). My issue is that I cannot pass dx and dy to either texture2D.Sample() or SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D. Does anyone know if there is a Direct3D 11 method that is equivalent to tex2D(s, t, dx, dy)

[regal stag]

SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D_GRAD(texture, sampler, uv, dx, dy) would be the equivalent.

[past nexus]

Thank you so much!

[lean lotus]

would it be more efficient to for a compute shader to loop through looking at lots of different data from a structured buffer many many times, or for it to look at the same data, but put on a large texture?
Looking for ways to speed up bounding volume hierarchy traversal

[noble tulip]

How can I tell how PC intensive a shader is going to be when playing?

[shadow locust]

try it out and see

[noble tulip]

I guess that's true. Does that mean that the minimum requirements for anything I put in Unity mean that anyone could handle most things I build in it? I'm trying to decide what the min requirements for a game would be if I used a shader vs take the time to build every single model with texture inversion.

Dumb question, I know. I'm tripping over the subject a bit lol

[echo solstice]

Are these real?

Can someone read and tell?

[tame topaz]

It's 2021, use a bin site to share code.

What do you mean by real? It looks like shader code. Try it.

[echo solstice]

But image is easy

[echo solstice]

Yes

Shader

I mean is it a dump or real code?

[echo solstice]

Can you please tell me

?

[tame topaz]

It's code, what are you even asking.

[echo solstice]

I mean will it work?

I got it from devxunity

[tame topaz]

Have you tried it?

[echo solstice]

I try to extract shader code

[echo solstice]

I have to type it

😑

[tame topaz]

Get typing. Nobody can compile code in their head. It looks like shader code, so there's your answer.

[echo solstice]

Yup

I should try

It's from unity 5.5.

But I extracted code with devxunity 2019

Is it a problem? Will I get any error?

[tired bronze]

You can't use stuff you don't have rights to

[echo solstice]

Nope

A project

I have made before

I have found a piece of it

[tame topaz]

So your own project, yet you have no idea if your own code works? Stop spamming this channel with your nonsense.

Type it out and give it a try, if you must know.

[deep salmon]

sorry, this is a very beginner question, but even after googling i seem to still have trouble with this. does anyone know why the materials are greyed out?

some of my materials are greyed out, while others i seem to be able to edit

[regal stag]

Materials embedded in models can't be edited. You need to extract them first, there should be a button in the model import settings (material tab) to do that.

[deep salmon]

hmmm, ok. I know i extracted textures. But do i have to do them both?

i will try this, thank you for your help

[sly breach]

is there a way to set Pass Render * Queue ?

it seems like it will let me write this without errors but it will use the main shader's render queue

[forest barn]

How do I get selfshadowing on a surface that uses a shader with parallax occlusion mapping? The documentation wants me to connect the PixelDepthOffset to the master node, but there's no possible connection... URP Shader Graph, btw.

[real pilot]

I've just split up a large single-kernel compute shader into a multi-kernel one, which performs great, but has the minor annoyance of now not being able to edit shader code during runtime and have it update straight away - changes to the shader invalidate the Append/Consume buffers that I'm using. Is there a way around this? It was a really handy feature to be able to change the shader code and see it update in realtime!
EDIT: Fixed, I was being a dum dum and not calling SetBuffer in the right place (which I had been before). All good now 🙂

[wary horizon]

Could any shader guru's guide me on how to achieve this ghost-like shader? Thank youuu ❤️

[shadow kraken]

That just looks like fresnel

[wary horizon]

i tried fresnel on my dude and mulitplied it by a colour but it looks horrible

[shadow kraken]

Looks like you have a lowpoly character with hard edges, it's not gonna work as well for you in that case

[desert orbit]

It works better on rounded shapes. Sharp geometric shapes won't have smooth falloff.

[wary horizon]

Theres not really any tutorials on this either

[shadow kraken]

Playing with the power should give you some better results though

[wary horizon]

i yoinked this one from google though, using a HLSL shader, Looks fine but its missing that outline glow

[shadow kraken]

You can add a fresnel effect to that in addition to the faded look

[wary horizon]

HLSL goes way over myhead

how would i do this?

https://paste.ofcode.org/8wEL6FdjcYLaQRMRDvtSvf

[desert orbit]

Can only point you to a tutorial explaining how HLSL works. Time stamp is on Fresnel explanation and later there's a complete shader anatomy breakdown. https://youtu.be/kfM-yu0iQBk?t=1183

[slim steppe]

How would go about displacing a water sphere/water on a planet?

Do you know how I could do that @regal stag?

(I'm using shader graph)

[robust ibex]

hello

can you guys help me with this weird problem?

the weird thing on the right

some mesh with other materials don't have it

[regal stag]

Can displace along the normals (Position (object) + Normal Vector (object) * displacementStrength). The more difficult part would be getting it to be seamless but I'm not sure I can help much there right now.

Maybe Triplanar would be best, but you'll need a custom node as the regular one can't be used in the vertex stage. Can see the code it uses here, you'll need SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D_LOD instead for vertex stage : https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@11.0/manual/Triplanar-Node.html

[slim steppe]

Thanks

[robust ibex]

oh jesus

[robust ibex]

I think it's because of the normal map that I use

damn it

it's still the same

but alot better

[keen snow]

Hi guys,

Where can I find a shader to make my low poly tree sway as moved by the wind? I looked at the Unity Asset store but couldn't find anything! 😥

[robust ibex]

guys, how to expand normal map LOD?

[thick fulcrum]

have you set your imported texture to correct type i.e. "normal map" when importing?

[robust ibex]

yes I have

Nvidia sucks I guess.

[forest barn]

Is Parallax Occlusion Mapping with shadows even possible in URP Shader Graph?

[thick fulcrum]

should be but you'd probably have to do your own lighting, as in I can't see it working with the LIT graph

[main coral]

I'm trying to create my own toon shader and while it works on my character model, i have problems with this big planet object:

Where do those weird corners come from?

[spring frost]

In URP ... how do I specify the shader targets Unity builds?

I'm interested in making a build only for #pragma target 4.5+, but with shadergraph, I can't seem to make that choice on a per-shader level. Isn't there a global setting? I've been digging for half an hour already...

[spring frost]

Perhaps the boundary of a shadow cascade; but this doesn't look shadow mapped.

(bester Username, übrigens)

Can you share the shader?

[sly breach]

How to extend p to negative infinity ?

that's what i got rn : p = (p+.5*c) % (c) - 0.5 * c;

where c = float3( 1,1,1 )

nvm i just shifted p +1000 units

[main coral]

Hahah danke danke, Fritösenerlöse sind die besten Erlöse 😆 So I followed this tutorial mostly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC91uxRTId8&ab_channel=NedMakesGames). So the shader actually supports shadows

And from this piece of Code inside a custom function node I get "Shadow Attenuation" and "Distance Attenuation":

https://gist.github.com/NedMakesGames/073fa3799aacbc67bf4979243955d671

[spring frost]

But then I'd guess it's a shadow cascade.

[main coral]

Which I multiply together like this

[spring frost]

Try: Reducing shadow distance, turning on soft shadows.

[spring frost]

Wait.

Nice node, I use one that has a separate shadow output.

[main coral]

Yeah, pretty glad I found it 🙂

[regal stag]

Is it a custom mesh? Maybe it has some weird mesh normals?

[spring frost]

will the jagged edge go away when you disconnect the shadow map?

[main coral]

Yeah I made it in blender out of a quad sphere

Ill try that, thx

[spring frost]

To first rule out it's the shadow map or the normals / math. 🙂

Interesting how everyone uses saturate I think my shader math is off 😄

(I use smoothstep... to the point of abusing smoothstep)

Or remap, wow.

I'm a savage. I should unify my lighting models.

This is my sorry excuse for a toon ramp.

I'mma fix that now. 🙂

[main coral]

Haha, well I always saw saturate, but I don't know actually why other nodes wouldn't also do the job too, in the end you just have to map -1 to 1 to 0 to 1. But since I'm new to shaders I'm just a copy cat so far 😄

yeah so disconnecting the shadows didn't fix the corners, so I think checking the normals is goo idea

Posterize also is cool idea, hmm

[spring frost]

I actually dont know how posterize works internally.

probably with frac() and I have no idea how expensive that is.

[main coral]

I use a texture with a ramp on it

[spring frost]

you can try and smooth the normals on mesh import.

or see if you accidentally already do.

[regal stag]

Posterize is floor(In / (1 / Steps)) * (1 / Steps); according to docs

[spring frost]

Thank you Cyanilux!

[regal stag]

I'm a little unsure why it's written like that though and not just floor(In * Steps) / Steps. That's the same thing right?

[spring frost]

I think the 1/steps way preserves more precision.

[main coral]

I think it could actually be my model :/

It's kind of hard to see but there are weird anomalies exactly where the corners are in the end

[shadow locust]

Are these corners not just triangle borders?

[main coral]

Yeah, I guess

It's from the geometry of the model

Thx for the help everyone 🤗

[spring frost]

^^

[main coral]

I think I can fix it now 🥳

[spring frost]

I'm looking for a mapping from camera near plane to world space, basically a cylindrical projection of the inside of the world.

(it doesnt need to be accurate, it just needs to be reasonably uniform - meaning if I turn the camera, I want basically a 2D scrolling effect in that mapping)

My current guess is to use an angle delta, but that suffers from gimbal problems.

(angle delta because sin(x) = x, as every physicist will confirm

So basically an acceptable 2D projection of the delta expressed by dC = cameraDirection - oldCameraDirection

It doesn't even need to "wrap", it just needs to be continuous for every cameraDirection and oldCameraDirection, given the angle between them is small.

(the idea to offset something mapped in screen space by this, and thus moving it with the camera)

(I realize this wont work except for planes, wow.)

So I actually need to consider the object position.

🦆

So yeah I need objectPositon to viewPosition (x,y), this cant be too hard 😄

I suppose something... like... this.

Except, the screen position is divided by w, and view position has no W.

Darn, this is almost it.

It doesnt do much differently than just screen space, darn.

I want the stripes to move with the ship.

(they are not in tangent space, they are overlaid in screen space)

[regal stag]

I've used this to do something similar to that, though it has some issues as it follows the camera rotation.

Also this, similar concept but in screen space. Doesn't have those issues but more complicated / probably more expensive

[spring frost]

Oddly enough screen positions is mostly correct

Thank you I'll check these out.

I love the idea with subtracting the view positions.

So simple.

The 2nd one is pretty cool.

[regal stag]

Was based on this tweet (and the ASE graph they shared) : https://twitter.com/Ed_dV/status/1047006623330373632

[spring frost]

yeahhh

this is what I want.

it's always bound to be a little weird when stuff rotates.

But much better than the moiré / perceived flicker from screendoor effect 😄

sometimes I actually want that, but for the player ship it's awkward.

I wonder how expensive that is, I should precompute this once.

And feed it into every stipple / hatching pattern subgraph

Though ironically I'd like to fake the perspective a LITTLE. 😄

[regal stag]

Yeah, if you have multiple of those subgraphs it's best to only compute it once

[spring frost]

Because an object in the distance isnt magically drawn with a finer pencil.

but I wanted to use some kind of mipmap compromise anyhow.

Do you know how I can perhaps specify my own mipmap, or mix shader branches based on which mipmap level I am on?

so when an object is farther away, shadows are eventually just grey, not hatched.

[regal stag]

The Sample Texture 2D LOD node would allow you to select which mipmap to use.

[spring frost]

I'll rebuild the screen space node.

[spring frost]

Interesting.

But I can't really create my own mipmaps, right?

so I basically just need to decide a cutoff distance and then use a uniform value instead.

[spring frost]

Thank you @regal stag , that projection trick provides a solution for at least my tangent space issues; but it doesn't work well (of course...) for rotations, especially about the Y axis. But much better for zooms now. 🙂 Maybe I just make turning harder and slower.

[distant karma]

anybody know why
float primary = noise(float2(id.x * scale + offset1.x, id.y * scale + offset1.y));
in my compute shader would be throwing this error?

(at compile-time)

[regal stag]

Make sure you have a function named noise available

[distant karma]

its an intrinsic function for HLSL, like all the other math functions

at least according to the documentation

does it need to be included?

[regal stag]

It's only an intrinsic function for Shader Model 1 (tx_1_0). You'd need to handle it yourself or find a library that includes noise functions

[distant karma]

aha

ok thanks

[meager pelican]

@spring frost Well, for a second there, on your first post, you sounded like you were looking for some kind of polar coordinate system. Now, IDK.

[lean lotus]

Is there a good way to send many materials/textures to a compute shader? im using the compute shader for raytracing, so I need it to be able to access the textures/materials of every object its raytracing

[distant karma]

is your shader only handling one texture per thread?

or i guess handling one object per thread

[lean lotus]

I dont think so?
Each ray needs to be able to check the entire scene for intersections so...

[shadow locust]

Not sure if you'l be able to do what you're asking but you either give it textures via SetTexture, or you pass data to it via ComputeBuffer which can handle any kind of structured data you want

With SetBuffer

[lean lotus]

would I need a seperate sampler variable I need to set for every material/texture? i want to make it as easy as possible for me to have any number of meshes, and for it to just be able to read the textures
Oh... I forgot that submeshes are a thing with materials... time to figure out how that works...

[spring frost]

Yeah it's not really polar coords.

It's more like a constant self-balancing mercator projection from hell.

[valid dawn]

Hi, is shaderlab deprecated? It seems like half the documentation pages return "Not found"

[brittle owl]

is there a free solution to runtime decals in URP? Like bullet holes?

my game is gonna have this black goop that certain enemies leave behind, ive already made a shader graph, now i just need a way to make the enemies leave behind a trail

[thick fulcrum]

I usually recommend https://github.com/ColinLeung-NiloCat/UnityURPUnlitScreenSpaceDecalShader for dynamic runtime decals (for use on non-deforming meshes)
there is also a shader graph node on github for decals in shadergraph if that is preferred. but you have some limitations currently in shader graph that really need code to work around. Although I made a lit decal with this and it works for my situation, it's pretty good and robust imo.
Having said all that, there is URP decals on the way in Unities roadmap I believe work has begun but how soon they land is anyone's guess 😉

[brittle owl]

awesome! I’ll check this out in the morning, thank you!

[vocal narwhal]

The "How to use this shader in my project?" section is most amusing

[thick fulcrum]

lol guess he gets a certain question a lot 😆

[vocal narwhal]

Relatable

[brittle owl]

does it just work fine with lit shaders? no need to modify?

also step 2 of installation makes sense but idk how to do step 3 and 4 :(

[thick fulcrum]

it applies over the top of objects, be them lit or unlit opaques (not transparent)
The shader itself is only Unlit, but for bullet holes and other things it's fine. there is emission too which is handy for some effects

[onyx jungle]

no, shader lab is still the primary shader editing language provided by unity next to shader graph.

[valid dawn]

Do you have the documentation url? This just returns that the page is missing https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-CullAndDepth.html

[peak pawn]

Is there any way to get positions relative to a parent in shadergraph?

[low lichen]

Looks like they are in the process of updating the ShaderLab documentation to mention the different render pipelines

[low lichen]

No, you can get positions relative to the object itself, which will include parent transformations

If the object has all default values transform, then it will be the same as relative to parent

[fading dove]

is there any up to date examples of a sprite sheet shader for shader graph?

All the ones I have seen are outdated

[tawdry tulip]

Hey guys, do u know maybe if there is a way to edit unity's autodesk interactive shader so it doesnt multiply texture * color in albedo, but gives me only raw solid color? btw im very new to shaders

[past wedge]

Hello, I'm trying to add a geometry shader to a standard shader but I can't find any solution..

[median carbon]

Hi, has anyone here got a camera projection matrix in HDRP Shader Graph 10.4 working?
It just seems like the multiplication (projectionMatrix * Vector3 (or Vector4 with 4th number as "1")) does not work at all.

To explain it a bit more: I want to project a world position to the camera view plane (x,y,depth ; x & y from 0-1) to make a GPU Vision Cone

[hushed basin]

sorry, im beginner and i having trouble with shader

the main preview look wrong
i dont know what is trouble here +_+

[median carbon]

How does it look on the object?

It looks fine to me, obviously the Preview has a different aspect ratio, but I don't see a problem here ..

[hushed basin]

in the project it look very weird

[median carbon]

screenshot?

[regal stag]

You'll probably want to drag the A output into the Alpha port too

[hushed basin]

give me a sec,i just restart Unity

[hushed basin]

amen, thank you so much lol

[hushed basin]

it still blank ;-;

[median carbon]

Because there is no texture set in the material (inspector)

[regal stag]

The property reference might be case sensitive to use the one from the sprite renderer. Try "_MainTex"

[hushed basin]

i dont know how da hell it work lel, thank you again @_@

[lean lotus]

Is there a good way to send many textures(of differing sizes) to a compute shader without defining like 20 texture variables?
They all come from materials, if that allows for anything...
Its for a ray tracing shader, so every mesh/submesh needs to be able to be accessed in the shader(so I send it all as a massive structured buffer(is this a bad thing?)), so I also need each meshes texture able to be accessed

[lethal mango]

Does anyone here know anything about amplify shader editor/shader graph and bent normal specular occlusion? Trying to imitate HDRP's bent normals specular occlusion in URP as a custom node or node setup but this is well outside my know-how.

[lean lotus]

What do I need to do to make a 2dtexturearray work in a compute shader? the only tutorials I keep finding are for non compute shaders. I keep getting the error "cannot map expression to cs_5_0 instruction set at kernel CSMain"
I have the Array texture first defined as UNITY_DECLARE_TEX2DARRAY(_ArrayTex); (This is the first time _ArrayTex is used), and in the function that samples it, I have UNITY_SAMPLE_TEX2DARRAY(_ArrayTex, float3(Uv, 0));
I cant find much on either the error or using these in compute shaders

[sly breach]

how can we view shader-graph's node source code to be specific im looking to find LitMaster shader code from HDRP ?

[sinful shuttle]

Why is this shader not rendering as double sided? I only see the front faces of the column. I thought Cull Off is all you need to make a shader double sided?

{
    Properties
    {
        _TintColor ("Tint Color", Color) = (0.5,0.5,0.5,0.5)
        _Thickness("Thickness", Range(0, 1)) = 0.5
        _FadeStart("Fade Start", Range(0, 1)) = 0.5
        _FadeEnd("Fade End", Range(-1, 1)) = 0.5
        _Intensity("Intensity", Range(0, 1)) = 0.5
        
    }
    SubShader
    {
        Tags { "RenderType"="Transparent" "IgnoreProjector"="True"  "Queue"="Transparent" }
        Blend SrcAlpha One
        Cull Off Lighting Off ZWrite On
        
        LOD 0```

Pass
        {
            CGPROGRAM
            #pragma vertex vert
            #pragma fragment frag
            // make fog work
            
            
            #include "UnityCG.cginc"

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

            struct v2f
            {
                float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
                float4 vertex : SV_POSITION;
                float3 normal : NORMAL;
                float3 origPosition : POSITION1;
                float3 eyeDir : DIRECTION;
            };

            fixed4 _TintColor;
            float _Thickness; 
            float _FadeStart;  
            float _FadeEnd;  
            float _Intensity;  ```

            {
                v2f o;
                o.vertex = UnityObjectToClipPos(v.vertex);
                o.normal = normalize(mul(UNITY_MATRIX_IT_MV,v.normal).xyz);
                o.origPosition = v.vertex;
                o.eyeDir = -normalize(mul(UNITY_MATRIX_MV, v.vertex).xyz);
                //o.uv = TRANSFORM_TEX(v.uv, _MainTex);
                return o;
            }
            
            fixed4 frag (v2f i) : SV_Target
            {
                float d =     dot(i.normal,i.eyeDir);
                float p = smoothstep (0,_Thickness,dot(i.normal,i.eyeDir)) * smoothstep(_FadeStart,_FadeEnd,i.origPosition.y);    
                return float4((p * _TintColor * _Intensity).xyz,p) ;
            }
            ENDCG
        }
    }
}```

[night wren]

Hi all, I've been trying to add a rotation to this screenspace UV shader I found here https://realtimevfx.com/t/camera-facing-uvs/384/36
and I'm attempting to use some of the code I found here http://www.shaderslab.com/demo-96---uv-rotation-with-matrix.html to achieve this..

Would the correct place to do rotating be within the GetScreenUV function? I'm finding my efforts so far are just scaling the UVs instead of rotating them.. Any pointers appreciated. The altered part of my code looks like this -

` float2 GetScreenUV(float2 clipPos, float UVscaleFactor)
{

     float4 SSobjectPosition = UnityObjectToClipPos(float4(0, 0, 0, 1.0));
     float2 screenUV = float2(clipPos.x, clipPos.y);
     float screenRatio = _ScreenParams.y / _ScreenParams.x;

//i figured this could be calculated here?
float2 pivot = float2(0.5, 0.5);
float cosAngle = cos(_Angle);
float sinAngle = cos(_Angle);
float2x2 rot = float2x2(cosAngle, -sinAngle, sinAngle, cosAngle);

     screenUV.x -= SSobjectPosition.x / (SSobjectPosition.w);
     screenUV.y -= SSobjectPosition.y / (SSobjectPosition.w);

     screenUV.y *= screenRatio;

     screenUV *= 1 / UVscaleFactor;
     screenUV *= SSobjectPosition.z;

//added these lines here
screenUV = mul(rot, screenUV);
screenUV += pivot;

     return screenUV;
 };

`

[brittle owl]

any way to get believable fog for a horror game in urp?

i tried cyan's volumetric fog method but it still doesn't look like how i'd like

[sly breach]

have u tried "Vertical Fog" from the asset store ?

[brittle owl]

not quite what im looking for, i'd like it to be able to react to lights

at least spotlights

[scenic bough]

So I am going to eventually need to recreate this as a shader, and I have a teensy bit of experience and have some questions on my starting point

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/838560022144352287/839552169865904128/image0.gif

At first glance it looks like it could be done with a geometry shader using its polygons, but is there any other method that just generates a (or uses a generated) noise texture and fades in/out the amount of noise used until it’s just solid?

[knotty juniper]

with opaque objects that might be a problem
a interesting effect for using cutout with opaque objects is to use the dither function / node to transfer the transparency to per pixel cutting
works fine for a lot of processes
the color wipe should be doable you could use a exposed float value as the control how far the "animation" is

[scenic bough]

A bunch of words I don't understand, but that means I can google and figure it out, so thanks! :D I'll be tinkering with this in amplify eventually so I'll finally be able to start understanding this stuff

I wish I could do the shader graph but I'm stuck with the built-in rp

[knotty juniper]

amplyfiy or shadergraph should both work

ah

[knotty juniper]

that's why i don't do projects with the build in pipeline anymore 🙂
amplify should be able to do this just fine

i used shaderforge before the HDP / UPR stuff

[scenic bough]

Yeah, I'm on the VRChat SDK, and they're probably never going to use an SRP

The hard part beyond this is I'm not really sure if I'll end up using non-quest supported shader features until I load it in and ask a quest dude if they can see it or not. So once I get the shader I want, I may end up needing to completely rewrite it to be simpler for the quest folks 😛

But hey that means for every shader I need I might have to write 2, so twice the experience

[bitter obsidian]

is it possible to have a sprite interact with lighting? I have a sprite billboard shader but I can't figure out how I should go about making it receive shadows and interact with lights in the game world

The reason why I use a sprite is that way I can animate it with the built in animator, I have 2D sprites in a 3D scene using the standard render pipeline

The billboards in the shadows of the trees are not affected and stay just as lit as the ones outside of shadows, I know I can fake the effect of lighting by tinting them but I want something more dynamic in the case that I add a day and night system

[shadow locust]

Instead of using a SpriteRenderer use a Quad mesh with a MeshRenderer

But it will be harder to do spritesheet animation yeah

[shadow locust]

I think you can pull it off with SpriteRenderer and a custom shader

https://youtu.be/flu2PNRUAso

[bitter obsidian]

ah yes the video that started my whole project haha, the only issue with this environment is that the camera is constantly rotating as it's from a first person perspective not quite octopath perspective where the camera is at a fixed rotation

but maybe I can manipulate the shader in this video to face the camera

is there a way to see if an object is in the shadow of another object? Like taking the world position of the sprite renderer and darkening it if it's in the shadow of another object such as the trees in the screenshot I posted?

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-VertexFragmentShaderExamples.html I see on this page under Lit/Diffuse with Shadows there's a shadow attenuation value that's a float between 0 and 1, 1 being fully lit, 0 being fully shadowed does the value work update properly if it's a sprite renderer? If so then I could technically just multiply the color or alpha of the sprite by this value could I not?

[meager pelican]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/water-shader-graph-transparency-and-shadows-universal-render-pipeline-order.748142/#post-5518747
Bgolus to the rescue, see post #17

[bitter obsidian]

is this referring to my issue?

[meager pelican]

Receiving shadows, yes. Or attempting to reply. 😉

It's for URP.

[bitter obsidian]

gotcha, much appreciated, I'll take a look into this, only issue that may arise is that the post he was helping with was over a URP shader and my game still uses the built in render pipeline, but I may upgrade my project to URP if this helps

[meager pelican]

OH!

I thought you were URP.

OK, sorry. NO, the standard pipeline has more history/doco on it.

So IDK why I was thinking URP.

Is your sprite set to receive shadows?
You can switch to debug mode and set receive shadows, or you can see:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/sprite-receive-shadow.357705/#post-2319797

[bitter obsidian]

yeah I've done that already

[meager pelican]

You're probably better off using pastebin or hatebin and posting your shader code. So we can look it over.
One way to tell if it is changing, is just return that value as a color. It's a float, right?

[bitter obsidian]

my biggest issue is that I can't really tell what's going on under the hood with my shader, I can't tell if the value for shadow attenuation that I have is changing or not

[meager pelican]

Edited

The easiest way to "debug" shaders is visually by returning colors if you can. Sucks for negatives, sometimes you have to remap them.

[bitter obsidian]

I see, let me get a paste real quick

https://pastebin.com/ixeGBd8j

[meager pelican]

So if attn is the attenuation, you just
return float4(attn.xxx, 1);
from the shader.

[bitter obsidian]

oooh gotcha

now am I correct to return that in the frag part of the shader or would I do that in the surf method?

apparently according to a recent forum post Shadow_attenuation is outdated

[meager pelican]

Oy.
OK, as far as the first question goes, I think it calls the custom vert/frag function in each stage, then runs off and does its own thing as generated by the Suf() function. IIRC it is called first.

But anyway, it won't matter. Where you set albedo is probably good. That's a float3, so you can just set it with atten.xxx;

[bitter obsidian]

gotcha

whenever I did return float4(shadow.xxx, 1); shadow being "fixed shadow = SHADOW_ATTENUATION(IN); everything was white regardless if it was in the shadow of another object or not

[meager pelican]

Huh.
Also it looks like you're reading and setting "c" twice.

[bitter obsidian]

what do you mean?

like in the surf shader?

this is a shader I found online so I'm not the original author of it

even if I remove the surf shader part of it, it works fine still so maybe it was unecessary

[meager pelican]

I'd keep that part. IDK why you want a custom frag function though. But I'm still researching.

I'm not running Unity, so I'm guessing.
Comment out the custom frag function, I don't think you need it.
But put the contents into the Surf function at the top. Basically.

[bitter obsidian]

gotcha

[meager pelican]

There's a pragma you'll have to comment out too that defines the custom frag.

[bitter obsidian]

so good news, now my sprite grass receives shadows like they should, the only issue is that the billboard no longer works

so that's progress and not progress at the same tiime

[meager pelican]

lol, I like your optimism as we mess up your code!

[bitter obsidian]

haha

[meager pelican]

So we're missing bush clumps

:/

[bitter obsidian]

bushes still exist

I took that screenshot at a separate area

[meager pelican]

So what does "no longer works" mean?

[bitter obsidian]

the billboard

they don't rotate

towards the camera anymore

[meager pelican]

Did you keep the vertex function in there?

[bitter obsidian]

yeah

[meager pelican]

ANd the pragma?

[bitter obsidian]

yeah that's still there, I only took out the fragment pragma

[meager pelican]

dammit

IDK, it's hard to do remote if you don't "spot" it.
IDK what that "lighting" variable is doing either. You calc it but don't use it (Frag)

[bitter obsidian]

let me send an updated version of the shader

https://pastebin.com/Bus0hJLm

[meager pelican]

oh! lol

you have to copy the missing functionality from the frag() into the Surf()

still

[bitter obsidian]

I thought I did, am I just missing the return o?

well if I do return o it gives me an error

that's the only difference between the 2 is that in the surface shader I'm not returning anything

[meager pelican]

Before you had c.rgb *= shadow;
And you set the shadow variable with the macro.

[bitter obsidian]

it says that the function surf cannot return a value

lets ignore that for right now because it didn't do anything

without the fragment shader the shadows worked for once

without me adding anything else to the shader

the only issue that remains now is that the objects don't face the camera anymore, like the vertex function isn't doing anything

[meager pelican]

But that's how you get shadow!
yes, Surf() does lighting automatically. That's why I said IDK why you need that frag().
But, why is it not camera-facing billboard. We didn't touch the vert().

[regal stag]

Because surface shaders don't use a vertex shader afaik. They use a separate "vertex modification function". Basically, #pragma surface surf vertex:vert. That expects an object space vertex output though as it just lets you alter the v.vertex not handle the conversion to clip space.

There's some examples here : https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-SurfaceShaderExamples.html

[meager pelican]

Right, but he has a custom vert function to do what he wants. And it was working.
the only thing he removed is the custom frag.

[regal stag]

It's also a little weird as I don't see a #pragma surface surf even in their shader so I guess it's just assuming it's a surface shader atm with some unity magic?

[meager pelican]

Maybe he should try that syntax.

[bitter obsidian]

adding it now

[meager pelican]

Otherwise he maybe didn't have a surface shader!

[bitter obsidian]

so adding pragma surface surf and keeping pragma vertex vert nothing changed

[regal stag]

I haven't worked in built-in much but afaik you have either a vertex-frag, or surface shader (with optional vert modification). I'm not sure you can mix both

[meager pelican]

There's pragmas for calling "custom vert/frag" and that's what he's theoretically using.

But the surface shader should still compile all it's code gen stuff.

[regal stag]

I guess, but wouldn't the surface shader also generate it's own vertex shader which might be replacing it?

[bitter obsidian]

so when there was a fragment shader, the surface shader wasn't doing anything afaik, but once I took out the fragment shader now the vertex shader isn't doing anything

[meager pelican]

I didn't see the reason for a custom frag though. It could probably just compute it in SUrf if he did it at all , but it should generate the shadow reception and casting auto magically.

[regal stag]

Surface shaders do usually make lighting & shadows easier yeah

[meager pelican]

What happens is that the auto-generated vert() function calls the custom-vert function first thing, then proceeds on.

[bitter obsidian]

there's the custom struct for the data being passed into the vertex function as well so that's the reason why it's custom, if I made it into a regular void vert and attached vertex:vert to the surface pragma then I wouldn't have that custom struct afaik

[meager pelican]

Try renaming it to something other than vert. SWAG

[bitter obsidian]

trying

[regal stag]

This is related, https://forum.unity.com/threads/standard-surface-shader-billboard.513060/#post-3358030

[bitter obsidian]

I change the pragma as well right

ahhh

but

there's no surface pragma either

[regal stag]

You should either be using the #pragma vertex ... and #pragma fragment ... OR #pragma surface .... Since you have a surf function you'd want the latter. I honestly don't know how the shader even works without it, I guess maybe since you don't have a fragment or because there's a surf function Unity is just assuming it's a surface shader for you.

[meager pelican]

Yeah, maybe use that syntax.

#pragma surface surf Standard vertex:vert fullforwardshadows

With or without the fullforwardshadows

[bitter obsidian]

would I have to change how the vert method is written?

or as long as I have that pragma it should be fine?

yeah from the errors I'm getting I'm assuming I need to change how it's written

[regal stag]

I think so yeah, since surface shader's vert just lets you alter the object space position. The thread I linked above might help as they're also doing a billboard shader

[bitter obsidian]

saying that the parameters need modifiers, specifically the in needs to be inout

[meager pelican]

Yeah, it's a specific param.

[bitter obsidian]

do I need to include the Standard for the lighting model?

[meager pelican]

Sec. Want to go look at your code again.
That's the lighting model, yeah unless you write a different one, or use a different one.

Standard = PBR

[regal stag]

Yeah, there's also StandardSpecular, Lambert and BlinnPhong models according to the documentation. https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-SurfaceShaders.html

I guess "Standard" is the metallic workflow.

[bitter obsidian]

getting this error

oh

I see it's coming from the surface method itself

[regal stag]

Yeah, the SurfaceOutput needs to be changed to the Standard type one

[bitter obsidian]

the inout under surf was just SurfaceOutput instead of Standard

yeah

waiting for it to refresh real fast to see the new errors

the main issue with that forum post is that it's not dealing with a sprite, the post is dealing with a quad as a billboard

oh

I see

it's in a pass when it shouldn't be

[meager pelican]

Try commenting out your vert, duplicating it and passing in
(inout appdata_full IN)
instead of the custom struct. IDK if you'll get errors if it isn't standard names but we'll hit that next. That passes all data to the vert().

[bitter obsidian]

okay trying that

[meager pelican]

And IDK if you want to make it a "v" instead of an "IN".
This code generator does stuff, but I'm guessing it won't matter.

[bitter obsidian]

yeah this didn't work, getting these 2 errors and let me send a screenshot of how the billboards look in game

[meager pelican]

It says void vert (inout appdata_full v) { right?

or maybe IN instead of v

[bitter obsidian]

right

question

does it matter if my surface shaders input is the custom struct and the vert inout is something different?

[meager pelican]

OK, put the vert back. (Uncomment old)

[bitter obsidian]

okay

[meager pelican]

Yeah

probably

But we're still messing with it.

The vert just gets gets the input from Unity, but since it's a custom-vert function in a surface shader, it's inout because the surface shader calls it from its vert() function, basically. But what you do is up to you, you have to set v.stuff.

[bitter obsidian]

what if the surface method is by itself away from the vertex method like putting the vertex method in it's own pass

[meager pelican]

YEah, uh....sec

[bitter obsidian]

lol

[meager pelican]

custom vert function doesn't return a value.

you were using a real vert() and weren't using a surface shader before, you just thought you were.

lol

It modifies the inout variable's data.

So Surf() is a thing that "generates code" into vert and frag shaders. And it passes stuff in a certain way.

And we're not doing that right anymore, because before we were REALLY doing vert/frag not Surf.

Right?

[bitter obsidian]

before yes we were really doing a vert/frag

it wasn't until we removed the frag that the surf began working

so Unity's compilation of the shader likely because it no longer saw the frag compiled it differently all together

https://forum.unity.com/threads/achieving-a-multi-pass-effect-with-a-surface-shader.96393/ this post is interesting, because they have a vert/frag shader and then a surface shader on top of it outside of the vert/frag pass

[meager pelican]

OK, but that's a 2nd pass.

Cool though.

OK, so where are we? Still error messages?

Or "just" no billboards?

[bitter obsidian]

back to the pastebin from above

is there anything wrong with having a 2nd pass?

[meager pelican]

If you don't need one, yeah. It's all overhead and you're drawing it twice.

So does it compile now or not?

No sprites showing?

[bitter obsidian]

hold on just a second

[meager pelican]

So anyway the custom vert should have a void return type. And modify the inout variable IN. Or whatever we set up.

[bitter obsidian]

so yes still getting errors

let me post an updated pastebin

https://pastebin.com/gxk0wsiw

[meager pelican]

comment out the later lines too, I think the Surface shader generates all that stuff already. All you want if I understand you is to make camera facing quads, and that's where you modify the vertex data. You probably don't have to worry about lighting at all (cross fingers).

So 100 - 106

[bitter obsidian]

to clarify 100-106 is the pixelsnap stuff right?

oh it's the return out

yeah that's already commented

[meager pelican]

Yeah and the transfer fog.

Pixelsnap, fog, return. All commented.

[bitter obsidian]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47939559/im-trying-to-modify-a-shader-in-unity-but-getting-shader-error-in-custom-sub/47941200

this seems to answer the issue with the errors that are coming up

gonna try just renaming the struct to Input

[lyric pebble]

Please Guys I'm trying to create a shader but I have a problem

Here is my shader graph

[meager pelican]

You gut rid of the pragma vert vert right? it's now on the surface shader pragma

[bitter obsidian]

yeah

[meager pelican]

@lyric pebble You want to clip the black part?

[lyric pebble]

Yes please!

[meager pelican]

Try alpha cutout. Google it for shadergraph, and find the NEW documentation.

There's a threshold you set. Any alpha below that is clipped.

[lyric pebble]

alpha cut out is a node ?

[meager pelican]

No its a thing on the master stack I think

You can do it with a node, but there's no reason to.

[bitter obsidian]

looks like renaming the struct to Input actually got rid of 2 errors

[meager pelican]

That's nuts AppDataFull didn't work? Thats from an include.

[bitter obsidian]

I'm about to find out, there was another error that I had to fix real quick, waiting on it to recompile

[meager pelican]

Exuding optimism.

[bitter obsidian]

but yeah once I changed the name for the v2fbillboard struct to Input and passed that in instead of Appdata_full, then it compiled and the input errors that I had above were gone

interesting

[meager pelican]

I don't think that's what you want to pass to vert()

[bitter obsidian]

yeah it's not

[meager pelican]

You want vert to be some struct that's for vertex stuff with semantics on it.

So unity maps the mesh data to the semantics and fills in that data for the mesh, basically.

There's standard ones in the include files. Or you can roll your own.

Let me scroll back and find an earlier bin, I thought you had one maybe.

Wait!

So v2fBillboardFog is the input structure to a normal vert function with semantics.
That's what all that stuff on it is. Like :NORMAL and whatever.

[bitter obsidian]

ahhhh

[meager pelican]

Yours is this:

            {
                float4 vertex   : SV_POSITION;
                fixed4 color    : COLOR;
                float2 texcoord  : TEXCOORD0;
                fixed3 ambient : COLOR1;
                SHADOW_COORDS(1)
                UNITY_FOG_COORDS(1)
                UNITY_VERTEX_OUTPUT_STEREO
            };```

So there's no normal there.

But IDK off the top of my head how that shadowcoords and stuff deal. But that's for v2f not for the main input, because again the Surface shader code generator should generate all that.

And do you know if you store some ambient light or color in ambient?

[bitter obsidian]

I'm not entirely sure, I don't believe it's used

[meager pelican]

Anyway, let's pare it all down, OK?

The only thing you're really doing is modifying the verts, right?

[bitter obsidian]

yeah

yeah that's all that's happening in the vert function

[meager pelican]

And you're also passing text coordinates to be interpolated. So fine.

IDK what the color stuff is since you're really reading it from a texture.

[bitter obsidian]

not in the vert function actually

I commented out the tex coordinates

because it was setting the input into the input

once we put inout Input v in the vert function

so we could get rid of the color stuff then right?