archived-shaders

[final hollow]

lol, I thought I read somewhere that that was undesirable for some reason and usually creating two shapes facing in either direction was preferable

but that did indeed work

and I totally forgot I could do that

[regal stag]

With lit shaders, the back faces don't usually get shaded correctly because the normals are facing the wrong way, that might be why it's undesirable. But you can still also fix that by inverting them with a Is Front Face and Branch node setup. (With unlit this isn't a problem though)

[final hollow]

ahhh, that makes total sense and jives with what I recall in that advice. Thanks again, Cyan!

[coral horizon]

some one please help, i am trying to make a vertex quantization shader to emulate that ps1 look. I dont really know what to do though. I started learning about shaders like 3 days ago so i know nothing plz help. My preview shows nothing

[grand jolt]

my problem is the pattern (as you can see in the picture) starting from the middle and getting distorted along the way .. anyone who can helpwith this?

[final hollow]

interesting shader for a first pass. what do you have selected as your preview model? if its just a cube and all of those verticies are set to floor, you might have just collapsed it all to a single point

I don't know much about that shader, but would it help to point out that you are inputting coordinates from your object in its local position, not its screen position? it seems like you're expecting to manipulate screen coordinates, but you're using the vertex's local offset

[coral horizon]

1. My preview is a sphere
2. I thought the master node needs in Input in object space

[coral horizon]

Also this is gonna sound really stupid but what do you mean by offset

[final hollow]

so, the final output of your calculations (which is the input to the master node) needs to be in object space -- thats true, and you do have that. I was just pointing out that you're currently also doing your calculations based on your vertex's object position offset.

the green is the final output to the master node, the red I have circled is the position input

by offset, I mean the coordinates are measured from the middle of something. in world, the coordinates are measured from the middle of the world, in view, they are measured from the middle of the screen, in object they are measured from the middle of the object

so, if a vertex is at object position (1,0,0) that means it has an offset of one unit in the x direction from the middle of the object

and if you moved that object way to the outside edge of the world and stopped pointing the camera at it, it would still be the same position

[coral horizon]

Ok so doesnt the transfomation matrix move it from object space?

[final hollow]

It looks like a lot of your calculations are based on the screen coordinates. I didn't know if you were also expecting to be doing math on the vertex's screen coordinates.

yeah it definitely does. I just dont have shader writing mileage to be able to confidently understand what its transforming to, or whether you supplied the right basis for that transformation. Since you said you were at zero, I'm kind of just checking that your assumptions are met

@coral horizon are you following a tutorial or something for this shader?

[coral horizon]

I've read through many old forum posts trying to figure out what to do

[coral horizon]

I have a basic idea of what to do but as i said ive literally never done this before so i dont quite understand everything

So no, theres no specific tutorial im following cuz i wasnt able to find one

[final hollow]

dude, I dont understand the scale value in the Object Node at all. dividing something's x (object) position by its x scale should bring it back to x position it would be if the x scale was 1. am I crazy? thats what should happen, period. Why is that not happening?

is the Object Node just straight up broken?

[twilit stratus]

how do i make a 3d glowing outline? like this one

[vocal narwhal]

Same way I explained yesterday
#💻┃unity-talk message

[twilit stratus]

i tried i didnt get it

[twilit stratus]

like it didnt work

i just want a simple glow i searched every vid on youtube

[vocal narwhal]

A simple glow is just that, an emissive material and bloom as post processing.

There are plenty of tutorials that go over bloom, and they will generally also go over emission with that

[twilit stratus]

any youtubers you recomend?

[vocal narwhal]

Not really. I don't tend to watch youtube tutorials unless I'm really stuck. If you're using the built-in render pipeline then any of them will do. Anything with the post processing stack will do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B-JoycbeSg
Noting that bloom is the only one you care about.

[twilit stratus]

but how do i get it on the edges?

[vocal narwhal]

By having an emissive material on the edges of your object. You will either have to slice the objects and add different materials in your modelling program. Or you will have to do a similar thing where you UV your objects so it has an emissive part of a texture on the edges.

[twilit stratus]

i have a idea idk if its possible

but

how about a outline shader

[vocal narwhal]

You may be able to use an outline shader to do something like this, but it's not going to be a thing you can easily set up. It'd require shader programming and likely some modifications of the rendering pipeline.

Especially as you'd likely want to mask those outlines to certain objects

[twilit stratus]

uhh

is there a dummer version of sayin this

[vocal narwhal]

No. There is no more straightforward way to do it than the way I originally mentioned, any other method would be highly specialised

[twilit stratus]

is there a detailed um video

with updated version

maybe

[coral horizon]

Ok so i keep reading about all these different matricies like model view and projection but like, what the hell do these actually look like and how does the calculations to change space work

[fossil copper]

So I have a grass shader. It's a geometry shader, so it's HLSL. I had to follow a tutorial to create it since it was my first experience with HLSL (but I'm happy to do my own research and get something working on my own)

It creates a grass "object" on every vertex of the object. That's coming back to bite me now that I actually want grass in my world. The grass density is dependent on the subdivision of the mesh, which is far from ideal

Tessellation isn't great, since I imagine dynamically creating and destroying thousands and thousands of polygons is pretty heavy. I also can't use Unity terrain since I need overhangs in my world

What is an alternative for this system?

I can't find anything about running a function on every "unit" of a mesh, but that seems like it could work if I could do that

[digital gust]

You can always use terrain and add extra meshes for the overhang, but besides that, you might have to rethink your shader, so instead of putting the shader on every vertex, you might get some distance value of those and rely on that to spread your grass "object"

[fossil copper]

Using extra meshes for overhangs doesn't work for me since I need grass on top of the overhangs and some of them will be massive

And do you know of any way to do that? I thought of that but I don't know where to start to learn how to implement it

[zenith heron]

Can anyone name and source a shader that can do a pixelate effect on a sprite? Can also do something like a swirl effect, and finally make a sprite brighter than spriterenderer's rgb can. Thank you for any help.

[onyx jungle]

Guys I am trying to create an ocean effect right now. I really like the look of the ocean to the right of the above image.

The image to the left is my attempt at this ocean.

I dont know how to make it look more like the image on the right, it seems that their reflections are not just rnomal maps scrolling, but I am not sure.

Any help appreciated

[mint geyser]

Their effect looks as though the vertices are moving versus just the normals. Maybe Gerstner waves?

[onyx jungle]

I am already tesselating the surface yes, I am adjusting the verticies to look like waves as well as scrolling normal maps ontop

But even with just a tesselated surface I cannot acheive the same effefct

Here is another shot of their water system

From what I have seen they are scrolling normals + adjusting verticies

but their lighting technique seems different

[mint geyser]

How are you doing the lighting? From this image, the water looks like two planes overlaid with the upper plane doing some refraction and color blending with the lower plane.

[onyx jungle]

Well right now I am not doing any lighting really, I am first scrolling the normal maps across the surface, then I multiply them by some constant to make the normals brigher and also have a slider to control the normal strength, then in the final calculation I just multiply this by a lighting variable which I calculate by getting the dot product between the world normal and the direction to the sun

So the normal maps get darker depending on their angle from the sun

However other than that I am not really doing any reflections etc...

[misty osprey]

Does anyone know if I can clip() something and write that to the depth buffer in unity shaderlab?
Because currently it cuts the texels correctly, but the depth buffer still thinks they're there

[mint geyser]

Gotcha. How are you calculating the vertex displacement?

[onyx jungle]

I am using a noise function from an included file of shader noise functions, I have a variable for increasing the noise offset and I pass this information into the noise function to work out my wave height

then I simply multiply the vertex by this value

I did this process twice to layer two sets of nosie

one for larger waves and one for smaller waves

I think I need to use planar reflections or something instead

[mint geyser]

Word. I think you might be hard pressed to get a similar level of displacement without the usage of a wave function, although I could definitely be wrong. If you stick with the noise, however, it might help to scale it up as it doesn't seem you're getting enough depth to mirror that lighting in the comparison image

[onyx jungle]

So you are saying to try and introduce some kind of reflectivity/planar reflections and then just bump up the actual vertex displacement

Rather than try and mess around with normal maps which will only provide a flat highlight

[mint geyser]

Yeah that would definitely be helpful

[teal breach]

You can use the SV_Depth semantic to output your own values to the depth buffer

[teal breach]

Note that the 'SceneDepthTexture' you might want for post processing doesn't use the depth buffer, it uses an internal unity shader to re-render the scene

[onyx jungle]

Ok sure I think this is a good approach

But one more question

[misty osprey]

so is there a way to modify that texture from a shader?

[onyx jungle]

if I were to introduce planar reflections, say I wanted it to take influence from the ambient lighting also, would this be possible?

[teal breach]

If using a scriptable render pipeline, you could insert a custom pass that does some post processing of the Scene depth texture

[teal breach]

e.g. to composite it with some other buffer

but it's getting complicated - what is the effect you are aiming for? there might be an easier way to achieve it

[misty osprey]

I'm basically aiming for a dissolve effect that gets outlined correctly, so I can reveal the level smoothly

And I'm using the built in pipeline for now, and this post process outline effect https://github.com/AGM-GR/EdgeDetection

[teal breach]

so you want the outlines to be drawn, and then fade in/dissolve in the scene objects to fill them?

(I wonder if Unity would consider adding threads to the discord)

[mint geyser]

Yes. The planar reflections influence the Albedo and thus whatever lighting effects you do (diffuse, specular, etc.) will influence the reflection as well.

[misty osprey]

The other way I think? First dissolve the object by cutting texels with a noise texture input, and then outline everything that it still visible

[teal breach]

ahh ok, so you want the outline to be drawn in a way that respects the bits that are dissolved?

[misty osprey]

Basically from this:

[teal breach]

See 'under the hood' - details vary depending on your platform https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-CameraDepthTexture.html. If using deferred, you can probably get the g buffer values and use those, and then it will automatically handle your dissolved objects with the correct depth. If using a DepthNormals texture (or Depth on some platforms) you'll need to do a custom implementation of the unity depth shader used to generate the scene depth texture.

[misty osprey]

to this

[teal breach]

is your shader in SL or shader graph?

[misty osprey]

shaderlab

[teal breach]

if SL, consider just defining a new pass that outputs a block color, and render objects with this pass to a separate buffer (I know how to do this in the scriptable render pipeline, but forgot in built in - sorry!) then use this texture as a mask when determining where to draw outlines

[misty osprey]

To be honest I think I could try to fiddle in URP and shadergraph a bit, but the main issue with that would be that the newer versions of URP don't support the ppv2 stack, so I would have to try a different approach to outlines

Which I did before, so I have that somewhere, but I remember it working very weirdly on platforms other than windows

With this method: https://alexanderameye.github.io/notes/edge-detection-outlines/

[granite violet]

Is there anyway I can make the Whiteness of a Gratient Noise Invisible?

I'm trying to make my own cloud shader

[twilit stratus]

has anyone seen this texture before?

my friend showed it to me but he cant find it

[olive brook]

hey. whats the line-around-object effect is called ? i'm trying to find a tutorial about it

[zenith heron]

Can anyone name and source a shader that can do a pixelate effect on a sprite? Can also do something like a swirl effect, and finally make a sprite brighter than spriterenderer's rgb can. Thank you for any help.

[tacit parcel]

outline?

[gray harness]

hi

i wanted to save my renderTexture

but im getting this error

heres how im saving

any idea how to fix this or save renderTexture some other way?

[vernal pewter]

Anyone have an idea how I can get a VertexID node working in shadergraph? I found this pull request: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/3291/files, but I'm having trouble incorporating it

The VertexID node appears in shader graph, but I can't attach the output to anything

[fathom kiln]

how can I make my shader ignore the top and bottom face of the zylinder?

do i have to model one cylinder myself?

[orchid pollen]

hey peeps, i'm wondering if it's possible to get gouraud shading in unity? I started recently and I can't really find any good tutorials and shader's and stuff, i'm making a ps1 style game and they used gouraud back then I believe

[swift loom]

Hi, can anyone tell me if I'm doing anything obvious here that is causing this to not work? Because I feel like it should, but it doesn't. https://hastebin.com/iwacutifuw.m

I'm sending an array of Vector4's to the shader with coordinate data in the x and y values and i'm trying to read the tilemap texture based off those coordinates and the screen position

all I'm getting is a grey background

but the shader material "icon" in unity changes its texture when i change my test variable so something is happening

[toxic flume]

Is it better to sample texture twice or use if condition in shader?

For example for some pixels, I want to have regular tex2D but for others, it should be distorted uv
Condition has only two part with &&

 if (dis <= currentTime + waveParams.z && dis >= currentTime - waveParams.z)
                {

I can implement something like it with step and lerp but I have to sample the texture twice

[round hawk]

Anybody knows some easy way to create a Glow effect around a single 2D object in unity ?

[zenith heron]

Does anybody know a way to make a pixelate effect on a sprite?

[toxic flume]

You can quantize uv

There are many videos about it

[runic pendant]

Are the TMPro shaders optimal for mobile platforms? I noticed that some of them use the normal and tangents of the canvas, which I assume makes it a bit slow.

[toxic flume]

If you want it for only one object, it is more clean to use another glow sprite for that.
A simple shader for that is outline shader
Counting transparent pixels around the current pixel. You need to sample the texture several times

[toxic flume]

How many texts do you have in your scene?
You can choose the simple one.

[runic pendant]

Like <15 per canvas, and there is one canvas active at a time. It's not that much but I want to make sure.

[toxic flume]

You can utilize frame debugger. Try to reduce drawcalls.
Using different fonts, outline shader, texts with shadows, etc. in one canvas

[toxic flume]

It is really small :/

[fluid turtle]

You could use the normals and cull the pixels if the object-space normals are pointing up/down

[meager pelican]

Hard to tell with what you've given, but in general a conditional that has some cores doing one side, and other cores doing the other side has the same net effect as the timing for doing BOTH sides. 😉
And sampling is a SLOW operation, relatively speaking. So doing that twice is twice as slow as doing it once.
That's a vast generalization without specifics, though.

I can't tell since you didn't show what you do after the conditional. Another sample? Oy!

This is all due to the fact that all the cores in a group share the same program counter, just some are masked off depending on what side of the IF applies to them.
See also the [branch] attribute.

[olive brook]

Yes thanks

[grand jolt]

is there a way to export blender shader graphs into Unity URP graphs?

[meager pelican]

No, you re-write them.

[grand jolt]

I guess the question then depends on the elements used in the graphs

[glad cave]

I want to create this shader again, with the same movement and the colors. Someone here can help me?

[zenith heron]

for some reason when making a sprite lit shader and opening it in shader graph the sprite lit master never appears on screen.

[final hollow]

wait, you can do tessellation with unity shaders?

[grand jolt]

How can I make the glare always go up and never down? ```cs
Shader "TimmyTGames/Interactable"
{
Properties
{
_HighlightColor("Highlight Color", Color) = (1, 1, 1, 1)
_MainTex("Base (RGB)", 2D) = "white" {}
_Thickness("Glare Thickness", Range(0.1, 10)) = 0.5
_Strength("Highlight Strength", Range(0.1, 2)) = 0.1
_Speed("Highlight Speed", Range(1, 20)) = 1
}
SubShader
{
Tags {"RenderType"="Opaque"}

    CGPROGRAM
    #pragma surface surf Standard vertex:vert
    #include "UnityShaderVariables.cginc"

    sampler2D _MainTex;
    float4 _HighlightColor;
    float _Thickness;
    float _Strength;
    float _Speed;

    struct Input
    {
        float2 uv_MainTex;
        float vertexPos;
    };

    void vert(inout appdata_full v, out Input o)
    {
        UNITY_INITIALIZE_OUTPUT(Input, o);
        o.vertexPos = v.vertex.y / _Thickness;
    }

    void surf(Input IN, inout SurfaceOutputStandard o)
    {
        float highlight_value = clamp(cos(_Speed - IN.vertexPos),0, 1);
        o.Albedo = lerp(tex2D(_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex), _HighlightColor, highlight_value);
        o.Emission = lerp((0, 0, 0), _HighlightColor.xyz * _Strength, highlight_value);
    }
    ENDCG
}
Fallback "Diffuse"

}

[grand jolt]

Meaning?

@mint geyser

[mint geyser]

Woops, I mispoke. My mistake 😅

[olive brook]

Hey. Anyone got some time for me ? I wanna learn something really quickly. Online tutorials usually waste so much time ...

I wanna just as about how post processing shaders work... I mean I know it's the same shader , only the given texture is the previous camera render... But I don't know how to pass the rendered Tex properly and in the proper way

[onyx jungle]

Yea, unity even has their own page on it in the documentation.

[toxic flume]

Inside branch only sampling with distorted uv. Simple procedure.
To calculate distorted uv, suppose some math calculations, pow, multiplication,1/a division kinda and then sample a texture with that uv and return color.
So we have a condition with two parts (dis <= currentTime + waveParams.z && dis >= currentTime - waveParams.z)
and inside that sample a texture with different manipulated uv and outside sample a texture normally

[onyx jungle]

Does anyone have any ideas how I could make my water (on the left), look like the water on the right

I suck at shader writing honestly but I just have no idea how the water on the right was created

[olive brook]

the lightings matter as well. be aware of that too

[olive brook]

please someone help out :D

[mighty turret]

are sticky notes really the only way to document nodes in the shader graph? Stuff is starting to look like spaghetti and I want to organize better...

[olive brook]

this group is very inactive... anyone knows a better place ?

[meager pelican]

You're honestly better off doing what you said you don't want to do...read the docs and google for it.

BUT...

Basically, the post processing (varies by pipeline), draws a full screen quad and does a blit passing in the current image as _MainTex, and you output your corrected-image in your pixel shader.

[olive brook]

The docs were clear enough really, but I didn't see any examples there which is unfortunate, because I'll not be testing what I've learnt for some time , so I can't brute force codes to see what's the right way. And being no examples online, I guess the only option is personal help , which Im very disappointed to say that Shaders seem to have a very poor community...

Though maybe it's because coders are turning into visual graphers generally and not just in shader world

[meager pelican]

Maybe, instead of telling us how much we suck, just ask about how to do the PP effect that you want to do? And maybe mention what pipeline you're doing it in. And have patience and see if you get a reply? Just an thought.

[stable hazel]

have any of you come accross an issue with Shadows when you use matrix to displace objects based on their position relative to the camera?

[olive brook]

I guess you saw my comment as an insult, which I can assure you it wasn't. you saw it in a way it was not intended to be seen.

no, you guys are awesome ! I didn't mean you , I meant all shader coders in general. and it's a fact. this category of people have less active community than other languages
( i've asked my PP question in Reddit+here+Telegram and have't gotten an answer thus far... )

my question though was "how to use a shader as post processing". I'm not looking for a way to write PP. I'm looking for a way to apply it to screen. I know the shader part, now I'm asking about the C# part :D

[timid minnow]

Hrmm, wasn't able to find a solution anywhere online... is it not possible to make a wireframe shader using shader graph? (HDRP)

[granite violet]

Is there a way to make the darker a color it gets replaced with just less alpha value?

For something like with noise

[slim steppe]

Hi, i'm trying to learn shader coding and cant find any good and free vs plugins. Does anyone know a good one?

[granite violet]

What do you mean?

[slim steppe]

I'm looking for a auto complete and syntax highlighting plugin for visual studio

[granite violet]

Wait for shader or just plain visual studio?

[slim steppe]

set the alpha to the r g or b value

[slim steppe]

shaders

[granite violet]

hmm I'm really sorry but I don't know any!

[slim steppe]

do you just code without that stuff?

[granite violet]

yes I use URP shader graph which is very nice

[slim steppe]

ohh

[slim steppe]

@granite violet does it work?

[granite violet]

let me see

[meager pelican]

What Pipeline are you using?

[granite violet]

No, I just makes the white part a little blinding.

[slim steppe]

I think this should work

[granite violet]

Oh cool!

Thank you!

oh wait

for some reason I don't have PBR so the names are a little different

Is alpha emission?

[meager pelican]

I'm not sure what your question is here.
If you want to darken a particular shade/color, you multiply the entire RGB vector (a float3) by some value less than 1.0.
So to cut it in half, multiply it by 0.5....but there's gamma correction unless you're in linear color space. But anyway, just reduce it by some fraction.

The alpha is more about how that color will blend with the underlying color.

[slim steppe]

hover over fragment and press space

then add alpha

[slim steppe]

*below Ambient Occlusion

[granite violet]

well I think I jumped to conclusions. I want to have it so that the "blacker" a color is the more invisible it is.

[olive brook]

built-in. but out of curiosity, can we write shaders for other pipelines too ? I mean properly

[slim steppe]

@granite violet Is this what you want?

[granite violet]

I just tried this. I just made my plane I had the shader attached to one color that was my (Color) variable

[meager pelican]

OK, it's all math. Because colors are numbers (mixes of R, G, B) right?

So you can "invent" any method you want. You can calc the "luminosity" of the color. I think there's macros for that to convert to B&W color, in several if not all pipelines. It's some differening values, since the human eye is more sensitive to green than to other colors.

Then once you get the luminosity, you can use that for the alpha.

A simple way is to use the max() functions to take the max of RGB and use that has the "brightest pixel".
So float myAlpha = max(max(color.r, color.g,), color.b);

[granite violet]

Well I think I should have said. I want clouds I thought this could be a way to do it

[meager pelican]

Yes, they can all (theoretically) be written by hand, without using a graph. Not well documented though, yet. @empty oar has a guide and so do others, somewhere.
https://www.cyanilux.com/tutorials/urp-shader-code/

[olive brook]

ah , that's good to know

I've heard there's full of #include and very nasty code designing needed

but as long as it works.. .who cares...

[meager pelican]

You're traveling in the bleeding edge of the road-less-traveled (shader programming).

Shaders are great, but as you've noted, it's a rarer art, and a sort of black-art with secrets and hard-to-initially-understand hardware lurking inside the computer. A basically separate specialized computer inside another computer.

Unity is undertaking a new path, and it's not well documented or refined yet. So with SRP's (URP or HDRP), you're going to have to dig in a lot and figure it out.

If that frustrates you, the standard pipeline will be around for quite a while I'd predict. And it has much more documentation and support/tutorials.

Frankly, if you can do it in URP (and mostly for HDRP too) you can still pull it off in the standard pipeline. With HDRP in particular, there's more....options and techniques....exposed in the new pipelines as they reinvent things. But for URP, you can do most of that in standard no problem. And Shader Graph is porting to, or has been ported to, standard too. A few things are different, like how it batches materials, and some volume things, and multi-pass options. But mostly, you can work around that stuff if you want.

It's all up to you.

[olive brook]

Thanks . I sure as heck want to learn hdrp and urp, it's all very weirdly are lovely, you just can't give up coding after you make your own's first specular+Lambert shader !

[haughty canyon]

Anyone had experience with resolving frame lag / hitches the first time visual effects play on device? after the first time they play fine. 2019/URP. Thinking its probably shaders but its not practical to preload all from a shader variant collection, or practical to use the warm all shaders call. I thinking it might be possible to build a collection on the fly with to warm just the shaders needed. But there doesnt seem to be an easy way to identify these from a Visual effect asset at runtime.

[karmic hatch]

why is the node dark?

it also doesn't seem to want to actually change the normals

[zenith heron]

I just finished making a shader. How do I use it in my project?

[karmic hatch]

you attach it to a material and then put the material on whatever you want

[zenith heron]

ok

I can't find the option to do so

[karmic hatch]

in the project tab you can drag the shader onto the material asset

you can also near the top select your shader from the drop-down list in the material in the inspector

[zenith heron]

it came out weird

[bold cave]

Hey guys (new to shaders), im trying to create a basic grass shader (URP shader graph), and so far it's working great, but i would like my grass to render in a lot lower draw distance than everything else - would you do that inside the grass shader? I tried an overlay camera that would render just the grass, but that didn't work cause the camera was obviously rendering the grass over everything else.

Do you have an idea how to solve it?

[zenith heron]

I can't get something like this to show on shader graph ever

also my main preview shows a pink color no matter what alternations I try

[meager pelican]

Make sure your render pipeline is set up for the shader type. (Like for URP, or HDRP).
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/srp-setting-render-pipeline-asset.html
Secondly, make sure you're using a sprite if you have a sprite lit master node.

[meager pelican]

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Experimental.Rendering.ShaderWarmup.html

Often hidden behind a loading screen or some other splash screen.

[bold cave]

How do you exactly,

use
that?

Fr tho im sorry how do you call this function? I added

using UnityEngine.Experimental.Rendering.Universal;```
but cant really just WarmupShader([args]); in Start

[karmic hatch]

I used URP (you install it and then create a render pipeline asset) and then you go into Graph Inspector in shader graph, click the plus, then URP and it adds it in. Presumably the same goes for other pipelines but i haven't used them yet

[untold shoal]

are there ways to load specific textures into VRAM ?

/unload them

for as long until i unload them that is

and then id need the ability to keep them in there

[zenith heron]

for a 2D game using unlit sprites, which option would be best?

I used a forward renderer and my sprite finally changed colors

[meager pelican]

Yeah, because SG expected that you were using an SRP (like URP).

So now you get to debug it.... 😉

Unless it is supposed to be black.

[zenith heron]

how do I debug it?

[meager pelican]

Well, usually you output information in a color....
But anyway. What SHOULD it look like?

What are you doing? Show whole graph.

[zenith heron]

I'm trying to make a pixelate effect

brb

[meager pelican]

Note that the sprite renderer makes a mesh for the sprite and it puts the color into the VERTEX COLOR of the mesh.

[meager pelican]

OK, so start by simplifying.
Just do the texture read part. Forget the stuff to the left (disconnect it). Read the texture at the UV and output the result to the color.

Don't forget to press the save button (don't use Ctrl-S it won't work).

[zenith heron]

ok

also normal button's appearance:

like this?

[meager pelican]

Yep. Does it work?

[zenith heron]

it works but it looks weird

the top is cut off a bit

and the image quality is lower

[meager pelican]

Huh. Might be the sprite renderer's setup??????
What resolution is the texture in/at?

[zenith heron]

where can I check the resolution of a texture?

[meager pelican]

Check import settings

and the texture itself (click on it and check the inspector)

[zenith heron]

I don't have a texture item, I only have a material, a sprite unlit shader graph, and my pipeline

[meager pelican]

Uh, something is mapped to MainTex...input variable on your shader, right?

[zenith heron]

yeah

[meager pelican]

It's a yellow circle with black border that has "play game". That's the texture. What resolution is it?

In your assets.

[zenith heron]

I changed it to full rect and now there's a black box around the yellow area

[meager pelican]

Yeah, it won't clip that off due to the change.

[meager pelican]

I don't do sprites much, but you can try the sprite editor too.
Anyway, it cannot tell about the black border that way unless by alpha.

So you could clip alpha zero maybe?

[zenith heron]

how can I do this?

[meager pelican]

But find the yellow circle texture and check that resolution and import settings.

Hang on for that next alpha part.

[zenith heron]

is the yellow circle referring to the play game button?

[meager pelican]

Sure. There

[meager pelican]

OK, so it's 592x 128

Hmmm

[zenith heron]

without the current render pipeline, the resolution is fine

[meager pelican]

See the filter mode? You have it on point.
Try another mode

[zenith heron]

actually its not the pipeline, it's the texture after all

wait

i meant my material*

[meager pelican]

It has zero alpha too, so we can tell unity to clip it, or clip it our self.

[zenith heron]

the image renders ok but the material makes it look like that

[meager pelican]

Well, you're using point filtering, so it will do that I guess. Depending on what res you're at on screen.

It won't smooth it out.

But then again, you want a pixelated shader, right?

So these things are kind of exclusive.

But let's do it a step at a time.

[brittle owl]

i don’t think it has to be a sprite

[zenith heron]

with the sprite material

[brittle owl]

you could just make it a normal texture

[zenith heron]

i just need a texture that renders the image properly to begin with but can also make a pixelated effect on request

[meager pelican]

Your shader is currently not using your pixelate logic, right? Just outputting the texture results. Right?

[zenith heron]

yeah

[meager pelican]

Change the filter mode yet?

You can also change the sampler state in the shader with a sampler state node.

[zenith heron]

I tried all 3 filter modes but no difference

[meager pelican]

Others are commenting, they'll have input.

[regal stag]

You're outputting the RGB (Base Color) but not the Alpha. You may need to check the Graph Settings (in Graph Inspector window) and make it Transparent for the port to appear.

[zenith heron]

ok

it works!

[meager pelican]

That's the alpha clip.

[zenith heron]

💯

brb

[meager pelican]

Which is fine, but we're trying to figure out pixelation. Is that OK now too?

looks good to me

[zenith heron]

ok

when attaching my pixelate logic, it works

when it reaches maximum, however, it disappears because it's that pixelated

0.99 looks like this

[meager pelican]

lol

[zenith heron]

this is 0

it loks kinda weird though

[meager pelican]

what's 10 %

[zenith heron]

specifically the text

[meager pelican]

you're screwed on the text, if it's built into the texture

[zenith heron]

this is 90%

[meager pelican]

10%

[zenith heron]

i don't really like this pixelate effect that much

10% is the previous one

[meager pelican]

There's 100 ways.
OK

[zenith heron]

actually, I'm looking for a pixelate effect that is independent from an image's resolution

the pixelate boxes seem to care about the width being more than the height

[meager pelican]

Once common way (particularly if you're doing the whole screen) is to do it in a post processing type of pass

OR

BETTER, to render to a lower resolution to begin with, and upscale it. But that can have some drawbacks too.

Or you can sample it in the shader by doing multiple samples with UV maths and averaging them.
or whatever.

[zenith heron]

I set a certain variable from 200 to 300 and the text issue seems to be fixed

[meager pelican]

OK, good.

Now, let's assume that you want to render to a lower-res render texture, and then upscale. That may NOT be what you really want, and there's some drawbacks but I don't recall the specifics. But OK, it all depends on what you want.

Rendering to a lower res texture is just plain FASTER, as there's fewer pixels to process and sample. Then, at the end of it all, you upscale the lower res texture to higher res screen.

So how do you make it resolution independent?
With math! (next post).

So you want to make it resolution independent. But you'll have to think about it, since you can have several resolutions and aspect ratios IRL.

So you have have mobile phones that can be (unrotated) taller than they are wide, and "normal" screens that are wider than they are tall, and at al sorts of resolution.

But you want to emulate some kind of look. Say a 800 x 600 screen.

So given your device's (check at runtime, per frame if it can change) resolution you can compute what you draw based on the aspect ratio. Maybe you only want to allow 800 x 600, and mobile users will have to rotate their screen (IDK if that will really work, sounds like wrong aspect ratio, but...).

So you set up a render texture that is 800x600 and render your game to it.
Then at the end it will output that to whatever resolution is running

So it will work on 4K or 8K devices just like it will work on 1920 x 1080 devices.

IIRC.

Others may comment more.

And if you want to mix full-res and pixelated, you'll have to have multiple cameras.

And that's only one way of many.

I'm just giving you ideas, but I'd do some heavy research and think about what your needs really are.

[swift yoke]

If you guys wanted that in your game, would you just split the meshes into whatever material they used?
So for that you'd have 3 meshes and 3 matierals.
The green part would be one mesh/material (metal painted green)
Stone would be 1 mesh and 1 material (stone mat)
That tin/metal part at the back would be it's own mesh and matierial
Or would you have the same material for the green and silver parts but change the colour property since they're pretty similar?

[olive brook]

Hey. Is it the ideal way to keep all the post pro inside OnRenderImage ? ( Built in )

Or is there other useful methods as well ?

[proper dew]

Hey there, I need to fade between two albedo textures on a material (or alternatively two materials). Is there a way I could possibly do this without writing a shader? Thank you 🙂

[merry rose]

is there a more stable way to get world position in HLSL for screen space effect? It looks good upclose but going further destroys it (camera clip does not change a thing)

[merry rose]

Got it fixed, was passing linearEyeDepth but needed default one

[meager pelican]

I like the separate mesh/material idea....because they ARE separate (just bolted together). The result of the lighting is that the painted surfaces will have different characteristics than the metallic ones. So you'll set the material values separately.

The GPU doesn't care that they're different meshes...make a prefab.

Now, there's implications in terms of things like colliders...you'll have to think about that and decide if the objects can share a collider somehow. But other than that, it is more flexible to have them be different if they're different.

It's all triangles and draw calls in the end. If you have 100 different materials on one "object" that can get excessive, but otherwise...meh...make your life easy.

But you can, of course, use things like metallic maps/gloss maps and such per pixel, even in the standard shaders. It's a lot of texture authoring, and is often done using higher-end software, and it's more work.

[feral kraken]

I am trying to create a custom node in shadergraph, The intention is to take in a Texture2DArray, loop through all the textures, combine the colors based on the alpha and the result is the final color. I have basically no experience in writing shaders so is this sort of thing possible or am i taking the wrong approach?
this is the sort of thing i'm trying to achieve

fixed4 result;

for (int i = 0; i < Texture2DArray.length(); i++)
{
     fixed4 texCol = UNITY_SAMPLE_TEX2DARRAY(Texture2DArray[i], UV);
     result = lerp(result, texCol, texCol.a);
}

Output = result;

[meager pelican]

Given that code, I don't think so. Depends on what you mean by "combine the colors based on the alpha".

If you want to BLEND them, you'd

1. first initialize result to zero (or ones or whatever) to make damn sure it is initialized, don't trust shader compilers to initialize things. You only need a float3 really, since the resulting alpha makes no sense.
2. read the color at the texture & index into a float4.
3. BLEND the color manually into your float3 result.

The blend equation for a normal transparent blend is:
(given that result is the accumulated color, and source is the current pixel value)
result = result * (1-source.a) + source.rgb * source.a;
This is assuming you blend OVER TOP of the colors. In other words that blend is an over-blend. But you may actually need your loop to run backwards, starting with the highest index if that is the "deepest" color, and blending to the lower index of 0. All depends on how the 3D is ordered.

Incidentally, that "over" operation is also why transparents get drawn by the engine in back-to-front order. 😉

[feral kraken]

will try it with these changes thanks for the help 🙂

[eternal jay]

why does my shader make the terrain look VERY smooth.

[meager pelican]

First guess, without seeing your shader....
Check both the resolution of the textures you're using, and of the mesh you're mapping the results to.

[eternal jay]

I am not using a texture, I am using a gradient.

here it is:

[naive knoll]

Do you know why all my textures are pink?

[trail marsh]

Have you recently deleted any package?

A renderpipeline or something like this?

[naive knoll]

Not that i know of

[trail marsh]

If you make a new material, is it pink too?

[naive knoll]

Wait let me try

nah

[meager pelican]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@11.0/manual/InstallURPIntoAProject.html

[meager pelican]

That shader still says "Standard". (Bottom pic).
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@11.0/manual/upgrading-your-shaders.html

[plush briar]

hey there,
im struggeling with unity´s post process effects. If I add for example bloom , the whole scene (+the UI) gets the effect. How can I add bloom or Vignette only to one, specific object?

[dusky stirrup]

When using Spine what in our shader causes the alpha to multiple like this? Making it so you can see parts overlapping?
We want the alpha to not see through to other body parts, hope that makes sense. Not sure what we're doing wrong.
Any advice would be really appreciated, @me if you have any ideas!

[somber slate]

if you change the transparent tag in the shader to opaque that might fix your problem

it's something like { "RenderType"="Opaque" } near the top

[dusky stirrup]

wouldn't that disable transparency completely? We do want transparency but just so it doesn't show the parts overlapping. Might have to resort to render textures but that's a last resort.

[somber slate]

oh i see

in that case maybe you're multiplying some values in your fragment shader where you should be adding them?

i'm not sure if you can do what you're trying to do simply

[dusky stirrup]

hmm okay thanks :)

[fervent flare]

Anyone know if there's a way to embed a Texture 2d Array Asset directly into a material?

Everything I read online seems to suggest this array can only be assigned to a material via a C# script attached to the gameobject

makes it hard to test a shadergraph without being able to drop in a test texture array

[regal stag]

Texture2DArrays can only be created using C#, but you can save it as an asset and should be able to assign it on the material like any other texture, assuming the property is exposed. I've got a small tool here for creating the asset from regular textures : https://gist.github.com/Cyanilux/e672f328c4cafb361b490a5943c1c211. Or can use this : https://github.com/pschraut/UnityTexture2DArrayImportPipeline

[strange pecan]

Hey guys, I'm trying to make a 2d water wave shader using a sin wave for now but it seems that whatever I do in shader graph I always get this result in the game. Can anybody help me? I'm kind of a noob with shaders :/

[fervent flare]

@regal stag Man, awesome. Thank you!

[regal stag]

Subtracting the object's position shifts the origin of the coordinates back to 0, it only translates though. There's still scaling and rotation applied. The Position port expects Object space, so is now applying that scaling/rotation of the object twice.
To get the vertices to match the selection outline, you'd just use the Position node in Object space. Or, if you really need to work in world space, use the Transform node to transform back to Object before inputting into the port.

[meager pelican]

Research "alpha clipping" in the opaque queue. 😉

[dusky stirrup]

Ty

[regal stag]

Looks like a scaling issue maybe, using the X axis from the UV might work better for the Sine input. Or increase the multiplier a lot to increase the wave frequency in the scene view.

[strange pecan]

@regal stag I tried it already but it doesn't seem to work. It gives me the same result. Is the problem maybe the fact that I'm using a sprite renderer?

[meager pelican]

Also, if you're using SG, it has an alpha clip threshold you can use.

[strange pecan]

All I did was replace the Position node with UV

[regal stag]

You don't want to replace the Position entirely with the UV. Just the input going into the Multiply (then Sine)

[strange pecan]

Ohh ok ill try that

Well now nothing shows up anymore

[regal stag]

Might be because you're now using World space for the position instead of Object?

[strange pecan]

I feel dumb ahah yes, I replaced it but I have the same result. I found something tho, when I modify the multiply value, the curve changes, just like if I was getting a different part of the sine wave

[regal stag]

That's a little weird. Multiplying should adjust the scale/frequency of the wave, not shift it

What happens if you change the value to like 500 or something higher?

[strange pecan]

exactly that's why i'm soo confused ahah

Same code but the value of the multiply is at 500

[regal stag]

Yeah I'm confused too. Maybe try a regular quad/plane instead of a sprite

[strange pecan]

Same problem but I think I found something. Look what happen when I put it on a plane

Maybe I'm not using the right axis? Or should I even modify the vertex shader?

[regal stag]

Oh right, the sprite is a quad. It doesn't have enough vertices to offset in order to show the shape produced by the wave

It might be better to just alpha clip parts away to produce the wave shape, so it's all in the fragment part. You could use vertex displacement but you'd need lots of vertices to make it look smooth.

[strange pecan]

OMG yesss that's why I have only 4 vertices, how can it make a sine wave -_- thank you soo much, I think making it in the fragment shader is a better idea and I can just modify the alpha like you said. Thank you sooo much!

[regal stag]

Yeah, should be a similar setup. You'll probably also want to Multiply after the Sine to adjust the amplitude/height of the wave.

[strange pecan]

Yeah, I plan on using a compute shader in the future for now I just wanted to test a bit and have something to prototype with that doesn't look boring

[elfin kraken]

is there something specific i have to name my mainTexture for it to be accessible through script?

I am using URP with shader graph

i tried _MainTex

[swift yoke]

Thanks man

[regal stag]

You need to change the Reference of the property, not just the name used for display. It's under the Node Settings tab of the Graph Inspector (while property is selected).

[elfin kraken]

@regal stag thank you, that fixed it

[naive knoll]

and what should i switch it too?

[meager pelican]

Upgrade the materials. Unity will auto-upgrade the standard shader to the URP lit shader for you, if you ask it to.

[naive knoll]

Yeah but how do I upgrade them?

(sorry for being a bit foolish but I am only a beginner )

[meager pelican]

Read the link, it has instructions in it.

    Open your Project in Unity, and go to Edit > Render Pipeline > Universal Render Pipeline.
    According to your needs, select either Upgrade Project Materials to URP Materials or Upgrade Selected Materials to URP Materials.

Note: These changes cannot be undone. Backup your Project before you upgrade it.

Tip: If the Preview thumbnails in Project View are incorrect after you've upgraded, try right-clicking anywhere in the Project View window and selecting Reimport All.```

[zenith heron]

How can I take the Out(4) and put it in an In(4) or something and output 4 elements or something

or basically just take the Out(4) and put it into the Vector4

[naive knoll]

thanks... Oh true I am blind x)

[zenith heron]

around the middle, I take my UV node and I multiply it by another vector4. This allows me to successfully scale my texture properly. However, a problem arises when a black-looking pillar forms above my texture. Why does this problem occur?

[meager pelican]

It's already a Vector4, so you shouldn't need to do that.
float4 = vector4

[zenith heron]

how can I turn this from a square view to its own dimensions

it's originally a 592x128 image

but shader graph wants to make it into a square

when I pixelate the actual image, the pixelation is slanted

[meager pelican]

https://godotforums.org/discussion/25882/make-shader-shape-independant-from-texture-size
might help. You'll need to interpret for your use-case.

[vernal pewter]

How much of a performance issue (or non-issue) is setting material properties during runtime?

[meager pelican]

Minimal to none, most of the time. If you're cloning materials every frame it could have some overhead and GC, but otherwise, it has properties anyway, and they get sent to the GPU anyway...??every frame??. (might have some type of cache so...) So the set time % of the whole process should be fairly minimal. C# has to find the material in memory and set the variables. But some of that is asynchronous to the drawing going on.

If you have 100,000 items to set, you'll probably want to be more picky. So how many items do you need to set?

Best Guess.

[reef grove]

unity keeps saying "ComputeScreenPos" doesn't exist

wtf

[vernal pewter]

Ah alright, I didn't know they get sent every frame, I assumed it worked differently. Thanks!

[reef grove]

It says ComputeGrabScreenPos is also undeclared which is what I think I wanna use but neither is working

[meager pelican]

There might be some caching on the GPU side, managed by the engine, but I wouldn't count on it being there anyway. That's pretty tech-deep for me.

Overall, it will depend on the "how many" part.

[vernal pewter]

More than a few, less than a lot :)

[meager pelican]

lol

I wouldn't worry too much. Cache the references on the C# side for speed if you can.

And use the propertyID values, not names.

keep the C# side as fast as possible and let the engine do its thing.

[vernal pewter]

I was using constant strings, but I guess I can change them to property IDs. Thanks!

[meager pelican]

Yeah, people don't realize it, but IIRC, using strings causes a lookup to get the ID anyway. So you may as well get the ID once, in startup, and cache it, rather than do it every iteration.

[reef grove]

I hate to do this but anybody know what is going on with my issue 😬😁

[meager pelican]

IDK, should work. This:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-BuiltinFunctions.html
claims such exists. Are you missing an include or something?

[reef grove]

OH

that might be it

what do I include

hmm seems like nothing needs to be included? is that even a thing for shaders?

ok lemme try just doing "#include "UnityCG.cginc"

siiick I worked thank you

[tired crown]

Hello, I am new to shaders. Basically what I wanna do is I have 2 textures - lets say a triangle and circle. They both have transparent background. I want to place one above the other, as if it were 2 layers in photoshop. How can I achieve that? I tried blend node, but it mostly offers some subtractions etc. Would anybody know? 🙂

[west eagle]

use lerp node, A is triangle,B is circle, lerp by the alpha of circle

[tired crown]

Hmm, it doesnt seem to work, it just translates from one texture to other depending on the W attribute of T input... 😦

[fervent flare]

Anyone know how to use delta time node in shadergraph?

Whenever I use it I get weird twitching instead of beautiful framerate independant math as I would get in c# logic

Getting these weird seams, which I suspect have to do with a lack of proper use of deltaTime

[vocal narwhal]

why is this using delta time instead of just Time?

[fervent flare]

it's not, it's using time, and a bunch of other other things, but not deltaTime

[vocal narwhal]

The issue looks to just be some poor logic somewhere causing it to not tile properly

delta time is not relevant to this

[fervent flare]

Hm, okay. Poor logic is pretty much guaranteed, I have little to no clue what I'm actually doing here

trying to get a water wobble effect going on but I'm pretty much just trying random math that feels like it's going in the right direction

[wispy stump]

If I were looking for someone to rewrite an SRP shader into an HDRP version of the same shader for a flat fee where would I look.

[olive brook]

I guess
Blend One One
Would exactly be the Photoshop Normal effect ?

[olive brook]

There's here and there's the official reddit, I think that's pretty much it for Unity shaders community

( If there's more, let me know too. Tnx)

[olive brook]

You could make like 4 steps of fade texture from texture A and texture B . Then apply them to the albedo by some speed u want. But blending smoothly requires shader code

[proper dew]

That's a smarter idea than I thought actually. I managed to get it working by cheating; I put two of the same object in the same position and then adjusted the alpha, but I will definitely do this next time if needed! Thanks 🙂

[olive brook]

@proper dew yeah that should work too , pretty hacky way :D

[proper dew]

Hacky for sure but it works 😂

[wispy stump]

is there like a specific person i should hit up or?

[olive brook]

@wispy stump I don't know them much tbh

[static turtle]

Hey folks, anyone familiar with Unity shaders available for a qq?
Struggling to pass extra data into my surface shader 😫

[grand jolt]

what the hell did I do to my skybox

it's grey and there's no light

[meager pelican]

You should spell it out, so people can reply. In other words, "just ask, with specifics".

[static turtle]

I'm passing contextual data for a mesh's vertices into a surface shader through its uv2...uv5 fields

But haven't been able to discover (online or through experimentation) how to access it in the shader

I see there are TEXCOORD...TEXCOORD3, but those are a differrent data type than the uv...uv5 data that I'm passing in (former is float4, latter is float2). So, does mean that uv3 and uv4 data are both packed into TEXCOORD1?

Just not understanding what happens to my UV data when it goes into the surface shader.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-VertexProgramInputs.html covers some of this, but doesn't mention what happens to uv5+ when it gets into the shader. It also actually adds some ambiguity about the data type for TEXCOORD properties... my intellisense says they are float4, but the docs say they could be float2, float3, or float4 without stating why 😦

[meager pelican]

Define it has a float4, and pack it yourself, if you want it packed.
But in the end, you should be able to define your surface input struct to have uv0, uv1, uv2.... as float4's if you're packing them. You can define them as float2, 3 or 4's but I'd pack them myself and use float4.

See note that the bottom, here:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-VertexProgramInputs.html

lol

same link on edit

It figures it all out. Use float4, pack it yourself, unpack it yourself, you'll save some headaches.

Watch out, though, since some UV's are used for light mapping.

[static turtle]

Oh... intellisense shows me this about Mesh.uv

    public Vector2[] uv { ... }

And I said float2 above when I meant Vector2, oops

When you say "pack it yourself", I'm guessing you mean something like this?:

mesh.uv2 = new Vector4[size]{...}

[meager pelican]

OK, the packing I'm thinking of happens between the vertex stage and the fragment stage IN THE SHADER.

as for Unity's define of mesh data, it is what it is.
I'm running out of time, have to bail out, but you can figure it out.
Since they define it as an array, maybe you can use any of Vect2, 3, or 4.
You get up to 8 UV's in a mesh. Sorry I can't help more right now.

[static turtle]

"OK, the packing I'm thinking of happens between the vertex stage and the fragment stage IN THE SHADER."

Gotcha, yes I am doing this now actually to get the vertex data into the bit which calculates the pixel/fragment color.

"I'm running out of time, have to bail out"
No worries and thanks for your help. I see that I get up to 8 UVs in a mesh, but I guess I need to keep putzing around in the shader to see how that data actually ends up in the data structures there

I feel like it should be MUCH easier to send data into a shader! Feels like I'm cutting up pillows, packing them into lunchboxes, mailing them somewhere and then trying to stitch them back together in the correct order 😩 Is this only hard because I'm using a surface shader? Maybe I need to go with a fragment shader instead...

[static turtle]

Burned out for today, but posted on the forums... hopefully someone can help 🙂 https://forum.unity.com/threads/confusion-while-passing-arbitrary-data-to-surface-shader-via-vertex-uvs.1160381/

[regal stag]

I think if you send in via .uv/.uv2/etc they are always set to Vector2 (which corresponds to float2 in shader. But you could write float4 still and the z and w channels will likely be filled with 0.

In the Mesh class there's a SetUVs function iirc, which can pass up to Vector4 so can fill those extra channels.

[static turtle]

Ah thanks for this, I'll give that a shot in the morning 🙂

[swift loom]

So, tex2D uses a normalized 0-1 value for texture coordinates right?

[viral trellis]

Is there an obvious way to sort Sub Graph input orders that I missed? They are all grouped and sorted on my Blackboard, but on the Sub Graph node's UI, the input order is stuck with the chronological order of the creation of new properties. 🤔 (version 2021.2.0b7)

[regal stag]

Yes, though the coordinates can be outside that range and the texture will clamp/repeat/mirror depending on the wrap mode set

[swift loom]

yeah thanks, just making sure as i'm having issues finding the real problem.

[elfin kraken]

why does this expose a Vector4?

when i clearly created a Vector2

[slim steppe]

How can I not include a layer in the depth texture?

[amber saffron]

Because the regular shaderlab syntax doesn't have a proper type for vector 2 and 3. This is fixed in more recent versions of shadergraph

[elfin kraken]

thx

[reef grove]

anybody know if there is a way to get the index of the character in a text shader

I got the text to do a kinda float thing but I want each letter to be independant

[tired crown]

Hello again. I still have problem with shadergraph. I was asking yesterday and I was sugested to use blend with overwrite to combine two textures to work as layers in any photoshop-like program. Blend node seems to have some problems with alpha overlapping. I tested it out and here you can see what happened:

I created blue and red line and I want to place them one on top of the other (for test purposes, my real issue is more complicated) using shadergraph. Both lines are blurred so their edges are semi-transparent. When I place them on top of each other in krita (or photoshop), they are working as expected. But if I place them on top of each other in shadergraph using blend overwrite, the red one has weird blue outline.

I am using this for 2D game, so all textures are 2D images and the texture is 2D unlit - in case it matters. Also notice the textures are not displayed incorrectly in the graph untill it reaches the master node.

[tired crown]

So to my surprise extra blend node fixed it. It seems like a problem with the texture sample or something... O.o

Still looks like some performence slow down to me.

[vernal island]

hello. Do you know any good tutorial(or any document/script) for Compute shaders... I have never worked with shaders before and im little confused. I need to create mesh with Compute shader. Ty 🙂

[meager pelican]

Well, you could start with reading the Unity documentation on procedural geometry, specifically DrawProcedural and DrawProceduralIndirect.
But you're jumping into the deep-end without a life jacket, if you have never worked with shaders before.
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.DrawProceduralIndirect.html

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

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ComputeShader.html

[vernal island]

@meager pelican yea i know... but i dont know other method (some api) to put my vertices/indices into buffers and create mesh by GPU not CPU ... :/ (need smoothy but with big amount of vertices)

[vernal island]

Is it possible create mesh by shadergraph? Or it's only for textures?

[rare charm]

@vernal island if you need to create a mesh during runtime you have to do it in a monobehaviour

[shadow locust]

You can create procedural geometry in the GPU. Here's an example: https://github.com/keijiro/NoiseBall3

It's only for visual effects of course, not game logic

Using https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.DrawProcedural.html
and https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.DrawProceduralNow.html

[vernal island]

Ah ok :/

[vernal island]

Ok ty! :3

[midnight spade]

Hey guys anyone know why I'd get this error when trying to use texture arrays in hlsl? unrecognized identifier 'TEXTURE2D_ARRAY' at line 39 (on d3d11)

I can't find any documentation on the subject unfortunately

Do I need to add some kind of include?

[static turtle]

Your suggestion was spot-on, thanks! Some additional details here: https://forum.unity.com/threads/confusion-while-passing-arbitrary-data-to-surface-shader-via-vertex-uvs.1160381/#post-7443542

@meager pelican Thx for your help, too! ^ link clarifies some of the stuff we were poking at.

[static turtle]

I don't know, but it sounds like either you've written some invalid code, there's a compatibility issue, or there's a shader code-gen issue to me. I'd start by making sure my own code looks reasonable, then explore the possibility that what I'm doing isn't supported for the hardware I'm targeting (check your pragmas) and that there aren't any known-issues related to shader code generation (e.g. specific variable names to use or avoid)

[meager pelican]

There it is! Tucked away behind the older mesh.uv stuff!
https://docs.unity3d.com/2021.1/Documentation/ScriptReference/Mesh.SetUVs.html

Thanks for the link, mannyhams and @regal stag
It can take float2, 3, 4...!!

bglous (the walking Unity documentation phenom) does it again.

[static turtle]

Ya bgolus is incredible

[hollow talon]

is texture sampling costs only for UV bounds? If I have a 4k texture, which I want to use half of it, does that mean would that cost like sampling 2k texture?

[meager pelican]

I doubt it is as simple as the "uv bounds" since there's a memory cache and accessing going on. But it might be able to 'skip' a significant portion of memory access.

And the results may vary by hardware implementation, so YMMV.
In general, the memory cache should "read ahead" for sequential access a bit, but at the end of your X uv, when it gets to .5, you'll increment the y and then start over with x=0, so you've "wasted" some read-ahead, and you've cause another cache miss to jump to the next area in memory.

I think. 😉

In the end, there's not much you can do about it, if you're using a texture atlas, which is still going to be better than two (or 4 or whatever) different textures. At least it has a hold on the thing, even if there's cache misses.

2 cents.

[amber saffron]

@tired crown Indeed, the blend node isn't exactly how photoshop handles layer blending, I think it only works with the color, ignoring the "layer opacity"
I implemented the math of the "over" operator described here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_compositing#Description
It seems to be what your are looking for :

[hollow talon]

@meager pelican is texture atlas still more performant for mobile devices?

[vernal island]

I find the program here is making mesh w/o mesh datas. (I have data of vertices and indices. But I would like to make mesh without that indices... Because the XNA output is buggy little bit for indices) don't you know any good "tutorial" same as this one?

[karmic hatch]

How do i change the strength/color of specular from my water shader?

There is an option for specular color but either it makes the water look weird and a bit pink when i set it nearer to white, or the reflections are super bright blue

at least, the reflections of the sky

Actually nvm I will try to use a gradient input for the specular color

[midnight spade]

Cool cool thanks I'll confirm all of that after work

Trying to convert my shader graph shaders to written shaders but it's much more difficult than I thought

[stark canopy]

Came across a Unity rendering bug and wanted to share it here to make sure people are aware when creating their graphics!

CustomRenderTextures don't update on WebGL if doubleBuffered is enabled. You can find this on Issue Tracker here: https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/webgl-customrendertexture-is-not-updated-when-double-buffered-is-enabled

Fingers crossed the QA team prioritizes this higher in their next triage. This is a massive issue for my team; I imagine it affects many others developing for clients on WebGL as well.

[lucid current]

guys when importing game asset my material order is kinda hell

but in blender it is fine. I export as fbx model

pls don't ask me to show the code for this🤦‍♂️

[merry rose]

is there any info on what this function does? unity docs should show this stuff.

[tired crown]

Whoa, really good job! This seems to work! I still find some small issues, but I guess I just need to fix the textures. Thank you very much, you saved me! 🤩 👏 Though I am surprised such trivial task requires so much effort.

[round nova]

hi, im using this grass shader and modifying it to have the grass spawned through code:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/urp-compute-54164790

This is a simple function i adapted from the code and put it on top of the grassPainter script:

    
public void AddPoint(Vector3 grassPosition, Vector3 grassNormal)
    {
        positions.Add((grassPosition));
        indicies.Add(i);
        length.Add(new Vector2(sizeWidth, sizeLength));
        colors.Add(new Color(AdjustedColor.r + (Random.Range(0, 1.0f) * rangeR), AdjustedColor.g + (Random.Range(0, 1.0f) * rangeG), AdjustedColor.b + (Random.Range(0, 1.0f) * rangeB), 1));
        normals.Add(grassNormal);
        i++;
        print(grassPosition + " | " + grassNormal);
        
        mesh = new Mesh();
        mesh.SetVertices(positions);
        indi = indicies.ToArray();
        mesh.SetIndices(indi, MeshTopology.Points, 0);
        mesh.SetUVs(0, length);
        mesh.SetColors(colors);
        mesh.SetNormals(normals);
        filter.mesh = mesh;
    }

I'm calling it using this:

for (int x = 0; x < 50; x++)
            {
                for (int z = 0; z < 50; z++)
                {
                    grassPainter.AddPoint(new Vector3(x, 0.9f, z), new Vector3(0, 1, 0));
                }
            }

Now if i see the i of the grass spawned in the grass painter, i do see the number increasing. but no grass appears in the scene and game view. does anybody know what's going on?

[untold shoal]

hey i have a very basic shader but theres these lines that appear near the edges of the sprite, not sure whats causing these, does anyone have an idea ?

[amber saffron]

The horizontal and vertical lines in the sample texture node ? This is just because the node preview doesn't display transparency

[untold shoal]

it appears in the game view too

when running

[amber saffron]

Can you show the rest of the graph and the current result ?

[untold shoal]

changed the graph but still shows up

[amber saffron]

Well, you didn't connect anything to the alpha output => no transparency

[untold shoal]

ahhh didnt know i had to do that

thanks!

also, any idea why changing my frame value would tank my framerate ? im dropping from 500 to about 80 ?

[amber saffron]

I don't see a reason for this

[untold shoal]

well now it doesnt anymore either way. strange

[spark stone]

my unity keeps freezing when there is 2 enabled reflection probes is there a fix for this?

[icy osprey]

Ideas on how to create a trail that stays same size no matter the distance from camera? I want to create a tracer effect similiar to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYGS3_Vyxys
Currently im using a VFX graph with screen space size set to 5 pixels, but this solution is flickering very strongly for some reason:

[meager pelican]

They're great for batching, because they can share the same material but with different instance offsets for texture data. IIUC.
But has far as memory goes, bgolus to the rescue again:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/potential-consequences-when-using-texture-atlasing-and-very-large-textures-on-mobile.730130/

Other hints (including using fewer materials by using an atlas):
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/OptimizingGraphicsPerformance.html

[icy osprey]

If anybodys wondering - this does the job:

[short gulch]

hello everybody, I started to study shader graph, and Im having some trouble to make vertex displacement, on the new version of shader graph

i made some subgraphs for distortion, outputing a vector 4 (RGBA)

and I multiplied them to have a single input source

however

it doesnt seem to be accepted by the vertex position

could anybody give me a hint on what am I missing?

please

[swift loom]

So if tex2D uses a UV value of 0-1 to grab a color, how come I can use UnityObjectToClipPos(v.vertex); to get a value between -1 to 1 yet get a properly rendered texture when divided by _ScreenParams.xy? Wouldn't that be a -1/1920 on the left side? it even works with a clamped texture.

if it's clamped will it simply cull the -1 to 0 and stretch the texture on its own?

i'm so confused right now 😆

i would have assumed a clamped texture would get rendered on half the screen or something. but how and where is this done then? because i'm having big trouble using UnityObjectToClipPos(v.vertex) for mathematics right now

[vernal island]

Hello. I want to ask. If i want to create mesh by computeshader and I have vertices (indices too but buggy), I need to write something in shader? If I understand it well (I hope), I need to push data to GPU buffer and after that take it and use drawprocedural and if I will do something with the model I have to write a code in shader right? (Drawprocedural doesn't need indexbuffer to create triangles alone right?)
And I have one question, I linked buffer with "shader" buffer and I wanted to call setdata but unity debugger tells me I set data of bigger amount of data (I need put 4M Bytes).
It's a problem with set or the buffer in GPU can't handle this amount? (If call setdata more times or GPU memory size problem)

[coral geyser]

Does anyone have any idea why a custom shader graph might not show up under the materials menu?

Got it working. Was in "failed to compile." Turns out there were some typos in a custom function. All fixed now.

[frank sigil]

Hi, I'm new to shaders - I created a simple one which I use to apply a RenderTexture to a MeshRenderer ingame. I implemented two passes so that the back face is flipped to have the texture be right way around on both sides (Probably not related, thought I'd mention regardless).

My issue now is that this works perfectly fine as is - But in VR, the right eye is misaligned.

If I use the builtin Hidden/BlitCopyWithDepth shader instead of my own one, it works fine in VR but has its own issues (Depth, Not flipped on backside, etc). To try and debug this I grabbed the source of this shader and compiled it myself, but that results in the same bevahiour as my own shader where the right eye is misaligned.

Obviously, I have to be missing something - If somebody could hint me what it is that would be appreciated. Here's my shader in question: https://github.com/kinsi55/CS_BeatSaber_Camera2/blob/77fd58eb21dca77266970a618c54aa0ec47d33a6/Shaders/VolumetricBlit.shader

And right as I write that I find out about UnityStereoScreenSpaceUVAdjust - Well, for anyone possibly encountering the same, heres the fix: https://github.com/kinsi55/CS_BeatSaber_Camera2/commit/ba76543db3faf88be764ebcdcbefcfdf8602c3a0

[soft harness]

so you know the fake room effect?

can you do the same thing for a cylinder

[regal stag]

If you're trying to map a texture to the screen, the correct way to achieve that is by using

// Vertex shader
clipPos = UnityObjectToClipPos(v.vertex);
screenPos = ComputeScreenPos(clipPos);

// Fragment shader
float2 uv = screenPos.xy / screenPos.w;

clipPos is in a [-w, w] range (where w is it's 4th component). ComputeScreenPos basically remaps it to [0,w]. We then divide by w in the fragment stage to reach a [0,1] range across the whole screen. If you only want part of the screen you can remap further from here.

[regal stag]

If a port won't connect it's because it uses fragment-only nodes for a vertex stage input. (e.g. Sample Texture 2D cannot be used in the vertex stage, but Sample Texture 2D LOD can)

[regal stag]

This might give some hints : https://andrewgotow.com/2018/09/09/interior-mapping-part-2/

[distant sleet]

Hey guys, having a small issue with HLSL so Im not sure if this is a property of HLSL or

if I have this simple code

float3 lightPos = float3(0.5, 0.5, 1);


[numthreads(8,8,1)]
void CSMain (uint3 id : SV_DispatchThreadID)
{
  Result[id.xy] = ((lightPos), 1);
}```

Then the output image is black

but if I do this

float3 lightPos = float3(0.5, 0.5, 1);


[numthreads(8,8,1)]
void CSMain (uint3 id : SV_DispatchThreadID)
{
  lightPos = float3(0.5, 0.5, 1);

  Result[id.xy] = ((lightPos), 1);
}```

It works

so can HLSL variables not be initialized outside a function?

[swift loom]

@regal stag thank you, i'll see if i can do something with this

[swift loom]

i think it worked 👍

[distant sleet]

Hey, I doubt anyone knows but.. does anyone know a good list of fractal distance estimators?

[regal stag]

I think global variables in hlsl are marked as "extern" by default, meaning it's an input to the shader and must be set externally. If you want to initalize it in the shader, you may need to mark it as static. (Based on info from the hlsl docs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3dhlsl/dx-graphics-hlsl-variable-syntax)
Alternatively could use a macro, #define LIGHT_POS float3(0.5, 0.5, 1);. Then at compile time LIGHT_POS is swapped out. (It doesn't need to be all caps, but that's the naming convention)

[distant sleet]

OH that makes a lot of sense, thank you so much

I was confused because I needed Pi for skybox rendering

and I was confused why that was intialized successfully

It was because of static const float PI = 3.14159265f;, so that clarifies a lot

Thanks!

I have another logistical problem, though

I'm using HLSL to completely override Unity's camera and render with raymarching

As there is no "list" alternative in HLSL and all arrays have a set size, I dont know how I would pass "Shapes" into the shader

Lets say in my scene I have 4 spheres, how would I pass the info (location and radius) of those spheres into the shader

to allow me to add 1 more at runtime?

[teal breach]

Perhaps you have to do it through a compute shader, where you have more flexibility over input buffer shape/size?

[distant sleet]

This is currently a compute shader

I was more confused about in what form I'd pass shape dat

As an example lets say I have 3 shapes

Sphere, box, torus

Sphere = radius, box = width height and breadth, torus = radius and inner radius

All of these sphers also have an xyz for position

In my non-compute shader attempts at this project I used an abstract class to render every shape

but now Im not so sure how to pass information to have an ambiguous amount and type for each shape

[wispy stump]

If someone knows how to rewrite a SRP Shader for HDRP I'd be willing to pay someone to do the task.

[formal canyon]

I'm trying to set the Emission Color+Texture in C#, I can set the Color using mat.SetColor("_EmissionColor", Color.red); What is the parameter for the texture??

[regal stag]

Probably _EmissionMap, but it depends on the shader

[formal canyon]

ok thanks, will give it a try!

works perfectly thanks a lot!

[amber saffron]

Do you mean to rewrite a "built-in renderer shader" for HDRP ?

[wispy stump]

yes

[amber saffron]

If it's something you got from the asset store, look if the maker of the asset didn't by any chance do a version for HDRP. Else ... well, good luck

[wispy stump]

It's surprising that not a single person's can do this task its crazy

[zenith heron]

Does anyone have a pixelate effect shader? Please reply to this message if you have an idea of where to find one as well. I've already searched it up btw.

[zenith heron]

The pixelate effects you can always find online do the same thing. However, I want a pixelate effect that can do something like this:

however, this is what most pixelate effects in the unity community do:

ew

I can't use that

isn't there anything closer to the first image?

[grand jolt]

How to make water in URP? All the tutorial on youtube is outdated. I have a river in my game but don't have water so I want to make it look like river water.

[rare charm]

@grand jolt realistic water?

[grand jolt]

Yes

[rare charm]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRq-IdShxpU @grand jolt this should get you started

[distant sleet]

man raymarching fractals is so cool

seriously mesmerizing

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/766232468797259776/880158153654804490/unknown.png

[coral geyser]

Does anyone have a more in-depth explanation of how the sample texture 2D node works? something is going very wrong and I'm not quite sure why

I'm trying to build a palletization system. I have a palette that I used to generate a lookup table (LUT). Basically this maps an RGB position to a color. So what needs to happen is unity needs to read a screen color as a coordinate value (let's just use R and G to make it easy). So say we got R = 10 and G = 255, we need to find that position in the map, X = 10 and Y = 255, and output the color found there.

I built up a shader graph that I would have thought would do that, but instead it outputs colors which don't make any sense.

https://i.gyazo.com/98820134204c07741d3e8798b1953f14.png

expected color out: red

result:

https://i.gyazo.com/6dcf7974debf59a251ee441d1241ff84.png

[amber saffron]

You're sampling at the UV position (1,0), so something around the bottom right pixel of the texture. isn't it white ?

Note that depending on the wrapping mode of the texture, this will interpolate with the bottom left pixel

[coral geyser]

It is red in the texture provided. I think. It should be lol

Wrapping mode is repeat and the interpolation is off so just point not bilinear or anything.

[amber saffron]

What does your LUT look like ?

[coral geyser]

Thank you for the help btw. One moment.

[toxic flume]

Normal and Tanget can be TEXCOORD in fragment input data?

o.normalWorld = normalize(mul(float4(i.normal, 0.0), unity_WorldToObject).xyz);

I have seen some codes like above to compute world normal map. It is a direction not point. It is wrong, right?

[coral geyser]

This is the LUT I'm using.

the color at 0,64 is what I'm targetting (Y starts at the top and goes to 64, x starts at the left and goes to 4098)

I built the generator so if it needs to be done differently let me know

[amber saffron]

Y starts at the top and goes to 64
This is in pixel coordinates in photoshop or image editing, in Unity UV space Y starts at the bottom

and X & Y range from 0 to 1

[coral geyser]

ooooh ok.

So I'm going to remap 0-255 to 1-0 on the y

[amber saffron]

Yep

[coral geyser]

and 0 to 255 to 0-1 on the X

[amber saffron]

So the uv you're looking after is 0,0 🙂

[amber saffron]

Note that you're mentioning RGB value for color, unity alway noarmlizes those to 0-1

[coral geyser]

ohhhh

ok well that's a problem too lol

[amber saffron]

So, the red 255,0,0 RGB is 1,0,0 in floating point format (shadergraph vector3)

[coral geyser]

https://i.gyazo.com/159da70122594e8d55d0117d313ea1f1.png

here's the new thing

it's showing green now.

Instead of red.

[amber saffron]

Next, I'd recommand to add a half pixel offset when sampling, you want to sample the center of the pixel, not the "edge".
Instead of remaping to 0;1, remap to 0.5/64 ; 1-(0.5/64) on Y, and similar on X

[coral geyser]

I'm going to switch to this lut

I'll try that.

ok that's working sir

now I just need to re-add the blue aspect lol

https://i.gyazo.com/1795d266521275b5f585eaec2a4d1416.png this is what the asset looks like without blue. So pretty good. there is this odd yellow line coming through at sub-pixel scale though, which is a bit weird.

[amber saffron]

If you plan to use the 4096x64 texture you posted above, I'd recommand to use it like a 3D texture, it would make the coordinate calculation way easier

[coral geyser]

Yeah that would be ideal, how do I do that?

[amber saffron]

In the texture import settings, there is a 3D texture mode 🙂

(unless you have an old-ish version of unity)

[coral geyser]

ok, I see.

Got the import bit

[amber saffron]

And in shadergraph, you use a sample texture 3D node

If you're remapping colors, it's just the matter of taking the input color as coordinate, and plug it in th UV

just have to remap with the half pixel offset, which is even easier since you have a 64x64x64 texture (so no need to remaps the axes separately)

[coral geyser]

still have the flipped y problem tho

[amber saffron]

Oh yeah

just pass the Y value in a one minus node before remapping then

[coral geyser]

https://i.gyazo.com/d9abeddba0f4bc6fb8e5fcb8a7b854f7.png

right so this is 99% there

still confused by the lines in the character model

[amber saffron]

The ... outline ?

[coral geyser]

no no

look very closely

there are very thin, sub-pixel scale lines that are only on the vertical coordinate

vertical direction*

[amber saffron]

I was going to say it might be wrapping issue, but the remap should handle that

[coral geyser]

Thanks for all the help so far btw

[amber saffron]

How are you applying this effect ?

[coral geyser]

can I buy you a coffee or something lol

[spiral bay]

We still can't multiply three inputs in a single multiply node in ShaderGraph, right?

[amber saffron]

nope

[coral geyser]

This is a post effect, a render texture at low resolution comes in and is processed with the shader.

then the output is displayed

[amber saffron]

Make a game, seel it so much that you have to pay for a unity license, so I also get paid 🙂

[coral geyser]

you got it lol

https://i.gyazo.com/0a0cb24404c9ba31cd481be4361e8b23.png

this shader isn't even as much of a beast as the toon shader that's also running lol

btw food for thought, the lines go away if I bypass the LUT system

[amber saffron]

Hard to read anything from that blurry image 🙂

[coral geyser]

I'm going to temporarily disable the sobel filter so we can see just the effect of the LUT system

https://i.gyazo.com/95ba6d628867128af50ced8c153812e9.png ok this is the output from the lut, standby for a screenie of the whole LUT system

[amber saffron]

I did try to use the lut you showed before in my scene, looks like this, I also have some "lines" showing up :

If I set the texture filter back to bilinear, it looks great

[coral geyser]

I think those are different. Try downresing the image and posterizing it

https://i.gyazo.com/116fba5ae056c039a04744d0b2279a1d.png

https://i.gyazo.com/2ddc68c131c02217254eddda203db2dc.png

https://i.gyazo.com/40c72310e8b9aa82a3f72f4fb2aa1b5f.png

the input pixel is a render tex, posting that in a second

https://i.gyazo.com/15fb9ed32b6f1ae8f22c7c1bb4f549a8.png

that's being driven by a camera naturally

https://i.gyazo.com/21e2c03c7b847a3a2898aae732a8d85a.png

it's almost like there are 2 images on top of each other at slightly different positions

[amber saffron]

Could you post a screenshot of the RT before the filter, so I can use it in my test as input ?

[coral geyser]

https://i.gyazo.com/42299bda4268718e0a25a4e882f491bb.png this?

[amber saffron]

yep

[coral geyser]

kk

[amber saffron]

Oh, I got it, silly me

Disable mip map generation on your LUT texture

@coral geyser Just in case you missed it, URP has a built-in color lookup post process :

[coral geyser]

Oh what how does that work lol

Let me try that mip map thing haha

o wow

yeah that fixed it

https://i.gyazo.com/585baa560dabd28feb493b902756e4b8.png

thanks!

https://i.gyazo.com/399d6dc8cdb8160b1f229e9eef5e41bc.png (with the sobel filter back on)

[amber saffron]

Also, you don't need to do the posterize in the shader if you already have your LUT posterized 😉

[coral geyser]

I KNOW I KNOW

If you're curious I made the lut generator public

needs node though

[amber saffron]

noice (even if I don't know what to do with that single JS file 🙂 )

oh, nodeJS

[coral geyser]

you install node and npm, then you run npm install . (This gets all the packages I used) then you run node generator.js

[amber saffron]

I'm to deep in nodal editors, I though you were saying that the tool needed some node workflow XD

[coral geyser]

oh no haha

this is nodejs

I'm sure you realized that

Also if you don't want to use the simple endesga-32 palette I provided, you'll need to create one, it's pretty simple, just any png will do, make sure every color in there is a color you want the LUT to have.

[toxic flume]

How can I choose a subshader with Render type tag value not RenderType?!
Also SetReplacement only works with camera and image effect shaders?
How can I switch between subshaders for an object in a script (runtime)?

[coral geyser]

ok I hate asking for help again so early but I'm so confused lol. I'm trying to make different layers, and it works in the preview but not in the actual viewport. Any idea what's going on?

https://i.gyazo.com/75b445d28d17494016432217171a311a.png the shader graph

the output

https://i.gyazo.com/3b3e45aab6d22db5f42b65c49785cfaf.png

[grand jolt]

i dont have the pbr shader graph option, did i not import something?

[coral geyser]

I think it's just called "Lit shader graph" in URP

@grand jolt

[grand jolt]

oh

thanks, i see it

[coral geyser]

technical artists, I need you lol

Where's that remy guy

I think the problem is that the camera is rendering stuff to the texture even when there isn't anything "visible to it" that hasn't been culled properly.

but it doesn't make sense why the previews would render properly but no the main window

[coral geyser]

https://i.gyazo.com/b91c978ef688823c4505cbcc7afe593c.png it's also doing this lol

[amber saffron]

Looks like you disabled the clear flags on the camera ?

[slate solstice]

looks cool tho

[coral geyser]

@amber saffron the opaque texture ones? There are a few cameras which capture each different layer. I've played around with the "opaque texture" things and haven't found a setting that works.

but I'd be open to anything you can think of

[coral geyser]

it do tho

[amber saffron]

first, let me have a breakfast

[coral geyser]

you're a boss dude

[spiral bay]

Can we actually create a texture via ShaderGraph? I have a Grid texture that I want to extract some squares depending on their black levels then separate them into "mini textures" of their own so I can scroll them indiviually

[coral geyser]

@amber saffron I have to sleep. I appreciate the help you've given me and if theres anything I can do to pay you back please let me know. Maybe I'll see if I can fix this layers issue after using the worlds best debugger (sleep lol)

[pliant pond]

You could either remap the coordinates with some (considerably easy; uvs are 0-1 in unity thankfully) math, or if you wanted an easier and more straightforward solution just split the grid up in photoshop and input the textures individually.. but since you're using a grid some math could look like float2 griduvs = floor(uvs * scale) and that'll get you a unique id for each section itself nicely named such as 0, 1, 2, etc., and you can go from there. just a thought

[charred meteor]

Hey folks, is there anyone around well versed in HLSL that could help me with an issue? I'm not sure how to go about doing what I want to do.

I have a fragment shader that has a Texture2D as a property. The shader does some sampling/interpolation of colours based on texture coordiantes. This works correctly, however I want to do some pre-processing on the Texture2D before I sample it.

Specficially, I want to "pad" the texture with a one pixel margin. This is only for the purposes of sampling and I do not want to change the underlying texture.

Now, I really don't know shaders at all so I don't know if the following is possible. If I were working in regular programming, I would just get the W/H of the texture, create a new texture of size W+2, H+2, then do a loop to fill each element with either my pad colour or the original colour based on the coordinate defined by the loop.

If anyone could give me some advice on this I'd really appreciate it

[amber saffron]

In shader code you would alter the UVs used to sample the texture to create this padding

You want to transform the [0;1] range of the texture to something that does [0-> 0 -> 1 -> 1]

This can easilly be done like this :
uv = saturate( uv * 0.8 + 0.1 );

[charred meteor]

Thanks for that, Got a few additional questions

By using that method, am I able to specify what the "pad colour" should be?

[amber saffron]

no

[charred meteor]

Ah, ok that's something I very much need to do unfortunately

[amber saffron]

Still possible, but you need to do more

You can use the UVs as a mask to display the texture and the "pad colour"

uv = saturate( uv * 0.8 + 0.1 );
float4 color = --- your texture sample code here --- ;
float2 uvsForMask = step(0.5, abs(uv - 0.5) );
float mask = min(uvsForMask .x, uvsForMask .y);
color = lerp( color, --- your padding color ---, mask);

[charred meteor]

Thanks very much Remy, I appreciate it,I'll give that a go and see where I get

[charred meteor]

Unfortunately I don't think this is going to work for me. The idea of interpolating between my texture sampled colour and my padding colour is sound, but I don't think this implementaiton works in my case, as modifying the UVs is going to impact the initial textrure sample.

Ideally what I'd like to do is:

• Sample Texture using normal UVs
• If UV coordinate is at the edge of the texture, interpolate to pad colour.

To put it in context, this is for trying to get rid of pixel-jitter on sprites at non-pixel-perfect locations. Essentally I want to say:

• "When the edge of the sprite does not fall perfectly onto the pixel grid, interpolate between the colour of the sprite's edge and transparent with a t-value based on how much of the screen pixel is occupied by the sprite"*

I found a shader that accomplishes this in the above manner for all the pixels *inside *the sprite, but isn't able to do so for the edges, as it is interpolating between colours on the Texture2D, and obviously "Edge Cooridnate +/1" does not exist on the texture, so in those cases I get no interpolation.

The thing that is really messing me up is that I'm really unsure of how to do this without branching or "if" statements

[charred meteor]

For future reference, I have found a way to detect the edges using some functions to avoid conditionals. My interpolation value is currently wrong but that's a simpler problem to solve.

Info here:

https://theorangeduck.com/page/avoiding-shader-conditionals

[queen apex]

any idea why my refraction glass shader flickers between black and white color when built for webGL?

[amber saffron]

Not clear to me, but because I see that some of the pilars are flashing in the background depending on the view angle, I suspect some issue with the rendering order

[queen apex]

yeah if I set the rendering order very low it just stays dark

problem is, once built for web the behaviour doesnt line up with in editor anymore so I have a hard time testing and debugging this

[daring dew]

It seems some objects in the background are flickering too. Does this happen with opaque materials as well ?

[queen apex]

I dont think so

[west eagle]

maybe try change the queue of the glass,seems it is a render queue problem

[queen apex]

Ive tested 7 different rq settings at this point

200, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2001, 2500, 3000, 3001, 4000, 5000

thats more than 7

but I tested all those

it eithers stays dark entirely or flickers in web

while in editor it stays dark at lower values and bright at higher ones

[west eagle]

are the flickers object share the same material as the glass?

[shadow kraken]

I'm looking at this fluffy tree tutorial https://youtu.be/iASMFba7GeI and I want to make something like it, but in VR. Therefore I can not use the view matrix to scale up each face, since this is too noticeable. Instead I would like to scale up each face based on its own vertex normal.

So as far as I can tell, I need to somehow be able to transform UV space to object space. Anyone got an idea how to achieve that?

[coral geyser]

It's called triplanar projection

You will probably need to edit the files uvs. Its doable tho

I would not do that in shader if I were you but it might be possible

Ok I'm awake and still quite confused. @amber saffron any idea what might be doing that? I'm also using a custom function to convert alpha to boolean, and the result looks as expected. The function is just out = (in>0.1)

[amber saffron]

Now I don't really get why you have a different result in the preview VS the rendering.

Like I said, it looks like a camera clear flag issue

[coral geyser]

How would i fix?

[amber saffron]

Well, what is the current settings for the camera clear flag ?

[coral geyser]

1 secundo

https://i.gyazo.com/b5b0ebebbeaeb96617c8e7bcf0c6ef4f.png camera 1 (main camera, for capturing the foreground)

https://i.gyazo.com/d5237479de9ac0e25eefb7ac63f145a2.png second camera for capturing the background (no LUT as you see)

https://i.gyazo.com/d8106773e720ab6153d550fe80c0aaf6.png

depth camera for sobel filter

I'm doing what every game dev knows is the best way, which is to do the graphics first and make sure it looks perfect before doing anything gameplay related lol

[amber saffron]

Why does the first camera have background type set to "unitialized" ?

[coral geyser]

that's what the instructions said to do lol but I've turned it to a few different things and gotten similar results

(the instructions for the toon shader I originally used)

[amber saffron]

I suspect that this is the setting that causes the issue

[coral geyser]

it does, but it also renders the layer system inactive it seems

[amber saffron]

🤔 I don't get how you full setup is done here

[coral geyser]

It was extracting the alpha channel from the "main" camera (the first one) and if the alpha there was 0, it was rendering the other camera's data

[amber saffron]

And to do this, each camera renders in a RT, and both a composed in a shadergraph then output to the screen ?

[coral geyser]

(that was the intention at least)

yup

My instincts tell me you're about to tell me the better way lol

thing is I don't want the shader graph applying the palettization stuff we did yesterday to certain parts of the image

so my instincts say to create a layer/compositing system within shader graph

[amber saffron]

Generally speaking, I would avoid using multiple cameras

[coral geyser]

yeah and I can see why haha

[amber saffron]

I think the most efficient way would be to look at render features in URP

you can use it to render some objects to the stencil buffer, and than use it as a mask for you post process

[coral geyser]

I like the sound of that

Ok I have a renderer feature and it's masking the correct layer. The tutorials I find aren't for specifically what I'm doing. If you would be willing to point me in the right direction, that would be extremely helpeful

https://i.gyazo.com/116fbfafee7184b554b35b4ed2a6191e.png

[coral geyser]

Potentially I could just use some kind of multiply or add feature but those always distort the colors

[coral geyser]

ughhh so frustrating, the system works in the preview lol

oh god I figured it out

I'm so goddamned dumb

[devout imp]

Hey howdy! I need a little help with a shader I'm working on

In summary, I've got this portal shader:

It's got some vertex displacement and some animation

I want to make it so that it looks like it has depth behind it

Sort of like if there was a small room behind the portal, entirely coated in the same shader

I've achieved similar effects in HDRP by simply increasing the height of a heightmap but I don't know how this could be done in URP. Any help would be appreciated! :)

[coral geyser]

What's funny is that what I've been doing just now is actually fairly similar to this, zucc

Are you using shader graph?

[devout imp]

Yup, I am

How did you end up handling it, @coral geyser?

[coral geyser]

it's a bit complicated. Long story short, I would recommend you create an actual room behind the portal with that effect applied as a material. Then you add that room to a layer and make that layer invisible to the main camera. Then you, in the shader graph, add the layer back in with a conditional. That's what I ended up doing.

[devout imp]

Oh man, that's a shame cuz I can't have a room behind it :/ But thank you a lot for reaching out

[coral geyser]

oh why not?

[devout imp]

I want the space behind the portal to be normaly walked in, like

portals aren't mounted to walls or anything. i want them to be able to stand simply in the middle of a room and be enterable in both directions

[coral geyser]

the room doesn't need to be visible or interactable in any way

and it only renders on the same pixels as the portal

[devout imp]

How did you do that?

[coral geyser]

Well, I have a camera that can only see one layer handling the "Main" effects, then I have an identical camera as a child of the first which can only see the "Room" layer

then I have the "Portal" be a special color (like a pink or something that isn't used in the rest of the game), and the shader graph looks for that color

when it sees the color, it knows to draw the "room layer camera", then draw the portal fx

[devout imp]

I see, I'll look into other solutions but if they won't work I'll do this. Thanks!

[grand jolt]

i used a cel shader tutorial with an outline but whenever i start my game everything is black, and its cause the outline is filling the inside of my player, and the camera is inside the player. i dont know how to fix it, can anyone help? https://pastebin.com/y4EYSZkv

[grand jolt]

I have made a UV map for my model in Blender, but it's not working (I am using URP and using a shader graph so I dont know how to add the UV) ... or am I supposed to unwrap the UV map in unity, and how do I do that if you dont mind telling me .. thank you

[coral geyser]

Is the UV map being exported? Are you using a material?

[meager pelican]

A stencil MIGHT work as well, depending on things like what you want to do about lighting. Then you don't have to "match colors up" (you're using that special color as a stencil mask).

[coral geyser]

That would be ideal haha but I've no idea how to do that

[meager pelican]

Well, if the "color" is just a mask in your portal object, maybe that's the best way (I re-read your post). Meh, it's all good.

Stencil is more about across-objects, and I'm also unsure on how it survives across cameras, as it is similar to the depth buffer, but it is a stencil buffer associated with the render texture for the camera.

[coral geyser]

Its not a portal for me, it's the background of the scene 😅

That sounds ideal but how do I do it lol

[grand jolt]

sorry I didn't see your reply.. the UV map has been made after the model was imported into unity\

is there a way I can apply it to the model?

[coral geyser]

The uv map was made AFTER it was imported? How was it made?

[grand jolt]

I used blender again ... just made a uv map because the default one gave me some problems when it comes to applying material

but if I add the new file.. I would have to redo all the animations (i have 42 and 2 animation cotrollers) it iwll take a long time which is why i am asking is there such a way

[coral geyser]

Ah yes. I think that would be an issue for the animations crowd. You'll likely be simply using the avatar system but I couldn't be sure as this is an issue I've had a lot myself

Try #🏃┃animation

There isnt any way to import just UVs as far as I know

[grand jolt]

they'll tell me about a way to copy the new animations instead of the old ones?

[coral geyser]

Your best bet would be simply remapping the old animations. Which would be the best way. Maybe someone else will have a way to remap UVs though, but I doubt it.

[grand jolt]

if there is a way, do you know where i should ask?

(btw i am using urp shaders... i was hoping there is a uv node that would help)

[coral geyser]

I guess here lol.

Maybe there's a way to do it in code?

assuming you still have the same number of UVs surely it's possible to manually read and reposition based on the read coordinates

[meager pelican]

Like I said, I'm not sure about stencils across cameras. Somehow you need to access the stencil from ?either? camera?

But just like a render texture/rendering can have a depth buffer, it also has a stencil buffer. You set up some drawing options (like a bit mask, and values to set/compare to) and when you draw, it sets the stencil for the object drawn that's the kicker. IDK if that works in your use case.

But if you have, say, a background you want to draw, you could have ALL your objects set the stencil where they are drawn (so you're setting it per pixel as always) and then wherever it isn't set will be background for some other pass. But all drawing/shaders would have to honor that stencil method.

Might just be easier in that example to check the depth buffer value.

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

[grand jolt]

@coral geyser thank you I appreciate it

[meager pelican]

https://theslidefactory.com/see-through-objects-with-stencil-buffers-using-unity-urp/

[coral geyser]

heh I was looking at this exact post earlier

Unfortunately I was left still not knowing how to get the contents of the buffer in any meaningful way lol

[twin rose]

Does [loop] not work in compute shaders?

[meager pelican]

Well, you have to kind of let the hardware do the filtering. That's a big performance win though. But you don't read it yourself in the shader code, you just set up the "filtering" and let the hardware do its magic.

[meager pelican]

Why would you need it in a compute shader?
You can do loops, of course.

[coral geyser]

damnit carpe magic should stay in the game!

[meager pelican]

lol

[twin rose]

Like variable length loops

[coral geyser]

yes but what do you need it for

[twin rose]

I'm throwing brush mesh generation of tiltbrush into the GPU

[coral geyser]

oh jesus

[twin rose]

And I almost got it

But it looks like I can't use for loops unless I use unroll

But then why does [loop] not work?

[coral geyser]

[loop] doesn't sound like valid code afaik

but I don't really know shader language too well

[twin rose]

It's defined in hlsl in microsoft documentation, maybe unity doesn't support it?? Or maybe I need to use some pragma stuff?

[meager pelican]

huh. I would think you could do variable length loops. Let me dig around.

The problem is that anything in a work-group shares the same program-counter. But I'd be surprised they can't be masked off.

Another way to do that, is to do the for-loop per shader-core with a max value, and use an IF to select what a particular core does.

So in pseudo-code:

and do a atomic max or some damn thing for all cores (group shared memory?)
for (loop = 0; loop < max-loop-count; loop++) {
if (loop index applies to this core) {
  Do this;
}
else {
  do this or nothing
}
}

[twin rose]

Yeah, you would think it's doable. I didn't know that they share the same program counter, that might be part of it.

What I'm thinking I'll try is having some known maximum count, and breaking when the known passed in iteration is met.

Problem is, it seems like Unity's gonna unroll it no matter what, so that's going to be a big shader that takes forever to compile 😦

[meager pelican]

Depending on how you construct the loop, the [loop] might work. The compiler will allow it if it can get that max value for all cores to be the same value since they share the same PC. I think. Wink wink and 2 cents and double guess. 😉

[twin rose]

I'll figure it out. I want my VR game to use tiltbrush art and I won't stop till I got it lol

[meager pelican]

I think you'll get it. Just try to make sure that the loop max value is some same-value-for-all-cores. Maybe even a max constant (oy, what a waste!).

if the compiler sees that it's not changing per core, [loop] SHOULD work. But if it changes per core, it cannot work (shared PC).

[twin rose]

Holy shit I did it @meager pelican @coral geyser

[sudden vapor]

I am getting this glitch from hdrp and cannot find what file it's coming from, anyone know the file type of a compute shader and how to fix this: Metal: Compute shader has 1024 threads in a thread group which is more than the supported max of 512 in this device

[mystic dagger]

can I create geometry in a compute shader

[twin rose]

@mystic dagger Yep but unless you know your shader stuff well it's a goddamn nightmare

[coral geyser]

that looks really good too dude wow

[turbid garden]

Hello bro, i want to make color streaks like the photo and be able to change its level. Please help me

[meager pelican]

Use [numthreads 8,8,1] in the shader, and dispatch the proper number of invocations in C#. Each thread might have to check if it needs to do anything, or should be "inactive" (using an IF).

[dapper marten]

do anyone have this kind of high res picture,everything is paid online

[vagrant coral]

Hey!
I'm having trouble with porting my mobile game to iOS: It keeps saying that all of my shaders are not supported.

I read that now all iOS devices use the Metal API, does this mean that I need to rewrite my shaders completely for iOS? Or is there a setting somewhere that makes them compatible?

[scarlet arch]

I have a problem
i use disolve effect
but I want it to only go one way (for my object to disappear) not for it to appear

[distant sleet]

I doubt I can get an answer here as its about a raymarching renderer I made with HLSL but

Does anyone know why when I hate a lot of spheres or any object like this it causes this effect?

I dont really seek to fix it as its not a huge deal but Im just wondering what causes this effect on far away objects

[amber saffron]

@distant sleet This is called a "moiré effect"

When seen from far away, a single pixel will only be able to display the surface of one of your sphere, when theorically there could be two or more there. Add some float precision issue to this and you get this effect.
It's similar to trying to display a texture with visible tiling from far away without filtering.
To fix the issue, on texture we use mip maps, and in you case you would need some sort of aliasing or sub-pixel sampling

[distant sleet]

Ahh very interesting, I'll search it up

thanks a ton I didnt know how to google it lol

I thought that it would be a floating point precision error yeah

Thanks

[storm crypt]

Hello, I have no idea how to shader program and i copy and pasted this shader. It gives me an implicit vector truncation warning in unity which kinda annoys me for that last line, how can I remove it?

[distant sleet]

I dont know the types of these variables but

That warning means you are trying to mutliply 2 vectors with differing lengths such as a float3 and float4

Just change it from (float4) to (float4).xyz

And that will explicitly truncate it

[storm crypt]

ight I'll try that

thanks for the help!

[scarlet arch]

^^

[distant sleet]

I have a problem, I'm trying to use the _Time variable in a compute shader

My IDE says it isnt declared which makes sense as it only has general HLSL error detecting, but my compute shader doesn't work anymore.

I did float test = _Time.x

[high tangle]

Hiya guys, just an idea i will be working on in weeks to come, planning to use this in my projects and also making it free stuff on asset store once it gets enough tight and tested. Idea is simple and is having gpu assisted (any math accelerated) without using compute shaders. Basically there will be C# library(middle man) that you can use while coding and that library will talk to the shader exposed fields(and exposed properties) will serve as inputs and outputs. To my mind this is dumb simple and yet it should save a lot of cpu power. What you guys think about this, does anyone sees some obvious problems with it or? Asking for experts opinion since i am not much into shaders that much(just making eye candies here and there hehe). I think there would not be racing problems since while you are coding you are deciding when and how to use the computed output from the shader/library.

[distant sleet]

Ok, StructuredBuffers are kind of confusing now as I'm just learning about them.. but microsofts documentation isnt really helpful

Anyone have good info on how they work

[runic pendant]

Does the vertex shader interpolate EVERY variable for the fragment shader? If so, is it common to store information other than lightcolor/uv/pos within the vertex struct?

[distant sleet]

I think I understand them now, so they directly copy byte data in the same structure as the elements they hold? As in

If they contain structs that go float f1, float f2, float3 vector

Then they have 4 bytes for f1, followed by 4 bytes if f2 and then 12 bytes for vector

Meaning if a computebuffer that goes 3f800000 3fc00000 3f800000 41200000 3f800000

Which is as floats, 1 1.5 1 2 1

Then f1 would be 1, f2 1.5, and vector (1, 2, 1)

Correct me if I'm wrong if thats not how they copy data from a computebuffer to the structuredbuffer

[vernal island]

hello. i have one question. i have vertices and indices in Graphicsbuffers and i want generate the mesh using GPU. but im little confused. Drawproceduralnow using both buffers to generate? or i need to write code in shader? i think i have both needing datas to generate mesh. Do i need to dispatch?

[meager pelican]

By default, yes, unless you use the [flat] attribute in OpenGL 4.0 or "nointerpolation" in HLSL. Surface shaders excepted. But if, say, all three verts put the same value into a float3 foo, what's there to interpret? (although it will tie up an interpolator unless you use flat).
See section 4.5 here for OpenGL.
https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/specs/gl/GLSLangSpec.4.50.pdf#page=86
and for HLSL:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3dhlsl/dx-graphics-hlsl-struct
Note version requirements.

[runic pendant]

Thank you!

[runic pendant]

Another question that has been bothering me: is there an inherit difference between "per-pixel lights" and "per-vertex lights"? Or are the types entirely based on how you implement them? I keep hearing how people use them in different situations, but I don't understand what is done to properly define what light to use. From my understanding, it depends on if you calculate lighting in the vertex/fragment shader. Is that correct?

[meager pelican]

Yes, basically. If calculated in the vertex stage, it interpolates the light value across the polygon based on vert interpolation. Whereas with per-pixel lights, it is calculated as you'd assume...for each and every pixel location.

Obviously, per vertex is a lot faster, but less accurate. And in some methods, IIRC, lights are always pixel lights for proper shading.

https://unity3d.college/2017/07/06/pixel-vertex-lights-unity3d/