archived-shaders

[steel notch]

some cross hatching texture

and then multiply it by an occlusion map

fokin

[kind juniper]

Yeah, you could. That's what I meant by you pass some data into it defining the AO value of each pixel

[crude bolt]

Is there a built in fog shader?

[tacit parcel]

I think you can just simply enable fog from window/rendering menu

[steel notch]

so I can access the normals of a mesh using this node

and I want to fade out (or really just do operations) on a texture based on values from this node

I cant seem to just multiply it though

what needs to be done?

[crude bolt]

Can I do that for specific areas?

[tacit parcel]

the built in fog is distance fog, which increase it's thickness the farther from the camera.
if you want fog which only affect specific area, you;ll most likely need volumetric fog

[grand jolt]

im trying to get terrain holes working on a custom HDRP Terrain Shader Graph, i'm using the correct reference as when i hook it into base color I can see the painted holes.

However if I split the Alpha channel and route it into the Alpha of the master node it doesnt work...anyone know why?

splitting Alpha into alpha master:

[kind juniper]

You're not feeding anything into the alpha though

You're feeding the color to base color that ignores the alpha channel.

[steel notch]

Does someone mind giving me the Tl;dr on what "Depth Write" does and the implications of changing it's values for Transparent shaders?

I understand that there is a depth buffer and it's used to order meshes when rendering to the camera.

But the exact implications of messing with this... I'm not sure.

[peak ridge]

uh. does this server prevent long messages from going through or something? i just typed up a message and it ate it 🤔

[kind juniper]

If it included code or repeating sequences/strings/characters, the bot might've interpret it as spam. If you want to share code, check #854851968446365696

[peak ridge]

well thats a bit tedious lol. let me try to reformat

ive written a shader which manually implements shadowing from point lights, but have a couple very strange issues with it.
my main pass (done with lightmode tag set to forwardadd), requires the use of one of a few of the vanilla multi compiles. i can't fathom why.
i tried to narrow things down by cutting out keywords. the minimum spec one is
#pragma multi_compile_shadowcaster
otherwise, shadows do not work.
i have no idea why this should even interact with my shader. im not even using UnityCG.cginc in this pass.
meanwhile, on the shadowcaster pass, i can comment out its multi compile shadowcaster line and everything still works. that seems... odd?

my point light shadowmap is being copied into a new texture via commandbuffer. that and all other values relevant to the light are being passed thru script via globals

so tldr: one random pragma is preventing a shader with 0 relation to any builtin unity functions from working, yet strangely isnt even required in the shadow caster pass.

[weak raft]

How would you go about dynamically changing the frequency of a sin wave in the graph editor?

[kind juniper]

Frequency is the rate at which the function parameter changes. So Just multiply whatever you feed into sin by some value(can be a parameter exposed to editing outside the shader).

[grand jolt]

the screenshot shows me checking the map works by feeding it into the base color yes, but when i change that and feed it into the alpha i get the bottom screenshot

[kind juniper]

Okay. Can you show the shader in the second case?
Also what graph settings do you have?

[kind juniper]

Ah, it's HDRP...🤔

[grand jolt]

i was assuming that the black areas of the splatmap are considered transparent, but that may not be the case, it could just be black / red, in which case how would i count the black areas as transparent?

[regal stag]

Just use the red channel in the Alpha port?

[grand jolt]

ill give it a try

doesnt seem to work, i even tried to One Minus it so the black areas turn white then feeding it into Alpha, no change

AHA! I may have it

@kind juniper @regal stag Note to self:

Telling your Shader Graph to use Alpha Clipping doesnt make a blind bit of difference. Must always activate it in the materials inspector settings.

Because telling the shader to do it is far too logical.

[regal stag]

Ah yeah, I forget HDRP has settings on the material for those too

[grand jolt]

XD

[grand jolt]

Do you know how to access the last 4 layers on the terrain BTW? i've got the entire thing set up, I saw a _Control1 declaration in the Standard Terrain Lit shader so am using that to access the second set of layers, also have a keyword bool with _TERRAIN_8_LAYERS as the reference but i still cant see the 5th layer

The first 4 work fine with _Control0

[regal stag]

Yeah, does _Control1 show anything if you output it & draw with the 5th layer?

[grand jolt]

ill set it up and double check

[grand jolt]

Not sure if i've set this up correctly but:

_Splat4 texture is lerping over _Control1 then fed into the 8 Layers keyword bool:

results in:

keyword reference:

the T of the lerp is the R channel of _Control1

[grand jolt]

Hello everyone, I have a transparency problem ^^
I just want to clip stuff (The only possibility in shader is still alpha clip right?).
But even using 0.999 alpha I'm still seeing through the sides of the mesh. Any tips?
Thanks

[kind juniper]

It's the other way around.

[regal stag]

I meant more like outputting the _Control1 texture directly to Base Color to see if it's even set to anything. Can also output _Splat4 and see if it looks like the layer texture. The setup should be similar to how the _Control0 is handled, but I'm not sure if the shader needs anything special to actually access the extra textures properly.

[grand jolt]

ahh ok ill give it a shot

[kind juniper]

You plug the alpha from the texture into the the alpha of the fragment shader. And alpha clip threshold controls what alpha value the pixel needs to have to discard it.

[grand jolt]

ok feeding either directly into Base Color doesnt show anything, so im guessing theres some sort of silly requirement to access those extra textures

[grand jolt]

Damn.. Thanks it make more sense (I had to reverse the color of my texture, it was weird) !

[grand jolt]

if this is true then WTF....why would they not just use a second control texture?

very detailed there Unity, nice one.

it clearly says HDRP can render 8 layers in a single pass though...

or should I try just using _Control0 and Splat4, 5, 6, 7?

[regal stag]

_Control0 would correspond with the first 4 layers, it wouldn't really make sense to use it for the others. That answer is intended more for the built-in RP which uses 4 layers per pass, while it looks like HDRP is 4 or 8 layers and single-pass only.

@grand jolt The HDRP/TerrainLit.shader does seem to have a tag in it's SubShader, "SplatCount" = "8" which might be required?

But it says in a comment those tags are for supporting "shader replacement features" so not sure

It looks like _TERRAIN_8_LAYERS is a keyword from the terrain system so just enabling it on the material might not work. It might be a setting in HDRP somewhere? Or on the Terrain component? Or maybe it just sets it automatically based on the number of layers :\

[grand jolt]

I went into debug mode and theres nothing relating to 8 layers on the component itself, I added a keyword:

[grand jolt]

Curiously the terrain 8 layers keyword doesnt appear in the keywords?

ignore that, didnt have it turned on

it does now lol

[empty elm]

Hello, I have a question. Here I have a transparent Shader Material, the thing is that I want to make it so you can see it from inside and outside of the material itself, how can it be done?

Here the inside, as you can see, it's invisible from the inside

[slim steppe]

did you use shader graph or code

[empty elm]

PBR Shader Graph

In URP

[slim steppe]

Which version

[empty elm]

Actually I'm working in 2019.4.12f1

[slim steppe]

Go to graph settings and activate two sided

[slim steppe]

its probably something like 3 dots on the main graph and might be called double sided in that version

[empty elm]

Inside the PBR editor?

[slim steppe]

on the pbr graph

probably in the upper right corner

[empty elm]

Ok I'll take a look in a bit. Thank you for the answer Max!

[slim steppe]

np.

[kind juniper]

@dusk cobalt here's the graph. I don't have time to explain everything now, but it should be clear from the names of the properties. Velocity takes a normalized direction Stretch takes the velocity magnitude and stretch offset( -1 to 1) defines the point in the mesh that the stretching starts.

[slim steppe]

Is there anything like the scene color shader graph node for shaderlab?

[torpid lichen]

Thx, i didnt know what to search but this is what i meant

That was my original attempt, but i dont know how to do it in a pixel shader, my original idea was to blur, normalize, smoothstep. But then i cant control the size of the individual dots, so i didnt know how to do it in a pixel shader.

? I thought all drawing apps basically draw a bunch of circles along the path of the stroke ?

Im gonna visualize what i mean, i think im explaining it badly 🥲

[grand jolt]

@torpid lichen I think they stamp alpha textures with a certain spacing.

If you want matrix printer dots, that's a different easier task.

Cause then you can just tile a pattern in screenspace.

[torpid lichen]

ok but it comes out the same as drawing dots right ?

[grand jolt]

You're not going for pixelart, right?

[torpid lichen]

wait im gonna send screenshot

Im not saying drawing the lines will fix the problems, i just want a kind of framwork i can use later to draw lines on top of frames according to a texture that tells the positions of the lines

I wanna do it this way so i can later manipulate that texture to smooth lines, introduce noise etc.

[shadow locust]

So as of 2021.2 - https://portal.productboard.com/8ufdwj59ehtmsvxenjumxo82/c/49-custom-struct-types?utm_medium=social&utm_source=portal_share is still not ready so I'm trying instead to encode some position/rotation/scale data from a compute shader for use in a ShaderGraph shader.

Is there a good way to do this? Actually I think I just need position/rotation, not scale

I guess I can use RBG of one pixel as the position and RGB of the next pixel as euler rotation angles, or the whole RGBA of the next pixel as a Quaternion for rotation.

[vague pike]

Any water shader tutorial that talks about how to make it so refraction effects don't cause objects in front of the water to get refracted on their edges?

[teal breach]

Check out ben golus' article on very wide outlines - that's probably the best starting point for what you are looking to do. I think the reason people keep asking if you are doing pixelart is because you keep saying pixel shader - usually you'd call it a fragment shader

[slim steppe]

Is there anything like the scene color shader graph node for Surface and unlit Shaders?

[meager pelican]

Yeah, multi-pass stuff and grab-pass. Try googling "unity grabpass".

In fact, here:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-GrabPass.html

[past kraken]

How to make sword trace in hdrp? Because motion blur built in hdrp is kinda bad

[shadow locust]

Anyone know how to get a float4 quaternion representing the rotation from a float4x4 matrix in HLSL?

[meager pelican]

You could try this (I haven't tried it):
https://answers.unity.com/questions/750259/how-to-get-the-quaternion-rotation-from-a-matrix4x.html

[shadow locust]

thanks I'll try it out

[slim steppe]

Thanks

[kind juniper]

A trail renderer maybe? I don't think motion blur was ever meant to be used for a sword trail or anything of that kind.

[shadow locust]

Is it possible to get the width and height of a Texture2D in shadergraph?

[plush fog]

texel node

[shadow locust]

doesn't that get the size of a specific texel?

[plush fog]

It gives the width and height of a texture

[shadow locust]

I don't think so...

[plush fog]

Well I was also confused about the naming but it is indeed like that, feel free to try it

[shadow locust]

Ok i'll try it

Apparently in a normal shader it's a float4 with: 1/width, 1/height, width, height

but it's only width/height in shadergraph

weird

[shadow locust]

ty

what a poorly named node 😛

[shadow locust]

Making a URP shader graph. Trying to use a calculated position for the vertex positon. Why won't it let me connect this node here?

It's like my Vector3 node is somehow stuck in the fragment shader instead of the vertex shader. (It connects to the fragment inputs just fine)

How can I fix that?

Hmm it seems as though it's because I have a Sample Texture2D node in the graph. Is it not possible to sample a Texture2D in the vertex shader section of a shader graph?

Figured it out - have to use Sample Texture 2D LOD

[vocal narwhal]

I was about to link you my site 😛

[shadow locust]

Sorry for the monologue 😄

[kind juniper]

Wait, so why does it work?

Why is lod sampling linked to vertex shader?

[shadow locust]

I'm not sure but my problem is still not fixed - it seems like there's some other node I'm using somewhere that may also not be available in the vertex shader stage

The behavior is documented in the docs though: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@11.0/manual/Sample-Texture-2D-LOD-Node.html

[vocal narwhal]

https://help.vertx.xyz/?page=graphics/shader-graph/vert-frag is my docs for it. I don't really explain why though

[shadow locust]

I'm looking through every node right now to see what else in my graph is not vertex stage compatible 🤔

They seem to all be ok though as far as I can tell...

Vector3
Vector2
Multiply
Split
Object (position)
Matrix Construction
Sample Texture LOD
Divide
Modulo
Add
Texel Size
Instance ID```

[vocal narwhal]

reconstruct it backwards from the vertex position and see what fails

[shadow locust]

hmmm

it seems to be... the Texel Size node?

Doesn't say anything in the docs about that being restricted though 🤔

strange but... maybe ok as I could work around this by passing in the texture resolution as a separate property if I need to.

[pastel cedar]

a vertex shader output with SV_POSITION should be bounded to -1 -> 1 right?

            CGPROGRAM
            #pragma vertex vert_img
            #pragma fragment frag

            #include "UnityCG.cginc"

            uniform sampler2D _MainTex;
            uniform float groundHeight;

            fixed4 frag (v2f_img o) : SV_Target
            {
                if (o.pos.y > groundHeight) {
                    return fixed4(0,0,0,1);
                } else {
                    return fixed4(0,0,0,0);
                }
                
            }```

my thought was that this would cover a portion of the sprite its attached to (0 < y < groundHeight) and that i'd specify groundHeight as being between ``(-1, 1)`

wait i've done something wrong

[past kraken]

Ghostrunner uses this

[meager pelican]

The vertex stage doesn't "know" about the screen pixel resolution (yet) nor the placement of the "depth", since that's output in clip-space. That's kind of a function of the rasterization stage that happens AFTER the vertex stage.

Therefore, it doesn't know how to select the right mip level (which is what LOD is doing) until the fragment stage hits.

Soooo.....when in a vert stage, you have to manually specific the LOD level you want in order to use a texture sampler. Thus you're required to use the sample-LOD call, since there is no default established for the lod level yet for the "normal" call.

[tacit parcel]

Could this be the reason why my shader doesnt work in LoD? But the weird thing is that's the problem only happens on mobile device
#archived-shaders message

[dusk cobalt]

Thanks very Mutch

[pine dragon]

Hi, I have a question and require some help. I have about 100 objects that are all fractured to create a "chunk" which I then use to put all the chunks together to create land that I can destroy satisfyingly for the game im working on. I have about 9 chunks all loaded at once and so that creates 900 batches which just creates insane amounts of lag. I do however use the same material for each and every object. I am wondering if I can somehow use GPU Instancing or maybe something different in order to reduce these batches as I am creating for Mobile Devices.

The only thought I have is to duplicate my material 100 times for each different fractured object piece to enable GPU Instancing and to reduce batching because it only works when it is the same material + same mesh. Here is a preview of the mesh I am working with whilst using a Triplanar shader to draw the material:

Any help and advice is much appreciated!

[past kraken]

what the?..

[honest scroll]

Switch it to sprite. Unlit shaders don’t work with UI elements.

[past kraken]

where?

[honest scroll]

You seem to be using HDRP…. Try everything. I only know URP.

[past kraken]

well, okay

thanks

[honest scroll]

De nada.

[heavy oasis]

I have a problem with my shader graph. I'm getting this error "DX11: Texture index out of range". Shader uses many textures (less than 128) but all texture samplers are connected to sampler state nodes. There are less than 16 sampler state nodes.

[heavy oasis]

This graph uses StackLit mode. The thing is that it works fine and without errors when it's set to the 'Lit' material mode. Same inputs are connected to the master node so both modes use the same samplers when I test them.

[pastel grail]

does anybody happen to know how to do fake specular highlights in shader graph in URP? I want specular highlights on my water shader but if I just add a normal map, and set high metallic/smoothness it screws with how the shader looks a lot

[dusk cobalt]

Can i add second Material and Shader to Mesh?

[sour mulch]

Sorry to pull from something days ago but this doesn't work. All I get is "There's no upgrader to convert shader to selected pipeline"

[shadow locust]

not every material can be upgraded automatically

[sour mulch]

figured it out, I didn't have URP set up, but it can't upgrade most of the materials in my project (including the default ones) so I'll be going in a different direction unless there's a way to fix them

[shadow locust]

You can always upgrade materials. You simply need to switch them to use URP compatible shaders

[sour mulch]

Unfortunately the project is too far in development to have our artists re-do their textures for URP (unless there's a way I can convert the textures to work with URP?)

[shadow locust]

you don't have to redo any textures

you just have to change the shaders on the materials. (or switch to a new material with a different shader)

and reassign the textures to the right place in the new shader

[sour mulch]

ok, thank you!

[lusty badger]

You could try using DrawMeshInstanced and use multiple submeshes instead of objects. Not sure what are the submesh limits or how big of a performance impact it will be but I don't have any other ideas.

[pine dragon]

Hiya! Thanks for the response. I had ran a bunch of profiler and frame debugging tests and eventually just went with a mobile friendlier shader for most of my objects and turned dynamic batching on. Thank you for your response however

[torpid lichen]

Thx a lot, yeah I see how I confused them, I thought the two were synonimous

Another kind of related question I had was is it possible to render the output of shader graph to a texture ?

Like a node that takes color just like the master but then writes it to a texture instead of the screen

[shadow locust]

I'm making a RenderTexture for use as an output texture for a compute shader.

The actual data I'm putting in the texture has nothing to do with graphics though. I want the data to just sit in the texture exactly as the compute shader wrote it (basically treating it as a big array of float4). What are the correct settings I should be using for creating this RenderTexture? For example I have no idea what to set for the format or for the color space conversion, or the depth buffer.

[slim steppe]

Hi, why is the edge of the depth texture less accurate?

[meager mist]

is there a way to create a tiling noise map within the shadergraph

[slim tulip]

Greetings gentlemen, what side-effect might appear if 2 different shaders have Vector1 with the same reference?
I'm planning to change materials using these shaders via one script, I can manually enter the new references into the script, but is there a reason NOT to just set the same references to Vector1/floats I need?

[meager pelican]

I'm confused by your question, the vector1 (a float value, basically) is going to be passed to the shader via the material properties by value on each shader that you set it on.

[slim tulip]

Yeah, I'm trying to ask about reference of a property. If n different materials/shaders would happen to have inside of them properties with the same rereference values, would that do any harm?

Thing is, I want to access the same property of copy-pasted materials with the same code.

[meager pelican]

Oh, the reference field in Shader Graph?
That's "just" the internal name within that shader. Since you have two separate shaders, they are independent references really. The word "reference" isn't really what you're thinking as it isn't the pointer type in C# that you might have in your mind. In fact, it is common to change the name (in this example) to "_OpacityStrength" (note the leading underscore) and that would be the property name in the shader.

And in c# you'd use something like
myMaterial.SetFloat("_OpacityStrength", myFloatValue);

Of course, it is always better to use a propertyID that you've stashed away, rather than making it do a string-name lookup every frame.

[slim tulip]

Yeah, thanks, it makes sense. I even used the same principle with texture2Ds, but for some reason missed that it's more general practice and can be applied to other variables :D
Dark side of blindly following tutorials, thanks!

[worldly karma]

i don't know much about shaders. is there a way to get sprite masks to render normal maps? the sprite mask only reveals the main texture.

[shadow locust]

Say I have two float3 representing euler angle rotations.
What would be the correct way to slerp between these two rotations in HLSL (compute shader)?

Simply doing lerp(a, b, t) between them seems like it wouldn't be correct, as you could have let's say 350 degrees and 10 degrees, with the proper interpolated angle being 0 or 360, not 175. Am I thinking about this wrong?

[teal breach]

I guess represent them as quaternions and do a quaternion lerp between the?

[wraith inlet]

I don't know if this is "correct" but finding the minimum angular distance between your current and target and lerping based on that seems reasonable. You should never be lerping more than 180 degrees along a given degree of freedom, so just checking if your distance is greater than 180 and flipping some signs/taking (360 - distance) if it is should work.

[shadow locust]

Will this float turn into (0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1) or just (0.1, 0, 0, 0) when it converts to a float4?

[kind juniper]

I think the first case.

[shadow locust]

Has anyone used the new Instance ID node in ShaderGraph yet?
https://docs.unity.cn/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@12.0/manual/Instance-ID-Node.html

It seems to always be giving me 0 as far as I can tell. however my material has GPU Instancing enabled, and I'm drawing it with Graphics.DrawMeshInstancedIndirect(itemType.Mesh, 0, itemType.Material, bounds, drawArgsBuffer);
So I can't imagine it's not being instanced. Also in the frame debugger as far as I can tell it's being drawn in one batch.

So is there some magic sauce I'm missing for the instance ID node?

I'm concluding that it's always giving zero because I did this and all the instances are still drawn directly on top of each other

[mental bone]

I too ran into the same issue. All my instances are being drawn at 0,0,0

Im trying to get the positions from a args buffer that is being filled correctly no idea where and how im messing up

[regal stag]

If it helps at all, this is what I had to do to get SG working with DrawMeshInstancedIndirect back in v10 : https://gist.github.com/Cyanilux/4046e7bf3725b8f64761bf6cf54a16eb

I think the Indirect version works differently from the regular DrawMeshInstanced. The new Instance ID node might only work with that one instead currently, but that's just a guess.

[meager pelican]

How many instances are you guys trying to draw?

If not in the many 1000's, you might be better off with regular Instanced calls anyway, unless you're procedurally generating the args buffer (and of course instanced data) on the GPU, say from a compute shader.

There's limitations to the # of instances in a call, but frankly, since there's probably no significant context switching going on, and the C# engine will do frustum culling for you, how bad are potentially a few more draw calls?

I'd time it each way if your use-case supports it.

[slim steppe]

Hi i've got some problems with making a pp shader only render if theres nothing in the depth texture that could "block" it

And it works great if you're directly next to it (the cube is rendered how it should be)

(the cube is rendered how it should be)

[slim steppe]

but if the distance gets a bit larger it just doesnt work

how can i fix it?

[shadow locust]

It is in the many thousands and the args come from a compute shader. I need instance id working 😅

[shadow locust]

I got a reply on the forum - seems promising https://forum.unity.com/threads/instance-id-node-always-giving-0.1193638/#post-7633861

[mental bone]

Right. Forgot about that. Im a bit sick right now and cant use my brain let me know if you make progress

[mental bone]

I think for my case I might just go for dots since I dont need the objects to interact with anything at all

They just need to be there and play their vertex animations

[slim steppe]

I accedentally made a crappy edge detection xD

[low lichen]

This doesn't sound right to me. The SRP Batcher won't override direct Graphics.DrawMeshInstancedIndirect calls. If it does, it definitely should be considered a bug, because there's no reason instanced draw calls shouldn't work alongside SRP batched draw calls.

[shadow locust]

I just tried it out. Disabling the SRP batcher doesn't fix it 😦

I was so ready to latch onto any bit of hope.

[low lichen]

Have you checked the Frame Debugger to confirm it's actually instanced?

If it is, I'd like to see the generated shader code from the graph

[shadow locust]

I did check the frame debugger, but I'll do so again

Actually having a lot of trouble finding my DrawMeshInstancedIndirect call in the frame debugger

is there a good way to label it or something?

Is it even possible for DrawMeshInstancedIndirect to not be instanced?

[low lichen]

I wouldn't think so

Can you upload the generated shader code somewhere?

[shadow locust]

yeah one sec

[shadow locust]

https://pastebin.com/jumqZS1u

        void UnityGetInstanceID_float(out float Out)
        {
        #if UNITY_ANY_INSTANCING_ENABLED
            Out = unity_InstanceID;
        #else
            Out = 0;
        #endif
        }```

like based on that it seems like that #if is not being satisfied?

[low lichen]

unity_InstanceID will also have to be set to SV_InstanceID somewhere, probably in one of the include files

[shadow locust]

would it be dumb to try manually editing this generated shader to do that?

in case that's somehow not happening

[low lichen]

It looks like it's happening here

struct Attributes
{
     float3 positionOS : POSITION;
     float3 normalOS : NORMAL;
     float4 tangentOS : TANGENT;
     float4 uv1 : TEXCOORD1;
    #if UNITY_ANY_INSTANCING_ENABLED
     uint instanceID : INSTANCEID_SEMANTIC;
    #endif
};

INSTANCEID_SEMANTIC is defined per platform, like here:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/blob/84384b4bb28d5bfcb8b19f2447dabd8fcd46e0c0/com.unity.render-pipelines.core/ShaderLibrary/API/D3D11.hlsl#L9

[shadow locust]

so that continues to beg the question why isn't it working T_T

[low lichen]

I'm not ever seeing unity_instanceID assigned to the Attributes.instanceID or Varyings.instanceID

And it can't really be in an include file because a separate file wouldn't be able to reference that particular variable, except maybe through a #define

Supposedly it's assigned via the UNITY_SETUP_INSTANCE_ID macro

[shadow locust]

so many layers of abstraction

[low lichen]

Which is never used in the generated shader

unless it's in some other include file

But yeah, I guess UNITY_ANY_INSTANCING_ENABLED might not be defined

#if defined(UNITY_INSTANCING_ENABLED) || defined(UNITY_PROCEDURAL_INSTANCING_ENABLED) || defined(UNITY_DOTS_INSTANCING_ENABLED) || defined(UNITY_STEREO_INSTANCING_ENABLED)
    #define UNITY_ANY_INSTANCING_ENABLED 1
#else
    #define UNITY_ANY_INSTANCING_ENABLED 0
#endif

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/blob/0305bdfa86979df4d785f5c16687c03f618e3c84/com.unity.render-pipelines.core/ShaderLibrary/UnityInstancing.hlsl#L44

[shadow locust]

Are these just preprocessor directives? Or are they based on some project or pipeline asset settings?

[low lichen]

UNITY_INSTANCING_ENABLED should be defined for instanced draw calls, so UNITY_ANY_INSTANCING_ENABLED should be set

[shadow locust]

god I wish you could just attach a breakpoint to a shader

or print something

I feel like I'm trying to debug a magic spell

[low lichen]

@shadow locust Do you see anything like this option on the Shader Graph? This will flatten out all the includes and defines you can actually read it.

This is a screenshot of the inspector with a regular shader selected

[shadow locust]

yeah these options are there hold on

[low lichen]

Get ready for a huge file

[shadow locust]

compiling 98,000 shader variants 😛

yep

[low lichen]

One of my shaders is 125K lines, but that's handwritten so I expect a generated shader to be much longer than that.

[shadow locust]

Unity crashed trying to compile it lol

[low lichen]

Did you select preprocess only? It shouldn't be compiling variants for that

[shadow locust]

I did

trying again

[low lichen]

Could you send the shader to me?

Or I guess I could easily recreate it

[shadow locust]

This is from my phone because it's killing my PC lol

Seems to be stuck here >_>

But yeah just recreate my screenshot of the graph

I've basically reduced the graph to just that for now to try to debug

[grand jolt]

Why do I need to add the near plane to the depth?

Doesn't that break the depth being normalized.

(Orthographic camera case)

I copied this function from URP source code.

For SSAO I think.

_ProjectionParams.y is near, .z is far.

Oh wait...

Linear depth is not normalized, this is in world space.

I mean view space.

[low lichen]

@shadow locust Did you ever try DrawMeshInstanced instead of Indirect?

[shadow locust]

Not workable for my use case

Yes I've done it in the past, but that was back when my project was using builtin RP

and I never had any trouble getting the instance ID when I was manually writing shaders

[grand jolt]

Holy crap, I'm actually finally getting somewhere with doing rain collision in VFX Graph.

Dang depth, why do they call it linear depth without specifying the unit.

[vague sinew]

Hey, back to a shader question… how do I remove the magenta from my textures?

I was using a custom code to read and remove the magenta by hand before assigning to the texture but now I have to use the resources folder

[shadow locust]

Remove it and replace it with what? Why's the magenta there in the first place?

[vague sinew]

Anything with 0 alpha... Magenta is there because it is how the original game client handles transparency

[shadow locust]

Anyway you could easily have a Shader look for that exact color in the texture and replace it

Or clip it

[vague sinew]

Thats what I came here to ask, if you'd allow me.. I'm not really experienced with shaders

[shadow locust]

Are you using built-in or one of the SRPs

[vague sinew]

Yes, the lightweight one I guess... this is the actual shader graph. I'm experimenting with the color replacement

[vague sinew]

This was the only way of getting somewhere close to what I want but the borders are not quite there.. What am I missing?

[frosty junco]

Does anyone know how to access _CameraOpaqueTexture from a shader?

[meager pelican]

You can!
You can inspect variables, and even hot-edit shader code.

BUT...you have to use graphics card vendor tools to do it.
So presumably Nvidia's tools, or AMD/ATI's tools.

[meager pelican]

If using SRP, try the SceneColor node. It has to be enabled in the settings (to capture the opaque pass to a texture). Sample it in a transparent material, since that's after the opaque pass, or any point (like post processing) that is after the opaque pass.

[shadow locust]

RenderDoc seems like a nightmare to use

Although... didn't realize Nsight existed 🤔

[fervent tinsel]

I've tried to like RD for years but I always go back to nsight

so... it's bit like blender, why fight the UX if it's clearly not designed for you 😅

[shadow locust]

DrawMeshInstanced works fine. I think I figured out the problem. I might be trying to do something that is simply not supported yet... https://portal.productboard.com/unity/1-unity-platform-rendering-visual-effects/c/61-support-for-drawindirect-drawprocedural?utm_medium=social&utm_source=portal_share

[low lichen]

I did some testing of my own, and yeah it worked with DrawMeshInstanced but didn't work with Indirect. It seems more like a bug to me though and maybe not something specific with Shader Graph. Have you written shaders that worked with DrawMeshInstancedIndirect on 2021.2?

[shadow locust]

I just upgraded to this version to try out this new feature (Instance ID node) so I haven't done much of anything on it

I can't really see how you can reasonably use DrawMeshInstancedIndirect without Instance ID at the very least so I'm really not sure how you're supposed to use it with shader graph at all if this doesn't work.

I'm already hackily using a texture as a data buffer shader graph doesn't support GraphicsBuffer/ComputeBuffer yet. This is so frustrating 😠

[meager pelican]

Time to write SRP shaders by hand....
I mean, you can only expect "easy tools" to do so much. IMO.

[meager pelican]

Perhaps it isn't supported for the vertex stage, but might work in the frag()? Anyone tried to see if it made it to the frag by remapping the instance ID to some colors?

[shadow locust]

Doesn't seem to work for either, but it's hard to tell because the only way I have to differentiate positions for draw indirect without instance id is to randomize them, unless I'm missing something.

[meager pelican]

You'd use the instance id node, and map it to different colors to see if it changes from 0 to anything else.

If you tried that, and it didn't work. It didn't work.

[shadow locust]

Right I tried that of course and it shows black but I can't tell if it's just the first instance drawing as black or all of them, as they all draw in the same position

[meager pelican]

Oh. lol.

Well there's that.

Do you look up pos based on id?

[shadow locust]

Yes that's the plan

[meager pelican]

If so, you're getting all the same id...0...and they all end up in the same pos. But that's set in the vert?

[shadow locust]

Yep

[meager pelican]

frack.

Well you could write a test case, and randomize some verts. Oh hell.

[shadow locust]

I wouldn't mind if Unity had documentation and examples but they don't. Shader Graph is supposed to be the main way to make srp shaders

[meager pelican]

"Improved documentation" is on the planned list.
😂

[shadow locust]

🤣

[shadow locust]

anyway thanks for the help

[meager pelican]

Yeah. Wish I could have helped.
The thing is, without compute buffers, it's a PITA to mess with this anyway. Oy.

[grand jolt]

Does anybody know why terrain textures are power of 2 + 1?

I hack around weird stuff being on the edges of a terrain splatmap texture by clamping the uv with a 4 texel inset but I don't get why it's this way.

If I don't skip the 4 outermost texels I get color leaking from as much as 40 texels away onto the border.

[timid minnow]

Tried making a UI related shader graph

What am I missing here?

I even added it to my shader graph and I still get the error:

Ugh... so it needs to be exposed? I don't even use this feature...

[mental snow]

So I'm new to Unity and I'm trying to use the shader graph to copy my Blender shaders, but I'm like 5 minutes in and I already encountered a peculiar error which I can't really explain

https://i.gyazo.com/7eb091cf1a45d9334aa959745df3ef62.mp4

For some reason the scrolling intensity does not work in the actual viewport/game but it works as expected in the graph editor

[kind juniper]

Did you save it the shader? What does the graph look like?

[mental snow]

Saved the shader before the depicted gif, yes. Gimme a sec, I figured I would update Unity to a newer version to see if that helped

I was using the 2020.3.22f1 LTS version

Will try with a newer one

https://gyazo.com/8286a863d1d54f69d134a6c761b1967a

Nothing complicated

@kind juniper Could you take a look and see if you see something glaringly obvious?

I'm not familiar with unitys shader graph

[kind juniper]

What's the value of Glow Intensity on your material?

[mental snow]

30

Reducing or increasing had no visible effect

[kind juniper]

And rune color?

[mental snow]

HDR orange with 4 intensity

I should probably cut out glow intensity and just change intensity value of the HDR anyway

[kind juniper]

Afaik hdr intensity is not represented in the shader graph color node, I think there's another node that representes intensity.

Also, is the game paused by any chance? is timeScale set to 0?

[mental snow]

Sure, but here I am multiplying with a value of between 0-1 from the gradient so it should lower the intensity

As the white will represent normal color while the darker areas of the voronoi should represent a darker blend

Just like the material preview

Works as expected in blender also

Not paused, no timescale to zero

[kind juniper]

Is it HDRP?

[mental snow]

Yes

[kind juniper]

I think you need to pass in an Emission Node to the emission input.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@10.2/manual/Emission-Node.html

[mental snow]

@kind juniper I'm apparently just too unfamiliar with unity -- it worked fine in the game view port, just not in the dev viewport

[kind juniper]

That's weird, but ok.🤷‍♂️

[mental snow]

After checking through a ton of menus I think I found the problem

By default basically all render layers were unchecked

in the editor

The one that solved it was the "Always refresh" layer

@kind juniper thanks for your time anyways, I appreciate it

[kind juniper]

I'm not very familiar with hdrp, so no clue, but you're welcome.

[mental snow]

@kind juniper One more question -- is the Normal from Height really so incredibly terrible?

pixellated mess

[woeful canyon]

problem might be that there is some very sudden increases in value from your voronoi noise

so the normal changes very quickly and produces a pixeled reesult

idk though ive never succesfully used normal from height

[mental snow]

The blender equivalent is just passing the texture into a bump conversion so I expected it to work the same in Unity

But it's literally ultra pixellated

All of it

[kind juniper]

Could be related to your texture resolution? I wonder where it goes from procedural data to the actual pixel texture.🤔

[mental snow]

https://gyazo.com/e62d89d8a1e568b97d3412c0316ad6ec

No way that is what is happening

Looks like this function is rendering it in chunks instead of pixels

Or something

[kind juniper]

Actually it doesn't seem to be completely pixelated. I think it might have to do with extreme values.🤔

[woeful canyon]

try clamping it

clamp and then normal from height

[mental snow]

Clamping does nothing

[woeful canyon]

did you try it?

[mental snow]

Yes

All the values are already between 0-1 as they just represent the amount of white so there should be no extreme values

clamping only changes the cutoff value where the normals arent being generated

So you are only "raising" or "lowering" the ceiling

Giving such a result:

https://gyazo.com/2230434a382c58a72860869c13159eca

Accidentally had the clamp into the strength there but same result without

I think this function is broken

Or it renders chunks instead of pixels

Doesnt appear to be in the same resolution as the source voronoi

But I see there is a different option to generate normals, Normal from Texture

But the texture input does not accept the output from the voronoi

[woeful canyon]

yeah

[mental snow]

For some reason

And there is no node to generate texture from voronoi either looks like

[woeful canyon]

could you bake the voronoi texture

[mental snow]

I could but that would completely defeat the purpose of the procedural aspect

btw thanks @woeful canyon @kind juniper for trying to help

This is the result I have from blender

The reason I want it procedural

Is because the actual UVs of my models are shrunk to a single pixel

Which I then move on a 8x8 color palette

To color it

So all the normals, smoothness, metallic, emissions etc have to be made procedurally

[woeful canyon]

why are you shrinking the UVs of the model to 1 pixel?

you mean like 0-1?

[kind juniper]

I think it might have to do with the uvs that you input into the voronoi node.

[mental snow]

The UVs are generated so that doesn't make sense

All of these are made without using the models UV

I am 100% certain at this point that it's just a disfunctional node (Normal from Height)

[woeful canyon]

have you tried testing it with a more basic case?

like just a procedural left to right gradient or something

[mental snow]

Yes, it pixellates

[woeful canyon]

yeah that sounds broken

[mental snow]

It looks like it's rendering chunks of 2x2 by normalizing the 4 pixels

Meaning you only get 1/4th the resolution

[woeful canyon]

classic unity

[mental snow]

By using this function

I baked a texture and used the normal from texture and it worked normally despite equal values

So it appears to be just this function

[woeful canyon]

yeah thats what people said

[mental snow]

Which kinda breaks procedural UV mapping..

[woeful canyon]

why do you even need it to be procedural?

[mental snow]

Because then the size of the UVs of the object won't matter, the material will still appear the same

You just tweak the values to get different sorts of leather

Instead of having ugly ass tiling textures etc

You will have generated a never-repeating pattern

If you see the above screenshot of the sword handle -- the actual UV of the handle is the size of 1 pixel only

Yet it has details in a limitless resolution

[woeful canyon]

how are you getting the voronoi to loop around the surface?

doesnt look like tri-planar mapping

is it 3D voronoi noise?

[tacit parcel]

based on this, it uses ddx and ddy which cmiiw indeed sample pixels in 2x2
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@12.0/manual/Normal-From-Height-Node.html

[mental snow]

You wouldn't need to do triplanar mapping with a generated UV afaik

@tacit parcel Any feasible workaround?

[tacit parcel]

I think you could do it by code instead of shader

[mental snow]

God damnit

:p

[woeful canyon]

make a custom node and write your own normal from height maybe

[tacit parcel]

btw, I was expecting the node samples the neighboring pixels to generate the normal, yet unity decides to use ddx/y

[woeful canyon]

how does it even calculate the derivative

on nvidia documentation:
"The specific way the partial derivative is computed is implementation-dependent. Typically fragments are rasterized in 2x2 arrangements of fragments (called quad-fragments) and the partial derivatives of a variable is computed by differencing with the adjacent horizontal fragment in the quad-fragment."

sounds like it is basically comparing neighbouring pixels

hm
"The partial derivative computation may incorrect when ddx is used in control flow paths where not all the fragments within a quad-fragment have branched the same way."

is there any branching logic in your shader graph?

[tacit parcel]

from the manual above
float sgn = d < 0.0 ? (-1.f) : 1.f;
yep, seems there is

[woeful canyon]

i mean like branching logic before normal from height gets called

because that apparently might mess up the derivatives and mess up the normal calculation

although when you tested it, it broke for just a simple gradient

so its probably broken even without logic maybe breaking it

[mental snow]

It breaks no matter what looks like

Actually I'm wrong

Doesn't break if the gradient is onedirectional

Not that it helps me I guess

Just weird how unity lacks such a basic function

Blender has it

[tacit parcel]

Btw, here's a good explanation from Ben Golus
https://forum.unity.com/threads/low-resolution-or-bad-anti-aliasing-on-normal-from-height.1051733/#post-6808757

The ddx and ddy functions work on a grid of 2x2 pixel groups (called pixel quads) across the screen, so if there's an edge that runs through the middle of a pixel quad it can calculate an approximate normal. If the edge is between two pixel quads then neither "see" it and you get no slope. Thus you get the above aliasing.

[mental snow]

Wow, beautiful

Pretty elaborate setup for what is just 1 node in blender but sure

If that's what it takes

[woeful canyon]

i think you can export blender materials to unity though i dont know how successful that is

[mental snow]

I doubt that tbh

Probably would register the simple properties just fine but I doubt it would transfer any functions

After taking a look at it I can't really replicate it for my shapes @tacit parcel

I wonder why the Normal from Texture requires a texture spesifically

The equivalent node in blender only requires rgb input

[kind juniper]

Well, you don't know how complicated the node that blender is using. It might be a performance nightmare in a real time render game engine. This kind of complaints don't really have any standing, unless you can provide actual arguments with data.

[mental snow]

You are of course completely correct and I didn't consider that, my apologies.

I just want to recreate my blender creations in Unity and I'm just disappointed given that it doesnt really appear to be viable after all

[kind juniper]

It's not always possible and when it's possible it either requires specific proficiency with 3d graphics and shaders or hits the performance hard. Remember that Blender is made for realistic rendering and unity for real time rendering.

What's the name of the node in blender btw?

[mental snow]

Bump

I don't think it should eat that much performance given it's 3 calculations per pixel that doesn't really need to change in real time after generation

Unreal appears to be capable of procedural normal map generation

But I despise c++ compared to C#

Fuck it I'll just bake I've wasted enough time as is

Nvm, that didn't work because my UV's are scaled to 1 pixel lol

[kind juniper]

That's when the triplanar projection comes to play.

[grand jolt]

In Shader Graph, is it possible to use a keyword to switch between opaque and transparent?

Right now I'm maintaining two basically identical shaders, with the only difference being one supports transparency and the other doesn't.

Having everything use the transparent shader isn't an option - that would mean I lose out on all the (very much used) benefits of a deferred renderer, and likely some other optimizations regarding shadow blending and such.

[west eagle]

@grand jolt just write one transparent shader then change render queue at runtime

[grand jolt]

I guess that could work, but then I'm branching on the GPU as well as looping over every single material as they're created.

[west eagle]

well, render queue is on the material so it isn't relevant to shader as long as the shader support transparent

[slim steppe]

i got a shader which uses vertex color to do some stuff. The colors are set in a particle system but it only works with the start color and not the color over lifetime
what am i doing wrong?

[torpid lichen]

Guys its me again im sure youre so happy

So i need to sample the surface/vertex normal of an adjacent pixel in the fragment shader, is this possible in shader graph ?

i would have expected nor be able to input a position into the Normal Vector node but its not possible

Do i have to use code for this ?

[meager pelican]

Bglous does it again.

You can, as he implies, sample 3 points on your procedural height with tiny offsets between them, and calc your own surface normal that way, rather than using the derivatives. Pretty common way to do it, in fact, when you have height-mapped stuff. Google around for the formula. @mental snow
It's not that bad, it's "just" that it requires 3 sample operations (well two others and the current pixel). And voroni calcs can be expensive.
It's common to construct two vectors along the surface using the 3 points you know, and then do a cross product (see below) and watch out for handedness. (again google this stuff).

[meager pelican]

IDK but it might not be a shader question, it's a particle system question assuming your shader is picking up the vertex color properly. The particle system is on the C# side, unless you're in VFX-graph, then you need to use the VFX section.

[meager pelican]

How is your surface normal data stored? Is it a texture that you sample (normal map)?

If so you can sample the normal map to get nearby data.
If not, you calc it?
But otherwise the GPU only knows the ddx/ddy of the float3 normal value of the current pixel, that MAY be of use depending on what you're after.
From here: http://www.aclockworkberry.com/shader-derivative-functions/
Derivatives can be used to compute the current triangle’s face normal in a fragment shader. The horizontal and vertical derivatives of the current fragment’s world-position are two vectors laying in the triangle’s surface. Their cross product is a vector orthogonal to the surface and its norm is the triangle’s normal vector
But see the discussion above about some inherent "dangers" of DDX/DDY. In this case, though, since you're doing a derivative of the actual normal value being passed in per pixel, not deriving it, it should be OK.

I think. 😉

[tacit parcel]

if the textures doesnt change at runtime (like, only generated once), I'd vote generating the voronoi heightmap and normal by code, less shader computation too

[meager pelican]

Agreed.

[torpid lichen]

im calculating the angle between the view direction and the normal vector and display this value on the model

what i wanna do then is edge detect this, that why i wanna sample the normal left, right, up and down from the current pixel to compare them

i dont know if this is a stupid approach

Should i just bake the normals into a normal map and sample from there ?

[meager pelican]

baking them would make your life easier, IMO.

However, edge-detection (your real question) is an art in and of itself. There are many methods, and I'd start with researching them.

DDX/DDY is not uncommon though. But it tends to be one-sided as the GPU "sweeps" through things. So you'd "know" the change for left and the top, let's say, but not the right and the bottom pixel values.

Whereas if you can sample a map, you can get your !8! adjacent pixel values, if you want that many.

I don't know all methods, nor all code for them, off the top of my head, but it's a good research project. Some may require more passes than others.

Also research "outlining" and maybe "toon outline".
Unity has a tut on that too.

[torpid lichen]

i intend to do simple 3x3 sobel edge detection, and then go from there in case it doesnt look good enough

[meager pelican]

Cool, sounds like you're "on the path".

[torpid lichen]

yeah, i researched those, but they are not to my liking, backface culling leaves much to be desired and normal color edge detection too

Also unrelated but kinda related, is calculating ambient occlusion in shader graph realistic or should i get that out of my head ?

[meager pelican]

lol.
I'm not the one to ask, since I only EAT spaghetti, not draw shaders with it.

[tender orchid]

Hi all, are there any shader wizards that can give me a hand? I'm making a scene with a pre-rendered background in Unity, which combines the top-left image with a depth pass in the lower-left to give us a composite on the top-right.
I now want to be able to apply shadows to the scene, and I'm assuming we use a shadow pass, but I have no idea where to even start.

[meager pelican]

I'm confused, the top-right image already has shadows.
But maybe start with telling us what pipeline you're working in.

Shadows are "automagic" in unity when using lit shaders any any pipeline, for the objects themselves. BUT, if you're combining images in some sort of full-pass post-processing thing, you're probably looking to research "screen space shadows".

If you're adding shadows for the player character, I'd expect a lit shader to do that for you. But maybe I don't understand.

[slim tulip]

Greetings gentlemen, would anyone happen to know how to combine some effects of shader graph shader and just a shader?
I've got a cool glitch shader from asset store, but it doesn't work quite well with my sprites, since they are PNG files with transparent background. On the picture attached there's the Original Sprite, a weird way Shader Graph sees it, and a way to clean it with shader graph. But shader that applies desired effect is written in code, while my way of cleaning PNGs is done via shader graph. Is there a way to combine two shaders? Kinda give output of one to the input of the other? Or perhaps transform code into shader graph?

[tender orchid]

Yes, I should have been clearer. The top left image is a pre-rendered image from Blender, complete with shadows. My character in Unity can walk around the scene and go in front of and behind the pink objects by using a depth writing shader and the depth pass image in the bottom left. This all works fine, but now I want the character's shadow (which is non-existent at the moment) to be applied to the pre-rendered image in the background, as well as shadows from the scene to be applied to the character itself.
Here's a picture of the effect used in Resident Evil. The background is a still image but the character's shadows can still 'interact' with the environment, either by shader pass magic or by potentially using invisible geometry to catch the shadows.

[patent plinth]

I don't think that's still image

[tender orchid]

They are absolutely still images, the gamecube didnt have nearly enough power to do these realtime

[meager pelican]

Shadows on or from objects are CAST (and later received) by a shadow caster pass, in the lit shaders.
So if your character casts a shadow, using a lit shader, it should cast onto a <something>. The problem you'll have is that if they are images (I don't mean textures on 3D, I mean flat geometry) it's the shader for that/those objects that have to calculate shadows while drawing them or you distort the shadows into geometry shapes while casting them.

So somehow you'll have to either fake geometry data, and write your own custom shadowcaster pass to magically update the shadow map as if there was real geometry there, or the shadow receiving logic will have to account for that and distort the shadow map, similar to what you'd do with a decal.

I have no idea how to really pull it off, never having done it. But I'm dubious about doing any custom passes like that in SG, unless you do ALL custom lighting yourself using unlit shader and one hell of a set of sub-graphs to fake it all up.

And I still don't know what pipeline you're in.

You could try researching "screen space shadows" for some ideas. Maybe also related as I mentioned above....decals.

However mixing "canned" shadows and real time shadows is tricky...like I wouldn't. If I had to do screen-space shadows anyway, I'd probably do the whole damn scene and not have shadows out of blender.

Because you want scene shadows cast onto your player too, and you don't want double-shadows (hitting player and also not hitting player) if that's even possible. My head hurts now.

[meager pelican]

@tender orchid
This wiki indicates As a result, the graphical style of the remake features 3D models on top of pre-rendered backgrounds like early Resident Evil games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_(2002_video_game)#cite_note-NGC_Mag_preview-15

Verifying your original assertion.

[tender orchid]

At least we know it's possible!

I'm going to have another go at it tomorrow - I'm fine with having the original geometry in the scene to catch/cast shadows, just not have the objects themselves visible.

[low lichen]

Adding the character's shadow to the pre rendered background is doable with the texture data you have currently, but if you want to the pre-rendered shadows to be on the character, you need a depth map from the light's perspective, not just the camera.

And those shadows will still be realtime shadowmap quality, not raytraced quality like in the render.

[tender orchid]

I'm fine with it being realtime quality, if it's good enough for Resi then it's good enough for me

[low lichen]

Are you sure RE had environment shadows on the character? I'm not seeing that in the screenshot above

[meager pelican]

They pulled all that off in 2002 with a gamecube. They must have made compromises somewhere. It's just that many of the articles cited in the wiki that have discussions by the programmers are in Japanese...

[low kettle]

Quick question, can you set the values of a gradient in a shader from a script and if so how?

[meager pelican]

Quick answer, gradients in SG (if you're in SRP) are calcs, so you could feed them in. See docs on the gradient node.
As for other methods, easiest IMO is to use a texture that you create in script. Like a 256 x 1 texture that you just sample from 0 to 1 in the x value.

[low kettle]

ok thank you

[tender orchid]

You know what, I think you're right. The character models take light data from a point light to apply shadows to itself, but at no point do objects in the world apply shadows to the character!

[meager pelican]

The code for sampling the array is in the other node that samples the gradient. So the gradient is "just" an array.
Also see here:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@6.9/manual/Sample-Gradient-Node.html

[tender orchid]

No leaf shadows on Chris

although this shot begs to differ...

[meager pelican]

window pane shadows....

[low lichen]

I think some of the shadows are actually also from dynamic objects casting realtime shadows on other dynamic objects and the environment

I saw some examples of moving shadows, like from a fireplace

[tender orchid]

I think so too - zombies also cast shadows on him. I reckon that window pane is an object

[meager pelican]

@tender orchidAre you planning on running on low-end hardware?
If you're "OK" with having some geometry to receive shadows anyway, why not do a combination of real time and baked shadows and "just" have some normal-mapped low-res geometry?

[tender orchid]

That's what I've moved on to trying to do at this point

I've got it so objwcts have their mesh renderer set to Shadows Only, so they can cast onto the player at least

[meager pelican]

IDK why you even need to do that. I mean, texture mapped quads for walls and door parts, a few rough geometry for insets and stuff, windows panes....

These days, since you're not on a 2002 gamecube, you can pull it off with "real" geometry, if you get smart about keeping it low poly.
Just my 2 cents.

Then it all "just works". Why fight the engine? Do some tests on lowest hardware.

[tender orchid]

I could do it all realtime, but I want to stick to the late 90's pre-rendered vibe - the depthpassed BG images are an absolute must.

I can cast shadows onto fake geometry, I can receive shadows from said fake geometry, but the fake geometry is also casting a shadow onto the floor (along with its prerendered shadow). Should I try passing along the shadow map from Blender to do a shader that discards the shadow? Or can I tell the floor to ignore shadows from certain objects?

[keen edge]

i remember that

pretty insane how they did it

[tender orchid]

it still holds up today, doesn't it?

[keen edge]

ayy whaddup leon

[keen edge]

meh looks really uncanny

like something's off

[tender orchid]

If I could cast shadows only from Player to Pink, and from only Pink to Player (no Pink to Pink), then I reckon that'd solve it.

[tender orchid]

Apologies for the large number of posts - just letting you all know that I figured it out. Correctly reading from a shadow pass texture did the trick.

[grand jolt]

Nice

[honest basin]

Im trying to get an image with an alpha channel to work, but the standard shader has no options for this, Which one should i be using?

[tight saffron]

Hey! I'm trying to make an eye shader and one of the things I'm trying to do it put a top down gradient on it but I'm running into an issue.

Right now I'm using a position node to control the gradient. World works how I want it to work where I can rotate the eyes and the gradient doesn't rotate with it, but when I move the model up and down the gradient doesn't follow the model.

Object mode solves the moving problem but then the gradient rotates with the eye.

So is there a way get the best of both worlds? Gradient following but also not rotating with it?

[low lichen]

World Position - Object Position should get you what you want. It'll be the world position relative to the world position of the eyeball.

[tight saffron]

@low lichen I just gave that a shot but its doing some funky stuff basically the causing the gradient to go up as the eye rotates up and down

I think I figured it out my eyes were being goofy

[vale shadow]

Hello guys, I want to make the typical hit animation that make the object go white and normal color fast. But I can't find any information about that. Also I need to make it with post processing effects so I need to use lit sprites. What can I do?

[timid minnow]

Trying to make an unlit shader graph in HDRP to use on the Image component... how do I make the vertex alpha function properly? This doesn't seem to work correctly unless the alpha is 0 (then it disappears)... any other value and it's 100% opaque.

[grand jolt]

Death's Door is just swapping between like 4 premade solid color materials on hit.

Super easy solution.

[timid minnow]

https://answers.unity.com/questions/845358/custom-shader-with-unity-46-ui-canvas-group-alpha.html
It seems that maybe I need to use the tag
Blend SrcAlpha OneMinusSrcAlpha
however, it's not clear how to do this in shader graph? Is there a custom function that could be deployed to route the alpha in correctly?

[marsh gull]

Hey guys. I'm trying to generate an outline around a 2d character made up of multiple sprites (PSD importer, rigged). My shader creates outlines around each individual sprite within the character, but I'm trying to find a way to make it only go around the entire group of sprites. Is there any way to do this? I can't find anything on this topic anywhere.

Perhaps there is any way to input all of the textures from all of the sprites the material is applied to into the shader graph, so it gets processed as a whole?

[west eagle]

@marsh gull you may need a postprocess shader to do the outline

[marsh gull]

Appreciate the response! Is there any tutorial or documentation for this process?

I'm also guessing it might be possible to separate the player into a separate camera, and then apply a shader to the camera somehow, but this is just speculation as there isn't much on this out there

[west eagle]

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

normally it is for 3D but same tech

also there is another way, write a shader control all animations and write code to transfer animation to texture

then do the outline wthin the shader, but this is way complicated than post processing

however if you have 10000 characters ,this will save a lot cpu on play animation

[marsh gull]

That sounds like it would make me drop the idea entirely out of frustration, haha.
The post processing idea sounds like it has merit but I'm worried this approach would apply an outline to everything in the scene?

[west eagle]

well that is the way everybody use,almost every outline asset sell on asset store use this way

[marsh gull]

Wouldn't really work in my case, I'm just trying to have outlines on specific sprites.

So far it has worked through a shadergraph + material for specific sprites that need outlines, but the issue I ran into is when I have a group of sprites that should share a single outline

[west eagle]

no it won't draw outline on everything

[peak ridge]

ive disabled screenspace shadows and was under the impression they should fall back to light space shadowmaps, but instead my directional lights dont cast shadows at all

this happens in a blank project, any idea why?

im not using hdrp or anything

[peak ridge]

well for some reason, its suddenly working. just had to keep disabling things 🤷‍♀️

ok wait, ive got it and i think this is a bug

it only ever works if cascades are disabled. here's cascades enabled, obviously rendering the shadow maps correctly, yet not displaying on anything in the world

disabling cascades it suddenly works

using 2020.1.3f1

[kind juniper]

Apparently that's by design. Shadow cascades require screen space shadows to calculate the cascade areas/resolutions if I get it right.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/use-cascade-parameters-without-screen-space-shadows-enable.1012732/

At least in BIRP

[peak ridge]

thanks for the link!
that is very odd and definitely was not always the case.

[kind juniper]

I donno if it was different at some point - never tested it, but I don't think there were any changes to that area in the last few years. Might've been like that since unity 5 or even before.

[peak ridge]

that sounds about right 😛

[dim yoke]

<@&502884371011731486>

[ocean mural]

!ban @grand jolt Nitro Scam

[echo moat]

Faye#1806 was banned

[heady axle]

I would like to have a shader graph that displays a texture on a procedural terrain. I was using the position node and all texture was stretched on some faces. The texture is mapped properly on view mode but I cant use that for obvious reasons. Any Ideas?\

What i want:

What i got:

[tawny cedar]

so i have a texture, and i want to apply another texture over it with 50% alpha for example to simulate lighting

you can see in the left there are the two textures and right is 50% alpha black pasted over the grass texture

how could i approach this in a shader?

basically i want two uvs on two channel

first is texture

second is lighting texture and both are from the same material

and put lighting over the texture (not blend them)

[regal stag]

You could project a texture from above by using the Position node -> Split and take the R and B axis into a Vector2 for the UVs. If the terrain has any vertical surfaces that'll still cause the texture to stretch though. If that's needed too, then you'd want to use something like triplanar mapping (a technique that samples the texture 3 times projected in each direction and blends based on normals). There's a Triplanar node to handle it for you.

[kind juniper]

Maybe just sample the same uv + offset(equal to the width of each square)

[marsh terrace]

so I need some help here

my artist sent me a object, a shadergraph file and a mat file

however, the material is pink and for the shadergraph, i installed the shadergraph package and I don't know what to do

I set out the object in the scene, slotted it's material and tried changing its shader to the shadergraph that was given to me, but everything is still pink and stuff

[marsh terrace]

it seems nothing was copied in relation to the shader graph

i have pasted the meta files aswell, does anyone know why this imported incorrectly?

[regal stag]

It looks like the graph is intended for the Universal render pipeline. If you're in 2021.2 I think you can now add the Built-in RP as an active target in those graph settings instead, or you'll need to install the URP package (see https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@11.0/manual/InstallingAndConfiguringURP.html). Though it doesn't look like the graph is doing all that much, could probably just use the Standard shader (or an unlit one?) as a replacement.
You should probably also talk to your artist and make sure you both agree on which render pipeline you're using.

[marsh terrace]

yea, it's definitely URP, I'm converting my project to URP right now (and fixing ProBuilder URP support as well)

the shadergraph supposedly should make the grass have a animation giving that wind feel to it

according to my artist

[drifting snow]

I need a little help

I wanna add a lightmap shader within the unity 3d standard shader

how can I do that

here is the lightmap shader

    {
        _Color ("Main Color", Color) = (1,1,1,1)
        _MainTex ("Base (RGB)", 2D) = "white" {}
        _LightMap ("Lightmap (RGB)", 2D) = "black" { LightmapMode }
    }

    SubShader
    {
        Pass
        {
            Name "BASE"
            Tags {"LightMode" = "Always"}
    
            BindChannels {
                Bind "Vertex", vertex
                Bind "texcoord1", texcoord0 // lightmap uses 2nd uv
                Bind "texcoord", texcoord1 // main uses 1st uv
            }
            SetTexture [_LightMap] {
                constantColor [_Color]
                combine texture * constant
            }
            SetTexture [_MainTex] {
                combine texture * previous
            }
        }
    }```

[tawny cedar]

ah no, i need a second uv list applied in a different channel to it's pasted over the original texture, i already have to position of it in the code

but no default shader supports two uv channels

[drifting snow]

hello

[marsh terrace]

So it seems that the shadergraph my artist gave me was not imported correctly

it's supposed to be a grass sway

is there supposed to be something more to import alongside the .shadergraph file?

[regal stag]

If the graph doesn't have any other nodes I'd assume they gave you the wrong graph

[amber egret]

hi! im making a mountain with the terrain tools, and i cant seem to figure out how to make the steeper parts of the mountain made out of rock, and the flatter parts of snow. i would like to do this with a shader. does anyone know how to do it?

[torpid lichen]

your can get the vertex position, split it, and map the height coordinate to different colors

Guys i really dont wanna sound like a broken record, but just so im sure, does anyone know if it is possible to sample the normal vector of another pixel than the current one in either Shader Graph or HLSL ?

[tight saffron]

quick question: if I wanted to overlay this white dot on top of my texture how would I do that. most of the combining operators only seem to like black but I just want the white from this. (The dot needs to be white in the end)

[lusty badger]

Using Maximum or Blend with Lighten selected could work.

[tight saffron]

That worked!

[fathom kiln]

Hi. Is it possible to have a disorting effect that disorts opaque and transparent objects behind it? I have found a grabpass filter https://gist.github.com/Refsa/54da34a9e2fc8e45472286572216ad17 which disorts transparent objects as well but disorts objects in front too which i dont want.

[torpid lichen]

you could just add it to the texture

[tight saffron]

Could but I want always want it facing towards the camera

[tight phoenix]

is Shadergraph able to solve this overlapping problem?

Online I read about Stencil Buffers being used to achieve this but thusfar I havent been able to find a tutorial on how to achieve it

[crude bolt]

how do I add volumetric fog?

I just want things that are further away from the camera to become less visible and more blue (it's underwater) in specific areas

[pseudo narwhal]

use regular fog (z-buffer or depth fog)

[tawny cedar]

how can i make my texture trasparent in shader graph?

somebody suggested multiplying by the alpha channel but it just makes it black

[vocal narwhal]

it is transparent

just use the alpha channel

just because the nodes do not display it as transparency doesn't mean the data isn't there in the .a/.w coordinate

you're just discarding it right at the end

[tawny cedar]

ohh

how do i disconnect a single node btw?

[vocal narwhal]

I forget what the nodes are, but it might be called Split?

[tawny cedar]

you mean plug into the alhpa channel of the pbr master node?

[vocal narwhal]

If you want the output to have alpha, yes

[tawny cedar]

umm it just makes it all transparent

edges are still messed up

ah no wait now i see

its out 4

do i just add a vector 4? 🤔

[vocal narwhal]

well, these operations don't make sense for a start

there's no reason to do this, so make sure you've removed it

[tawny cedar]

yeah, that was just what someone on google suggested to fix this

how do i convert from a split back into a 1?

so rgb back into 1

[vocal narwhal]

also, what you did there didn't make sense either. That uses .r

you need to use .a from a split node.

Combine

just pass the out from the lerp into albedo, and the a from the split into alpha

[tawny cedar]

worked 😄

ty for the help @vocal narwhal

now let's see if i can actually use the two uv channels lol

nope 😦

current shader

and my code

        mesh = GetComponent<MeshFilter> ().mesh;
  
        float x = transform.position.x;
        float y = transform.position.y;
        float z = transform.position.z;
  
        newVertices.Add( new Vector3 (x  , y  , z ));
        newVertices.Add( new Vector3 (x + 1 , y  , z ));
        newVertices.Add( new Vector3 (x + 1 , y-1 , z ));
        newVertices.Add( new Vector3 (x  , y-1 , z ));
  
        newTriangles.Add(0);
        newTriangles.Add(1);
        newTriangles.Add(3);
        newTriangles.Add(1);
        newTriangles.Add(2);
        newTriangles.Add(3);

        newUV.Add(new Vector2 (tUnit * tGrass.x, tUnit * tGrass.y + tUnit));
        newUV.Add(new Vector2 (tUnit * tGrass.x + tUnit, tUnit * tGrass.y + tUnit));
        newUV.Add(new Vector2 (tUnit * tGrass.x + tUnit, tUnit * tGrass.y));
        newUV.Add(new Vector2 (tUnit * tGrass.x, tUnit * tGrass.y));

        mesh.Clear ();
        mesh.vertices = newVertices.ToArray();
        mesh.triangles = newTriangles.ToArray();
    mesh.SetUVs(0, newUV.ToArray());
    mesh.RecalculateNormals ();

    newUV.Clear();

        newUV.Add(new Vector2 (tUnit * tOne.x, tUnit * tOne.y + tUnit));
        newUV.Add(new Vector2 (tUnit * tOne.x + tUnit, tUnit * tOne.y + tUnit));
        newUV.Add(new Vector2 (tUnit * tOne.x + tUnit, tUnit * tOne.y));
        newUV.Add(new Vector2 (tUnit * tOne.x, tUnit * tOne.y));
        
        
        mesh.SetUVs(1, newUV.ToArray());
        mesh.SetUVs(2, newUV.ToArray());
        mesh.SetUVs(3, newUV.ToArray());
        mesh.SetUVs(4, newUV.ToArray());

why is the second uv channel being ignored?

[plush fog]

The blend factor is 0, the lerp factor is 0

[tawny cedar]

okay blend set to 1, but i'm not sure what's the factor for lerp, the T?

i see here in the example they are using a split with in4 and out 1

how can you do that? 🤔

[plush fog]

just link 1 to 4. You can create a float node and link it

or link whatever you need into it, idk what you're trying to do

[tawny cedar]

lol, well i don't exactly understand what the T for lerp does, basically i want my UV2 to be overlayed over the UV0

[wraith inlet]

T in lerp is the % to blend between A and B. If T is 0, use 100% A and 0% B. If T is 1, use 0% A and 100% B. If T is 0.5, use 50% of each

[plush fog]

Try this? Note that blend is set to Overwrite. And if you need alpha to apply when blending uv2, send the uv2 alpha into the blend factor

[tawny cedar]

hmm, overwrite literally replaces it, 🤔

here's an example of the final effect

so basically this will be the lighting for my textures

[plush fog]

Yeah that's what overwrite does. I guess I don't understand what the goal is. You can change it back to overlay or whatever

[tawny cedar]

i take one piece of the same texture

plop it over the other texture

and it simulates lighting

when it's fully black it just turns out black

so basically a copy paste of UV2 over UV0

[plush fog]

The top left grey square has transparency right? Have you tried linking the alpha of UV2 into the blend factor?

[tawny cedar]

the first block is just a black block with alpha set to 50%

[plush fog]

Can also try this

[tawny cedar]

ahh right multiply

lemme see

so it sorta worked

im displaying a pink number over the grass texture

but the rest of the grass dissapeared

lemme try with the 50% alpha block

[plush fog]

If it's not shaded it should be multiplied by white

[tawny cedar]

hmmm

well i'm thinking like this

i want that final color

but i don't want the alpha to apply

because the alpha will make the other block transparent as well

but how to multiply so it only adds the color of that semi transparent black over it

hmm, just add doesn't seem to do anything at all 🤔

[plush fog]

You can just multiply the base texture by a value between 0 and 1 (white is 1, black is 0)

[tawny cedar]

so i made separate textures to test

this is the result

and textures i used

if you multiply it's still too much black

[plush fog]

You're multiplying by pure black so it's gonna output pure black. If you want a 50% shade multiply by grey

Oh and alpha should be 1 everywhere on the shadow texture

[tawny cedar]

not sure this is the right way

if i multiply by pure black it's still visible

maybe i need to figure out the formula of what happens when a 50% black texture is pasted over the texture in the aseprite editor 🤔

applying 50% black to that red basically makes all rbg values in half 🤔

so i guess i take the alpha channel extrapolate it to a value between 0 and 1 and then multiply all rbg values by it 🤔

cause when it's by 0 it's gonna be 0 which is black

[kindred granite]

I have a big grid of sprites where each tile uses one of 15 textures. What would be the best way to render it avoiding a lot of draw calls?
I tried creating a texture array for the textures and setting a texture index per instance, but the instancing is not working (I believe it is related to this bug which will not be fixed it seems: https://forum.unity.com/threads/adding-an-instanced-property-breaks-instancing-when-used-with-sprite-renderer-properties.794325/)

[tawny cedar]

hmm so it worked, i just linked the alpha channel directly into the multiply second value

but it's inverted

the more alpha the brigher it is

how can i invert it somehow?

invert colors doesn't work

cause i guess the alpha is ignored?

it worked with subtract

[tawny cedar]

it works!

thanks for the support @vocal narwhal and @plush fog !

here's the final shader

[tawny cedar]

i'm back with another issue, i'm trying to make it so a different lighting hew is added to the lighting, yellow in this example

but when rbga is all 0 on the secondary lighting texture

it makes it look all weird

i don't understand why this is happening, if i'm adding just 0 to all rgb they should all be the same as before

this doesn't happen if i remove the addition

hmm even in the preview window it looks normal 🤔

[crude bolt]

Regular fog is in the entire scene tho?

[meager pelican]

It's all color math. And colors are "just" vector4 floats (float4's).
You can do it manually, as you're doing, or you can use some automatic blend modes.
But to see more about how to think about it....have you read this thoroughly? Including the alpha calcs?
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-Blend.html
In particular:
finalValue = sourceFactor * sourceValue operation destinationFactor * destinationValue
there's tables for the different operations, and factors/values.
Like you mentioned something was inverted in alpha, which indicates to me that you should be using (1-alpha) somewhere.
And there's multiply, additive, etc. operations.

It's all just number crunching. There's really nothing special about it, other than maybe overriding alpha output in an opaque queue.

Grab a piece of paper and figure out what you want to happen with some sample values.

[native spoke]

someone know where i can find some textures for a procedural Sand Dune Mesh Shader? Or a tutorial 🙂

[tawny cedar]

So i figured out what was happening i think, for some reason when you leave a texture spot completely empty it fills those empty places with nearby rbg values(but not the alpha value) so when i added them they made weird shapes and blended awkwardly, so i put a condition that only in case of the alpha condition bring greater than 0 it should add, otherwise don't add anything

And it worked!

[marsh terrace]

So I managed to get my artist's shader to work with a grass sway and everything. However, it seems that the shader doesn't compute shadows from meshes. Would anyone know how could I make it so the meshes actually project shadows into the ground/grass with the shader applied?

May I add, how can I make the shader accept Unity's lightning as well? It seems the directional lightning is not affecting the shader in any capacity

[marsh terrace]

I have almost zero knowledge of shaders and this shadergraph seems complex enough and I don't even know where to begin

[paper oar]

Can somebody help? How to remove OpenGL validation at runtime? Oculus does it inside their .so file - how can we do it in Unity?

[clear vector]

Hi guys, i'm trying to make first steps with HLSL and right now trying to write custom function in shader graph. ShaderGraph gives me an error on my CustomFunction node,
Is this because ShaderGraph doesn't support some shader model? What i'm trying to do is to make an int from my float, so i want to use ceil or floor, but both produces and error. My code is simple as float intPresicion = ceil(Precision); or float intPresicion = floor(Precision);
As i can understand error says, that there is no such a function with 1 parameter, but msdn tell me that there is https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3dhlsl/dx-graphics-hlsl-floor

[dim yoke]

can you show the whole stuff like this?

[dim yoke]

anyways you probably need to define Output variable and do whatEverNamedOutputVariable = ceil(Precision);

[clear vector]

I was thinking that there is some bult-in defenition for Precision value, so i have tried to replace it with Itereation name and error has gone, then i have wrote Precision name back and there is still no such error. But i have new, now "undeclared identifier ReplaceColor"

My hsls code:

void ReplaceColorCyclically_float(float3 In, float3 To, float Precision, out float Out)
{
    float intPresicion = floor (Precision);
    float3 colorStepHalf = (float3(1, 1, 1) / intPresicion) / 2;
    float colorReplaceRange = length(colorStepHalf);
    Out = In;

    for (int i = 0; i < intPresicion; i++)
    {
        float3 from = i * 2 * colorStepHalf;
        Out = ReplaceColor (Out, from, To, colorReplaceRange, 1);
    }
}
float3 ReplaceColor(float3 In, float3 From, float3 To, float Range, float Fuzziness)
{
    return lerp(To, In, saturate((distance(From, In) - Range) / max(Fuzziness, 1e-5f)));
}

oh, defining should go before call, lol

[marsh terrace]

So how one would go to make a custom shadergraph receive shadow?

in a lit one, that is

[meager pelican]

That means parameter # 1. In your case "Precision".
How is Precision defined?

nm I see it above. Sorry.

[clear vector]

@meager pelican all is ok for now, thanks. That was some mistake with variable data type

[lament bramble]

Hi guys 🙂
I'm seeking your council. I have some procedural terrain with a custom mesh. I'd like to have several textures (>5), therefore i would go with a splat map.
As far as I see and read, i would need non-shared vertices to get it to work. Actually, I already have a working splat map shader in shader graph.
However, I considered making use of the primitiveId and use per-triangle data, so i could use shared vertices and therefore massively reduce the number of vertices at the cost of additional lookups in a buffer. Unluckily, it seems that the shader graph doesn't support primitiveId yet, so I would have to write a new shader.
The map size is intended to be quite huge, so storage space and speed is definately important.

As I'm new to the topic, i would like to have a hint, which route I should follow: Use the shadergraph splat map with non-shared vertices or use a shader, utilizing primitiveId for per-triangle data. I attached a screenshot of my current status 🙂 Thanks in advance everyone!

[ocean blaze]

how are shaders made?

[clear vector]

i was searching for a good way to implement palette swapping shader, but i see now, there is no convenient way. I have found few

• Hardcode color swapping, when you just define N color params and do replace color on each. So for different color number you need different shaders. Not the best variant

• Main texture is a map itself to palette texture. Every pixel contains index to palette pixel. It can be done with writing to red channel or with grayscale.

The second one seems good for me. But i see problems: you'll have to generate mapped texture for every sprite you using with such shader.

Is there any tools to hook up import process and generate mapped sprite from given palette? Or maybe somewhere in the world exists generator for such images? Any suggestions? 🙂

[meager pelican]

Nice question.
I admit I'm guessing a bit here, but the additional overhead for accessing memory on your per polygon data buffer will probably cost as much or more performance than the shared verts, since you'd have to be reading from an additional buffer and that will impact memory coherence/cache. But I get your point about memory usage/size.

Any way you can code up a test case and benchmark? I'm curious as to the results.

Also, I'm sure you know that primativeid will lock you into DX 10 or later.
And be aware of this: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/HLSLcc/issues/49

It occurs to me that there's probably several ways to "cheat" this process vs having one huge map. For example, break your terrain into manageable sized chunks, and take advantage of frustum culling. Then you'd not have to share verts AND you could somehow index into your own buffer if you still need to by calcing an index based on some data stuffed into the verts (I know that sounds wasteful too, but it'd be smaller anyway). And of course there's the whole procedural draw thing, were you don't even send full meshes, but IIRC you have to do your own frustum culling.

[shadow locust]

You either write them manually, or use a tool like Shader Graph

But they are just code

[ocean blaze]

I saw a brackeys tutorial with a shader graph. He made a cool effect can you make it just changing the properties or do u have to make it urself?

https://youtu.be/Ar9eIn4z6XE

[shadow locust]

you literally just linked a tutorial on how to do it. Try watching the tutorial and following along.

[ocean blaze]

no its not that. like are you able to make that same effect but just with properties?

or do u have to use a shader graph for that

[shadow locust]

You have to make a custom shader to get a custom effect.

[ocean blaze]

alr... tysm

[chilly ocean]

Currently wrangling with Unity's support for GLSL shaders. Does anyone here know how to go about getting the tangent normals as a vec3/vec4? There is seemingly no simple answer online, as far as I can see.

[kind juniper]

Why not HLSL or CG?

[vague pike]

Not really sure where this goes... but how would I go about having a texture that stretches across multiple meshes sort of?
Basically I'm thinking of like a 3d tilemap, so I'd have one big grass texture and that's supposed to stretch/repeat over the whole tilemap (but only for the grass tiles of course). Then a sand texture thats supposed to stretch/repeat over the sand tiles and so on.
I'm thinking either I have to somehow combine the grass tiles (even if disjoined from one another) into one big mesh. Or each grass tile would use texture UVs calculated as a modulo of its world X/Z position

[cerulean dune]

Hello ! Do you know why it's showing me this error ?

[vague pike]

what does that connection lead to?

[cerulean dune]

It's connected to a lerp with a Vector 3 in A, and Vector 4 (automatically converted to Vector3 by the shader graph) in B

[vague pike]

hmm is it supposed to be that error texture btw? :p

If not, wheres that left Add coming from on your first screenshot

[cerulean dune]

It should be, but in game there's nothing strange x)

[vague pike]

Ah

[cerulean dune]

Well it's just a sky gradient x)

But everything looks good

[vague pike]

Isn't that the multiply?

[cerulean dune]

But the place where the texture is first strange is here :

It's another thing that I add

The Negate of the MainLight direction seems to give the error

[kind juniper]

Is MainLight a custom node? Maybe that's the issue..?🤔

Although unlikely

What does the error on dot product say?

[cerulean dune]

Yeah, I just realized that it was using a custom node, but still find it strange that it's working with these errors :s

'Invalid Conditional Expression' on every errors

[kind juniper]

It's not event conditional expression though...🤔

Maybe this is related?
https://forum.unity.com/threads/invalid-conditional-expression-in-custom-function.1043452/

[meager pelican]

You have to know how many meshes in the shader.
If you have 2x2 meshes, each set of UV's would be adjusted to 1/2 what they'd be for a "normal single mesh" with starting offsets. So lower left would start at (0,0) and go to (.5, .5), and upper left would start at (0, .5) and go to (0, 1), etc. You could set them in the modeling program individually, or you can procedurally calc them.

Also, as you implied, you can "just" calc them based on world space coordinates, and tile them like you said in your last line.

As for combining, it's commonly done with a splat-map, like the terrain system uses (google them). That lets you blend between grass and sand. But you could, if you choose, map each triangle even to one or another texture and not blend at all! All up to you.

[vague pike]

Hmm I see. Will google splat map and try around with the other things, thanks~

[opaque gale]

Hi, i have a question. I want to create a shader that makes objects look like plastic, but i want the shader to use the objects material color

how can i fix that

[amber egret]

Hey, i need help with my shader. i made a shader where the steep parts of the mountain is made of rock while the rest is made of snow. I did this in HDRP. Theres one problem though. The shader is pink, and i cant upgrade the materials because its a custom shader. Anyone know how to fix this? thanks

[kind juniper]

That means that the shader is broken or incompatible with the render pipeline. Is it shader graph or a regular shader?

[amber egret]

its a regular shader

[kind juniper]

Do you have any errors when trying to compile it?

Share the shader code.

[amber egret]

one sec

no errors, but heres my code:

Shader "Custom/Terrain" {
    Properties {
        _SnowColour ("Snow Colour", Color) = (0,1,0,1)
        _RockColour ("Rock Colour", Color) = (1,1,1,1)
        _SnowSlopeThreshold ("Snow Slope Threshold", Range(0,1)) = .5
        _SnowBlendAmount ("Snow Blend Amount", Range(0,1)) = .5
    }
    SubShader
    {
        Tags { "RenderType"="Opaque" }
        CGPROGRAM
        #pragma surface surf Standard fullforwardshadows
        #pragma target 3.0

        struct Input {
            float3 worldPos;
            float3 worldNormal;
        };

        half _MaxHeight;
        half _SnowSlopeThreshold;
        half _SnowBlendAmount;
        fixed4 _SnowColour;
        fixed4 _RockColour;

        void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutputStandard o) {
            float slope = 1-IN.worldNormal.y; // slope = 0 when terrain is completely flat
            float snowBlendHeight = _SnowSlopeThreshold * (1-_SnowBlendAmount);
            float snowWeight = 1-saturate((slope-snowBlendHeight)/(_SnowSlopeThreshold-snowBlendHeight));
            o.Albedo = _SnowColour * snowWeight + _RockColour * (1-snowWeight);
        }
        ENDCG
    }
}

[kind juniper]

Ah, that's a CG shader

Hdrp and urp only work with HLSL shaders.

[amber egret]

oh

any way i can change it?

[kind juniper]

Start from changing CGPROGRAM and ENDCG to HLSLPROGRAM and ENDHLSL

Then you'll get some errors that you'll need to solve by changing CG stuff to it's counterpart in HLSL

[regal stag]

It's more to do with that it's a surface shader, which isn't supported in URP and HDRP

[kind juniper]

Oh, guess that too.

[regal stag]

I'd recommend using shader graph though, writing shaders by hand in HDRP is a nightmare from what I've heard

[amber egret]

i have no clue on how to use the shader graph :/

[fervent tinsel]

then it's more likely you will have even harder time doing custom HDRP shaders

in short, Unity doesn't want you to do custom hdrp shaders

basically you could take stock HDRP lit and modify it if you really need to but would be just so much easier to use SG as it will not break on every second future HDRP release like your custom HDRP shader will

[amber egret]

are there any other ways i can acheive a look like this?

[fervent tinsel]

that's typically done by precomputed mask texture

then just layered few materials with a shader

or use some kind of terrain shader if it supports that

[unreal gale]

Hi, got a quick question, I made an outline material shader with ShaderGraph, and I want it to apply to all objects when rendering on a secondary camera, how can I achieve that ? I tried searching online but no solution worked so far

[kind juniper]

Probably with this:
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Camera.SetReplacementShader.html

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

[unreal gale]

I tried using this, and either my shader doesn't work with this system, either I am not using it properly. Could it also need the meshes to already be present in the scene to make the shader replacement ? I am loading my other scenes (which contained the meshes) additively after my main scene start

[kind juniper]

I don't think so...🤔
What's the issue though? Does that camera not render them at all? Or renders with the wrong shader?

[regal stag]

Which render pipeline are you using? Replacement shaders are only supported in built-in afaik. URP has an override material which is similiar, the RenderObjects feature on the Forward/Universal Renderer asset can do that.

[unreal gale]

it renders using the object's base shader

[unreal gale]

I am using the the URP, are there examples using RenderObjects or other functions to override on a camera ?

I saw it existed but didn't look into it much as it said it could be unoptimized to use

[regal stag]

There's an example on how to use the feature here : https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@11.0/manual/renderer-features/how-to-custom-effect-render-objects.html (You'd just need the Material override, not the depth parts though)

You can create a second Forward/Universal Renderer asset somewhere in your project files and assign it to the list on the URP Asset. Then on the camera switch the Renderer, that way it doesn't affect your main one.

[unreal gale]

it's working ! only problem left is that my white outline became black for some reason but I am definitely much closer to the solution, thanks for the thread !

though now I need to figure out why it does this ^^

actually it's fine, I just used the wrong processing event, all is in order ^^

Quick snap at the first pass of my (mini)map feature it renders ^^

[grand jolt]

@meager pelican can I get a reminder when I am supposed to use .DrawFullscreenMesh() and when to use Blit() for fullscreen effects?

[chilly ocean]

The ability to reproduce the same shader in Maya is one of the deliverable requirements, so GLSL was determined the way to go, since the changes required for porting are minimal.

[silver sparrow]

https://youtu.be/vIh_6xtBwsI could somebody please explain to me why did the person split the Absolute World Position to obtain the X and Z value, and then have it plugged into a Vector2 node to obtain a texture that projects only at the top? starting from timestamp: 4:20

i'm genuinely confused

[regal stag]

The position is a Vector3 (xyz), but to sample a Texture2D it requires a Vector2, hence the need for the Split and Vector2 nodes. The X and Z is used since those are the axis involved with the top surface. The Y isn't used so the texture stretches on the side, but I'd assume later in the video they project textures from other sides too and blend based on normals. There's also a Triplanar node that does it for you.
Absolute world space is used so moving, rotating and scaling the mesh doesn't change the projection.

[grand jolt]

I'm trying to make a ray marcher in unity using hlsl

And instead of a sphere, it gives me this:

https://paste.myst.rs/d2097xya

Here's the code

I have a warning: implicit truncation of vector type

[meager pelican]

Uh, what the hell is .DrawFullscreenMesh() ? 😉

[grand jolt]

URP SSAO uses it instead of blitting.

It draws a quad scaled up to match the whole screen.

So instead of mixing stuff manually in the shader they draw the SSAO on a quad with alpha.

[meager pelican]

Well, the good news is do does blit (the fs quad). And blit let's you pass a material.

But I'm obviously not the one to ask, maybe someone else knows.
I'm curious now though, so may dig further.

[grand jolt]

No, with blit you feed the camera target and you have to make sure to output the old pixels where your special effect has 0 alpha.

With draw fullscreen mesh you can just dump a (0, 0, 0, 0) out and it won't give a shit and will blend on top of your screen target nicely.

At least that's how I think.

[meager pelican]

Oh, you're saying you can use alpha blending and just blend into the back buffer.

Sounds like you've answered your own question, beat. 😉

[grand jolt]

But when do I pick one over the other.

What are the perf implications.

I can't be writing "skills: shaders" in my resume if I don't know this 😄

[meager pelican]

I would think that the fsmesh call with blending would be faster, if you don't need to know what you're blending over (but I haven't dug in yet), so I'm grasping here. SSAO would have to have read that somewhere, and then "just" blending the result over top with that fsmesh call. Like as a final step after it had the shading info for AO.

SSAO isn't cheap.

[grand jolt]

Oh, I know how SSAO works.

I just don't know how to learn stuff like that.

The whys.

[meager pelican]

But but but....
You just learned it, explained it, and then educated me. 😉

It sounds like...that they're doing that final call just to blend the result in using alpha blending per your explanation.

[grand jolt]

Yeah, but why not blit.

It's not the only builtin render pass in URP I've seen that uses fullscreen mesh.

[meager pelican]

YOU answered that. Blit gives you the OLD target, and a new target, and you'd have to be:

1. reading the source.
2. writing to the destination
   AND
3. adding in the AO result. So that's reading 2 things and writing 1 new one back out.

As compared to taking what you have (however long it too you to get it...and that's no slouch with AO) and "just" splating that on top of whatever you already have in the back buffer. Like shadows do. That's one read input, and a hardware blend output to the back buffer.

I think. That's what it sounds like.
So I'm GUESSING that's why they did it.
BUT...IDK how long it took to get the AO results to AO Map back on top of the screen.

But the GPU is going to be designed to "dump" stuff blended into the back buffer. Like fast.

[grand jolt]

Hmm, true.. AO pass needs the depth prepass target but not the camera color buffer so we save 1 texture tap since we are no longer blitting using the camera target as a source.

[meager pelican]

Yeah, since the depth is often/usually "free" with the back buffer.

[grand jolt]

Nah, URP uses depth prepass target rendered before everything, not the camera's depth target. We also got depth priming recently so maybe URP maybe also uses that same prepass to prevent overdraw even.

[meager pelican]

But pre-pass just means WHEN/HOW they get the depth buffer populated. Right?

So...they do a pre-pass. No pixel shader necessary. It basically "just" writes depth information to the back buffer, colormask 0 basically. Only depth info gets output, IIUC. At least that's the goal... have the vert() do its thing, position the triangle, and then rasterization just outputs the interpolated depth across the triangle for all frags and doesn't even call any pixel shader.

I think.

Pretty fast.

And then you have a depth buffer sitting around for all the good stuff in later passes.

[grand jolt]

I just mean it's a separate render texture, not the "live" camera target.

Oh, us programmers and semantics 🤣

[meager pelican]

So you need it for the pipeline anyway.
I just meant that it's "free" to the AO process later.

[meager pelican]

That gets complicated IIUC, and may be (is) implementation/hardware dependent. Sometimes Unity makes a separate one, sometimes it is a hardware one. I get confused as to when it does which, to be honest. And it's part of the RT setup.

Maybe it makes one if you have to read it, but otherwise if you're just doing hardware z-testing it "knows" it won't need it. Not sure.

[grand jolt]

Well, it comes from cmd.GetTemporaryRT() so I dare the GPU to remove it 😎

[meager pelican]

lol

Yeah, and RT depth buffers and copying....oy....

[primal dagger]

How can I make a gradient fog effect?

[steel notch]

So in this video, in the area where the shader cuts off the mesh, a texture covers the cross section
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8PdPdcbMzk&ab_channel=AbdullahAldandarawy

How exactly do you get this effect?
(Specifically something like Shader Graph 😛)

[regal stag]

Remy has an example of a textured cross section shadergraph here : https://github.com/Remy-Maetz/ShaderGraph_Doodles/tree/master/Assets/Shaders/CrossSection

[steel notch]

Oh thanks. Exactly who is Remy?

[regal stag]

Unity dev that sometimes talks here, they shared it a while back #archived-shaders message

[steel notch]

emphasis on a while 😛

thanks ill take a look

[steel notch]

sick it works

alright nice

thanks

[storm trout]

Is there currently a plan to add a node similar to Blender's ColorRamp?

[regal stag]

I think the Sample Gradient node is similar?

[storm trout]

Kind of, but it's also kind of a pain

And the noise options are way more limited

Had to abandon a project because Unity has no wave texture node

[sweet cosmos]

Previous versions of Shader Graph contained PBR Graph which had AlphaClipThreshold parameter in its master

How can I set AlphaClipThreshold in newer versions?

[onyx veldt]

i think this goes here
how can i make this not blury
Its a very small image

got it^

[rocky rapids]

How would i do something like this in 2d

without actually making it part of the texture

[rocky rapids]

minecraft textures when

[onyx veldt]

tf is happening

[tacit parcel]

transparent material usually ignores zbuffer

[onyx veldt]

i fixed it now

im using this one

[exotic kraken]

Can you have multiple shaders apply to a single material at the same time? Like an outline shader on a mesh that has a pbr shader as well?

[chilly ocean]

So, odd issue that maybe someone here can help with... I'm working on building an identical shader in Unity and Maya, and am getting different results in the two programs with what should be identical inputs.

Left is Unity, right is Maya. A simple swizzle of a vec3 fixes the mirroring issue, but for some reason the normal data in Unity displays as much smoother than Maya. Anyone know why this might be, or how to fix it?

[exotic kraken]

Maybe the interpolated vectors in the vertex shader aren't normalized in Maya?

[chilly ocean]

I'm not sure if that's the issue. Applying normalization during the Pixel Shader stage doesn't seemt o make any sort of difference to the output color.

At least if my understanding of your suggestion was correct.

[timid rose]

can anyone help me with trying to get a boids project working in hdrp?
specifically https://github.com/Shinao/Unity-GPU-Boids
or at least point me in some direction on how i can try figure it out myself
i assume the compute shader works the same on all pipelines but normal shaders and specifically surface shaders dont with hdrp
i tried looking at shadergraph examples that have a structured buffer as i assume that's important for the optimization of this boids implementation but couldnt find much
any help would be really appreciated
I assume trying to get this (https://github.com/Shinao/Unity-GPU-Boids/blob/master/Assets/8-GPU_Boids_Final_Clean/Boids.shader)
to work in hdrp isn't a simple process at all but i've looked for resources for hours and thought maybe someone could help

[ocean blaze]

can someone please help me. pbr graph is gone and idk how to make the shaders now

[vocal narwhal]

What render pipeline are you using?

[ocean blaze]

universal

and it just shows lit shader graph

unity said they removed pbr

[vocal narwhal]

that's it

[ocean blaze]

but how are we supposed to make the shaders now...

[vocal narwhal]

what's wrong with lit shader graph?

[ocean blaze]

it has a vertex and fragment thing

and i follow brackeys tutorial

[vocal narwhal]

what's wrong with that

[ocean blaze]

i folloed it

and it didnt work

the shader stayed pink

[vocal narwhal]

If it's pink then you're likely not using URP properly

[ocean blaze]

wdym

[vocal narwhal]

If you create a material that uses a built-in URP material does it display properly?

or is it also pink

[ocean blaze]

how do i do that...

[vocal narwhal]

Assets/Create/Material

[ocean blaze]

let me try and make the shader again

how would i then apply the shader to the material

[vocal narwhal]

you don't need to do that

[ocean blaze]

since you have to pick it through the shader thing

oh i dont?

[vocal narwhal]

just use the default URP material, it should be preset if you create a new material if you are using URP

[ocean blaze]

the mateiral is still pink

[vocal narwhal]

Then you are not actually using URP

[ocean blaze]

i set the shader to URP/Lit

[vocal narwhal]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@latest/index.html?subfolder=/manual/InstallingAndConfiguringURP.html

[ocean blaze]

and then i made a new shader graph

lit shader graph

and made the shader

i installed URP @vocal narwhal

[vocal narwhal]

If the default lit URP material displays in pink, then your project is not configured for URP.

[ocean blaze]

do i have to do more than just installing it in package manager

[vocal narwhal]

Yes.

[ocean blaze]

oh...

do i need to set it in project settings