✨┃vfx-and-particles

[south patio]

It's still the same result

@warm torrent I tried updating the positions every frame, the problem is now just the particle following the rotation not focusing on following the waypoints.

[low bear]

Hello, can you tell me why the second **Burst **occurs at the end?
You might say, use Single Burst, but it only works as **a one-shot **and is not played again until the game is restarted.

Thank you for your help.

[ashen robin]

Single should work. Are you sure you're specifying enough particles and setting a Lifetime?

And that you not changed the reap particle setting

Oh, I see what you're doing. You should instead of using Play as a bool and instead call the event to spawn the particles.

Which you should hook into Start there at the top of the spawn context

Actually, if you've multiple systems you simply just need to call Play() on that specific system as using an event here would call it on each individual system No wait, it should be fine. Play() or calling the event using the reference to the system will do it local to that system.

https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.3/Documentation/ScriptReference/VFX.VisualEffect.Play.html
Play() is just shorthand for VisualEffect.SendEvent("OnPlay"); anyway

[low bear]

In short, I used a Bool in the animation so that it wouldn’t activate at the start of the game, and I assigned VisualEffect.Play to the OnTriggerEnter event script.

Thank you very much for your help.

[placid forge]

is this where to ask question about shader?

[fathom cypress]

when making vfx with meshes and shader graph, is vfx graph better than particle system?

[warm torrent]

No
#1390346776804069396

[warm torrent]

Depends on your definition of "better"
The unique advantages of PS and VFX are not related to whether meshes and custom shaders are used

[onyx pecan]

Is there a way to make a Decal Particle only render on specific layers? I don't want to limit all decals in the project, just this one specific VFXGraph that outputs decals

[warm torrent]

I think it must have its own rendering layer
But once it does it doesn't limit all decals

[onyx pecan]

Yeah, I'm poking around at it and I think I see. I thought enabling the "Rendering Layers" option in the URP asset was limiting all decals to specific laters, when it just enables the ability for decal renderers to choose their own

[opaque knoll]

Hi. I'm using jobs for my particle, i assume this is the correct channel for that

Anyways i updated unity to 2021.3.35. And seems like now my job process only gets done on exactly 1 particle and not more. Could something be disabled in this new version?

[opaque knoll]

Ok nvm

I changed collision module's maxCollisionShapes. It was 256. Changed to 512 and wasn't enough
Changed to 1024 and it's finally enough
But i dont get why or what this value does

[split latch]

Heya! Quick question, how would one go at making 2d rain? Like in silksong and hollow knight? Would particles be a viable option or would it lag too much? If so, any alternatives? I'd love to have some space for heavy and light rain as well, cause i wanna do different types of weather (light rain, heavy rain, lightning even etc)

[ashen robin]

considering you've a lot of room to work with since it's 2D you'd probably be fine with particles, but if performance is a concern then consider using a texture overlay and make 'pretend' splash around the environment to simulate the water hitting an edge.

[split latch]

aight, do u know how hollow knight did city of tears rain perchance?

[ashen robin]

ya got a gif of it

or any ref

[split latch]

https://youtu.be/xaZ1qCnIEtw?si=h14Oz-aV2B1NDte7 first one i found

https://youtu.be/L0kZl7AyHnE?si=af1M6hO8KfTXRiUC also smth from silksong, warning for spoilers but just watch the first few sec

[ashen robin]

yeah looks baked, or rather no reason for it not to be baked

krita has a seamless draw mode which you can try your hands at if you wanted to make a scrolling texture

[split latch]

so i could do this wil a scrolling texture?

[ashen robin]

sure, but just a suggestion though either can work here if you prefer just using particles

[split latch]

well, i found some tutorials and guides for particles as well but i suppose i just gotta see how each of em looks

[ashen robin]

considering the game's art style I'd say it's all drawn though

[split latch]

mhm

[warm torrent]

These could be just very stretched particles moving down quickly
Dark ones in the foreground, bright ones in the background
The effect of them hitting surfaces is a frame by frame animated sprite, added separately multiple times over the walkable surfaces

[valid jacinth]

is there no elbow joint node in vfx graph?

like in shader graph. to make the wiring more organized

[smoky ember]

Hey, does anyone know what might cause VFX decal outputs to not render on my custom material, but the projector decals do? I have narrowed it down to no information getting written into the dbuffer, but I can't figure out why that is

[late quiver]

Hey, so I'm wanting to make a VFX graph that has particles rotating upward in a spiral, but i can't find out how to do that online, since most of the tutorials are either out of date, or are just not what im looking for.

[normal ibex]

Hello guys! I was trying to figure out how to use the 6-way lit smoke preset that could be found in Shader Graph in Unity 6, and it behaves like in the video - the 6-way-lit quad (or particle) do react to directional/point lights (though not always aligning with the test sphere on the right side), but when the quad or particle is being rotated, the shadow rotates with it. I supposed if the fake lighting worked fine, the shadows would stay on place in case of sphere-shaped volume? Any ideas of what I am missing?
Update - oh no I've just read that 6-way-lit things are not supposed to be rotated/flipped

[toxic prism]

I'm adding the boost mechanic to my 3D sonic engine and I've got the basic mechanic working so I want to fix the acual boost aura FX to make it look good. I'm using a boost aura ripped from Sonic Frontiers. This is how its supposed to look:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4PcHTr8bQ&t=809s (9:33)

How do I get mine looking like that? I'm completely new to VFX and stuff 😅

[ashen robin]

Well, the first boost in that video seems to be purely particle strips, but this blue aura you got going on seems like animated texturing with some shader work

But if you don't want to draw frame by frame, you can maybe make yourself a seamless texture and scroll it

with a little bit of noise here and there

Some other ideas using that texture as a mask with multiple different variations and then run a gradient through it to make it seem animated

[toxic prism]

oh alright i'll look into it

thank you 🙏

[dusty creek]

has anyone made a shader that u can just attach to the material of the particles in your particle effect to make them metaballs?

[warm torrent]

It isn't possible with just a particle shader
Metaballs require some additional system for blending separate metaballs, while shaders only run for each vertex/fragment with no knowledge of what other vertices/fragments are doing

Typically that's a compute shader that has the data of and works on every particle at once

[raven bloom]

I read that as meatballs and I thought they were just super complicated to make in Unity

My spaghetti and meatballs gave an error

[warm torrent]

They don't warn you about spaghetti code for no reason

[raven bloom]

LOL

[sacred elbow]

why is time not looping my texture and instead letting it fold into infinity?

very new to shaders

[warm torrent]

This would happen if the texture is has wrap mode "clamp" rather than repeat, in either its import settings or in SG through the Sampler State node

#1390346776804069396 is for shaders

[shrewd crest]

Hey I have created inside Unity some spirited away inspired water shader
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/WXorwy

[neat trench]

Having issues with the Trail Renderer component. I'm new to Unity (background is 2D animation and Blender 3D Animation) but at work I've been trying to set up this smear/trail system for character punches and weapon swings. I originally had it as a particle system and I got something alright but I wasn't really super happy with it. I tried out the Trail Renderer and I liked it more but something I'm running into is the jaggedness of the trail it makes. I've poked around and I've done all I can to figure out what could smooth this out more. I've dropped Min Vertex Distance to 0, increased Corner and End Cap vertices to 90 which is about all I could find that effects this. Is there anything else that I could tinker with or is this just a matter of the animation being too fast since (from what I can see) the Trail builds itself on a frame by frame basis and essentially makes a straight line from the last location of the last frame.

[ashen robin]

They aren't the easiest to smooth as usually you do need a lot of quads too really give it a nice elbow. If you don't care too much about stretching the quads, making a particle system that emits a particle based on distance will usually produce some better results if you set a high capacity.

[neat trench]

I'll have to noodle with it some more I guess

[ashen robin]

https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.2/Documentation/ScriptReference/ParticleSystem.MainModule-stopAction.html
API says that parameter cleans up the gameobject with the particle system when it ends instead of cleanup per particle

Also Duration refers to the system while Start Lifetime refers to particle time. Naming of some of this stuff could be clarified a bit more

[left obsidian]

The issue is that it is either never ending or just not trying to destroy the object

[ashen robin]

So with your settings I expect it will emit for 1 second, but it won't destroy until about 6 seconds later (the system itself)

[left obsidian]

It doesn't destroy ever

[ashen robin]

Odd, API explicitly says "when the Particle System stops and all particles have died."

Are the particles themselves ever dying?

[left obsidian]

Doesn't seem like it

[ashen robin]

Ok, make a new system and use the default systems. Change Stop Action to Destroy and turn off looping then run the game.

Remember it will only destroy when you run the game

And if that works then go over the properties that you've modified that aren't similar to the defaults

[left obsidian]

That, and the problematic particles work fine when placed into the scene.
I should add that I am instantiating them

[ashen robin]

Well, I'd pause the game and check on the GO to make sure non of the params changed after initing them

[left obsidian]

I'm sorry what is the GO

[ashen robin]

the gameobject the particle system is on

[left obsidian]

For some reason, setting the particles to Public fixed it...

No actually

How it was before
Destroy(bloodPop,3f);
The fix
Destroy(bloodPop.gameObject,3f);

[ashen robin]

You wouldn't need to Destroy if you're doing it on the system itself

You can do it either way really, but the setting on the system you've pointed out will do the clean up for you when the last particle expires

[cobalt scarab]

!collab @candid tangle

[crimson heron]

:loudspeaker: Collaborating and Job Posting

We do not accept job or collab posts on Discord.
Please, use Discussions to promote yourself as job-seeking, advertise commercial job offers, or look for non-commercial projects to participate in:
• ** Collaboration & Jobs**

[weak parrot]

how to i make it shine like the sun?

[glossy hemlock]

A basic question about VFX Graph. Let's say I'm writing a game where little spaceships fire at other little spaceships. I want to implement impact/sparks/smoke type VFX using VFX Graph. Let's imagine that the player ship fires lots of small bullets, and I want to spawn some impact particles on every bullet's impact.

The question is the following: should I lean towards simply spawning a new instance (gameobject) of the VFX Graph effect on every impact, letting Unity sort out whatever instancing/batching it can apply (and maybe using a gameobject pool to reduce the spawning/unspawning cost), or should I rather lean towards having a single instance of each effect and then spawn new particles programmatically (which, I believe, works through custom VFX graph events)?

For the latter, I imagine I will probably need to give the effect instance quasi-unlimited bounds to make sure it always renders (or parent it to the camera and use world transforms for particles?)

Anyway, not looking for detailed instructions, just a nudge in the right direction. I can figure out the details myself.

how to i make it shine like the sun?

[clear spruce]

I would start by just pooling gameObjects, shouldn't be too hard if you need to change later. Only way to find out would be to test both but having multiple VFX graph objects should be fine too. Even effects with GPU Events can be GPU instanced since unity 6.1

[glossy hemlock]

Yeah, I'm definitely overthinking things if I'm already looking at an optimization like that. But I was mostly just trying to find out if this (1 instance with programmatic spawning) is something that people do.

I'm guessing if the overall number of visible effects on screen are in the dozens, the extra draw calls won't immediately break my game

[clear spruce]

The instancing will also decrease the cost significantly

[clear spruce]

I'm not aware of the exact details but having a large system with lots of unused particles isn't great either. I have been told that particles that are not used will still be "simulated" to some degree. Especially if you don't know how many effects you will have in total, you would have to keep the particle capacities unnecessarily high. I would start with separate systems with GPU instancing enabled (should be by default afaik).

[ashen robin]

I usually like using single VFX Graph systems, but yeah you can run into some problems if you don't handle it correctly such that you'll be drawing a bunch outside of the camera depending on how the bounds are set.

[glossy hemlock]

Yeah, I don't mind the non-cullability, since these types of VFX will almost always happen within the viewport or close to it in this game.

[glossy hemlock]

Ah, a detail about VFX Graph that I've been missing so far and that I just understood after reading about it in the docs is that it does, in fact, automatically group multiple instances of the same effect asset into the same draw call automatically. I stupidly wasn't aware of that, and it makes my above question mostly obsolete. Thanks for everyone's input!

[clear spruce]

Yup. For very long time GPU Events broke that instancing so creating particles from the graph itself would automatically disallow instancing (between multiple gameobject instances of the graph), but instancing for GPU Event graphs finally landed on unity 6.1

So either way unity will try to combine the graphs into as little draw calls as possible

[glossy hemlock]

That's excellent, thanks

[wild mango]

Hi, i'm currently experimenting the VFX Graph in 2D. I wanna try to create a spiral, which goes from the oustide to the inside, how can I achieve this ?

[wicked kraken]

what happened to this thing?

it's not an option in the vfx graphs anymore but a fuck ton of tutorials use it

has it changed into smth else or like whats going on

[prime dome]

hello everyone, does anyone know how to create realistic/dynamic flame simulation that interacts, collides, and propagates over and around object or the environment.
i haven't been able to find anything that is remotely similar to what I've been looking for.
basically im looking for a real time simulation of fire, like how its made in blender or film.
Do I have to export an elembic file to create the results I'm looking for?

[quiet ether]

no clue.. googled it and this is what it said.. is this helpful?

if not i'll try to fire up my Unity here shortly and see for myself

[warm torrent]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.visualeffectgraph@17.4/manual/sg-working-with.html
Prefer the documentation rather than google's chatgpt

[quiet ether]

oh yea absolutely ^ about 1/4 down the page
my point was more of, a simple search would have shown it still is a thing.. and can be found

edit: I'm about to get back into shadergraph and vfx graph myself..
next time i'll know more of what im looking for 😄 i just dropped in b/c he was crossposting in other channels.. thought i could drop a bone right quick

[warm torrent]

Yea definitely an appropriate case for LMGTF/RTFM

But also true that if you've already learned how to enable and find the SG slot in Output, you'll likely be looking for it in the wrong place after the change
Happened to me too

[wicked kraken]

ya supposedly you just need to activate experimental features to access it but it's still literally just not showing up for me

@warm torrent ^^^

[neat hollow]

Does anyone have any ideas of how one would implement something similar as to the bolts in Ratchet and clank? I'm trying to study videos from the game and I'm not entirely sure how it has been implemented. It seems to me like the bolts collide with the environment to some extent, but there are also thousands rendered so it is surely not rigidbodies - but they can all be picked up individually to increment the currency. My first thought was to use VFX graph, but then I don't see a way of colliding with the environment (depth buffer wouldn't work). I can make it work with raycast commands to at least get the target positions near it, but I don't think this would scale well. Maybe some sort of combination with VFX graph, raycast and commandbuffer?

Video for reference: https://youtu.be/cSPIj1VPFP8?t=64

[warm torrent]

Isn't that the correct option right there in your video

There's two methods
"Experimental Blocks" and "Output Mesh" in older versions
"Output Shader Graph" in newer versions
Even the AI summary correctly alludes to it
The linked page explains the correct way directly for a given version

[wicked kraken]

idk the settings on it are completely different from what's shown in the tutorials and guides

do you maybe know why the scale factors are being completely ignored here btw?

[warm torrent]

I don't know what result you expect but you are setting the scale once, then overriding it by setting it again

[merry fjord]

Any idea to make realistic rocket engine exhast for super heavy in 2d? Like i want to know where to start(also optimized)

https://youtube.com/shorts/PpsfE1V_rcw?si=1Pbr9iJ_cuPGoPyo

[obtuse yarrow]

so i thought random color from gradient (constant per particle) would make each particle a solid color from the gradient... but it did this, am i using the wrong node?

[last minnow]

It appears to choose a random selection from the gradient and still implements the gradient, you'd have to make them solid colour if you wanted and find a way to randomise the colour for the trails

[gleaming mauve]

How do I make the boat look more connected to the water? rn it feels like its floating above it

[robust owl]

Hi guys!, I'm wondering if there is a better way to do the weapon slash effects. Currently is instantiated through animation events but rotations and positions kinda wronge and looks like it's too much work to adjust it correctly for each slash vfx. Any idea how else I can do this?

[ripe mantle]

I want my particles to kind of explode outward and then return. What can I do?

[autumn quail]

I havent worked with particles before and dont know what im really doing, how can I stop new particles from being emitted without pausing mid-air or removing ones already active

[stiff dust]

If there's someone who understands unity Shader Graph can you see if I did alright or should I change something.

I'm basically trying to create a fog because in my unity URP ver.17.2.0 there's no fog screen in post-processing

[ashen robin]

the seafoam you got somewhat going would be a good idea

[ashen robin]

Seems like you have the idea, unless there's an actual gimbal lock problem with rotating

No one said asset management and hooking it all up was going to be easy

[robust owl]

I made it better but still wondering if thats the only way of implementing vfx to combat.

[ashen robin]

Unless you're generating the trail but seems like it's animated

https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/file/Elden-Ring/skill-blade-of-death-elden-ring-wiki-480px.gif
Like here elden ring creates the trail as it moves which pretty much follows the weapon so less timeline work needed

[warm torrent]

Didn't show what it looks like though?
Very few can render a lot of nodes in their mind

[gritty osprey]

doea anyone know if theres a way to render transparents on top of eachother without it unrendering the transparents behind it? I dont htink its possible but I though ti may as well ask here just in case

i need it for a distortion shader i made, since it hides the clouds behind it when the distortion effect plays

(the clouds are just planes with transparent cloud textures since i can't afford to march a ray that far into the scene without causing lag)

or if anyone knows of a work around, it would be very much appreciated thanks

[short narwhal]

is there any particle system weirdness i should be aware of

i copy-pasted a PS parent obj into a couple places but everything besides the original is bugged and spawns particles 20 meters off the ground

the particles spawn right above the end of that disc

thought its somehow spawning particles at origin but a) it isnt, b) only variation here is y, both x and z of the copy are respected

(origin)

[warm torrent]

Transparents don't "unrender" each other unless you try to make it happen
What you're dealing with with distortion is the color information behind the material not including other transparent materials
Ask in #1390346776804069396 with more details like which render pipeline you're using

[warm torrent]

Can't see in the picture but could be related to Scaling Mode, or more precisely inherited transform scales in the hierarchy

[short narwhal]

can try switching to global

hhh no global option

[ashen robin]

Can manage yourself a texture of the current rendering up until all transparents are rendered, but the problem would be that since transparents aren't writing to depth that you'd have trouble sticking a mask in the space to distort selective pixels.

So basically yes it's possible, but everything that doesn't write to depth would also be distorted that's in front of the mask.

[ashen robin]

I'm thinking that instead of doing it by a render texture you could maybe manage it by just distorting local to the object. This way as the objects are being rendered it can check against the mask (which itself should write to depth) for if it should become distorted.

[autumn quail]

Can I turn particle emissions on and off with animations?

Without freezing the particles mid-air or removing existing particles

[neat hollow]

Anyone know if theres a faster way to get the amount of alive particles?

var info = vfx.GetParticleSystemInfo(systemName);
int aliveNow = (int)info.aliveCount;

Also tried vfx.aliveParticleCount
but it seems like it doesn't update as soon as the particle dies, but more in "batches".
I basically wanted it to get some pseudo way of a callback of when a particle dies

[ashen robin]

readback isn't accurate. If you control the indexing on the CPU-side you'd have that information up front

but ideally you shouldn't be looking for these types of callbacks if you're spawning thousands of particles

instead just determine the time that a system expires

[stiff dust]

I will need to put grass or mountains in then to test out.
But does the math look good to you? Let me rephrase that.
How would you Shader Graph like this if you wanted to create a fog that also stays up.

[warm torrent]

"Stays up" meaning?

[stiff dust]

The fog isn't on only on the ground but it has a height chain like how a normal fog behaves.

[marble citrus]

this should set the particles to a solid color using a gradient curve, tho make sure to do this in the initialization context, you also might need to have enabled the experimental blocks for VFX

[obtuse yarrow]

thank you!

[north silo]

I am using Visual Effect Graph, how do I destroy the gameobject whenever the effect is "finished" like Particle System's behavior?

[solid adder]

I added a particle system with a particle system force field.
In the editor the particles are spinning around and looks really good. When running the game, they just move like a pixel or so a bit randomly. Any suggestions?

The particle system force field does have some impact, because when I turn it of the particle system behaves normally

[solid adder]

Seems like it's just the rotation thats bugged

[iron lotus]

#💻┃unity-talk message

[hearty flare]

Add color over lifetime and adjust the alpha/color as you'd like

[bitter blade]

For some reason my particles have different speeds. Some go slower and some faster. But with these settings that shouldn't happen right?

[neat hollow]

What emission shape are you using? Could it be that it's simulating the direction in 3d so it looks like they are going slower due to it being 2D?

[bitter blade]

Thank you!! That was it yeah, it was set to sphere instead of circle

[iron lotus]

Did that but it still just disappears suddenly like on the video

Idk if i have something else on or what

[swift briar]

Hey guys. Had a question. Is still Shader Graph (at least in 2022.3) not optimizing whenever you have duplicated input property nodes in the graph? Do we still have to create just one for every use ?

(so if I have two graphs that use the same input, can I create two instances of the same node, or should I have only one and have both graphs sharing the same input node?)

Because I'm aware that wasn't the case before and it wasn't optimized.

Because it creates only one Uniform, otherwise it creates several? isn't it clever enough to share the same one?

[neat hollow]

What do your settings look like

[iron lotus]

All of them?

[neat hollow]

Maybe just the relevant ones, like the renderer, and color,alpha over lifetime etc

[neat hollow]

What happens if you set the start color to completely transparent, does it affect it at all?

[iron lotus]

il check now

its not

[neat hollow]

What shader is the material using

[iron lotus]

custom one

[neat hollow]

I would probably check the shader then

Are u using shader graph

try multiplying the output by vertex color alpha, im not completely sure if thats what the shuriken system uses or not but worth a try

[iron lotus]

nope by code

im checking rn what the issue is

[neat hollow]

Yeah maybe try using a built in simple shader to see if that works and then compare the difference

but im pretty sure it uses vertex color so try that first

could be as simple as multiplying the vertex alpha with your output from the texture

and color too if you want it to affect the color

[iron lotus]

i found out

changed source blend to SrcAlpha

[marble citrus]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.visualeffectgraph@7.1/manual/Events.html

VFX graph has event blocks, which you can link with in c# to destroy the gameobject

[north silo]

I believe those events are just for VFX Graph, aren't they?

as in, you can send and receive callbacks ONLY in VFX Graph, it won't use SendMessage to MonoBehaviors

[marble citrus]

yeah, it seems you are able to get an event output from a spawn block, but that's not useful if the particle has randomised lifetime

@north silo https://discussions.unity.com/t/send-an-output-event-on-particle-death/912030/3 this is complex, but will probably help

[north silo]

Jeez, definitely not simple

I'm amazed such a feature isn't implemented considering most VFXs are single-shot

[neat hollow]

probably a limitation due to it being GPU and not CPU driven like the shuriken system

The way i currently handle it is having a VFX effect class on my vfx and some functionality for if it should destroy itself after time or be handled by pooling etc

Of course that requires you to sync the class noted duration with the duration of the VFX it is on, so a bit more manual work

[valid holly]

Made some simple stars using a particle system!

They're far up enough that the fog culls them-
Is there any way to have them be unaffected by the Fog under Lighting > Environment > Fog?
-# Still new to Unity, please be gentle

[neat hollow]

Yes I believe in the shader there's a fog flag somewhere

I did this with some asteroids and planets in the far distance by making a custom function inside the shader that just passthroughs a value (just so it gets evaluated), and then something hacky to remove the fog.

For now im doing it basically exactly the same as the comment (from wwWwwwW1) in this https://discussions.unity.com/t/how-to-disable-fog-in-lit-material-shadergraph-urp/935842/7 but you should also be able to remove the pragma fog flag

[sturdy jewel]

Hi, I am playing around with VFX Graph, and I wanted to create a lot of smoke in positions sent from code. I have managed to do that, but the particle system behaves strangely. I pass positions using a graphics buffer. I spawn particles at those positions and immediately kill them. On death, they spawn more particles (actual smoke). But they look off. I have a circle around the camera where they are not visible, and the lighting looks strange. There is only one directional light straight down. I also can't find how to disable shadows.

[neat hollow]

Does it have some sort of fade near camera node?

also you might wanna disable shadows haha it looks really odd

[sturdy jewel]

OK, this circle was related to soft particles. When I changed the Soft Particle Fade Distance to a small value, it disappeared.

[sturdy jewel]

I have disabled drop and receive shadow but I still have this strange effect.

[warm torrent]

If by strange you mean the brightness changes by look direction, that is light directional attenuation

Since they are billboards they are flat quads facing the camera
And because they face the camera they rotate with it, and can turn away from the light
Geometry facing away from a light will not be lit by it

In HDRP that could be handled by a diffusion profile, but in other render pipelines you'd have to change the light calculations to modify the directional attenuation directly

[sturdy jewel]

On this video light is straight down, but when I rotate the camera, particles lighting do not change. They are facing the camera position.

And in this video, I have put the directional light inside the camera, so it is always shining directly at particles, and in one direction, particles get more intense lighting.

[warm torrent]

Directional light is always facing in one uniform direction

Billboard particles are always rotating to face the camera

Therefore particle quads will change brightness as they rotate relative to the directional light

[lilac ginkgo]

hey, is it not possible to animate a material parameters on a URP Decal Projector's material in a timeline?

[ashen robin]

I don't see why you couldn't as you can modify them outside of the timeline

[charred cipher]

brand new to shaders and shader graph and im a little stuck here any helps appreciated

im trying to create a hit flash on top of my sprite. the sprite uses the vertex color to color it, and its base color is white

but overwriting with white here just sets it back to to its vertex color

is there any way to get the white to overlay the base and vertex color like how black does with this current example

[burnt coral]

iirc sprite graphs automatically apply the vertex colour. Should be an option in the Graph Settings to disable that, unless you're on older unity versions

[charred cipher]

ok lemme try that

so should I lerp between applying it and not then

[shut cliff]

I have a similar "issue" with some normal-mapped billboard effects in URP. Looks good from some angles, then not so great from other angles- any suggestions on how I'd keep the good look from that one angle in a shader? Hope that makes sense

[charred cipher]

just poking now, not seeing the option here. Am i looking in the wrong spot?

[burnt coral]

It's the "Disable Color Tint"

With that ticked it won't apply the vertex color automatically, you can use the Vertex Color node in graph to obtain it - probably Multiply it with the texture for the A port of your Lerp.

[charred cipher]

perfect thank you so much! figured it out

[mellow lagoon]

Greetings! I'm getting started on learning about VFX effects through the VFX Graph.
I have no previous knowledge or whatsoever more than how to set some things up here and there.

I was tasked to practice with a "simple" healing/buff effect through this system. But I'm going to be honest I have no clue how or where to start.

It could be possible that someone could guide me in order to achieve the creation of this effect or something close to it? I currently have the potential required textures and flipbook for the splash itself

[ashen robin]

If it's just flipbook stuff you can actually just use the timeline for everything if you wanted to do it that way

but, say if you have single frames of say those droplets or sparkles and wanted some variance to it then the VFX graph would be a good idea

[charred cipher]

another dumb question, attemting to apply this scrolling texture to a 2d sprite but if i apply to a white square sprite it doesnt show the scrolling texture. Not sure how to set this up proper

[warm torrent]

_MainTex comes from the sprite field of the sprite renderer
So in this case the white square sprite is what's being scrolled

[charred cipher]

Yeah that makes sense ty

So if I rename it will it use the texture in the editor

Completely new to shaders I probably sound like an idiot

[warm torrent]

That's correct
_MainTex is a special property because the sprite renderer overrides it, though there's no indication much anywhere that it works like that

[rocky pine]

Hello! Does anyone know why my unlit particles look darker than the color I'm assigning to them?

• Postprocess is disabled.
• I'm applying color in overwrite mode.
• Particles are unlit, so no lights affecting the outcome.
• I'm using the output particle unlit quad node in vfx graph.

All ideas welcome.

[ebon tide]

If anyone could help with this it would be a big help to me, I'm fairly new to shaders and shader graphs but I'm trying to recreate this shader from a character called ADAM. I've been stumped and confused on how the hell this could've been made or how they made it appear only in like certain spots for each vowel like in video.
https://youtu.be/D_1gY9sbJN0?si=bvR-5oglPFyvipZ4

[warm torrent]

I think it's likely entirely generated on the CPU into a texture, because the audio waveform data has to be read from the CPU and that's how they used to work traditionally
https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.2/Documentation/ScriptReference/AudioSource.GetSpectrumData.html
You can get the wave using this method for example, then render it in a prettier way

Probably a whole bunch of audio waveform visualization assets out there too

[prime dome]

I have been attempting to make a retro type look for a game I have been working on. I am new to making shaders, and it works well, asides from with the color blue. For some reason, blue appears to be completely black. No idea why, I have been attempting different things for a while, but no clue. If someone could help, I would really appreciate it.

When splitting the color blue, Everything appears grey. Not sure what causes this, but thats the effect.

[ashen robin]

If you're just pluggin in the blue into the color you're probably getting the greyscale relative to the value of blue. Perhaps what you want is to split the values into a new vector where you've only values of blue if that's what you're looking for, but I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to do. Consider clarifying a bit more and posting in #1390346776804069396

[brave idol]

Hey everyone. I've got an object with a trail, just for some testing. I'm wondering how I can make the trail "forward only".

When moving forward it works alright

And when moving to the side I'd like for it to just not do anything.

But when moving diagonal I want it to be shooting straight at like half the power (i guess using the time property)

Also when turning sharply for it to not curve

Is there any not too messy solution that works for this?

[ashen robin]

So is the idea to not have it curve at all? Could just make your own quad where depending on the input you scale it to the amount you want

scale such that the pivot is at the bottom of the quad

[brave idol]

A quad, like the 3d quad? No, right?

[ashen robin]

quads are only 2D ;)

[brave idol]

Yeah but they are on the 3d section of the GameObject menu, right?

That's what I mean.

[ashen robin]

I think spriterender calls them square rects or something right

either case, make an image with your triangle gradient and then just use the sprite tools to set the pivot at the bottom

[brave idol]

Alright

Thanks

[ashen robin]

something like that but you'd probably want to color it otherwise need to modify the spriterender shader to include gradient logic

Particle System may be doable with a greyscale though? Thinking it would only be through some parameter like over a duration

[warm torrent]

You probably want a line renderer instead that you set the points of manually

Rotating wholly with the attached object isn't very trail like behavior
Particle system trails can sorta do that with custom simulation space, but if you also want to control the trail length independently from the attached object's motion, then it can get hacky

[prime dome]

figured out the issue, it was just me being stupid and not thinking right 😭. I accidentally set the vector 4 being dithered the screen position (for some reason). I just set it as a render texture, and it works

[north silo]

can VFX graph make a trial effect like the trail component?

Right now the template of "trail" uses constant spawn rate and not over distance.
It seems like the "spawn over distance" node does spawn anything at all when I move the effect.

[spare plank]

Hey guys, I'm kinda new to shader graphs and I need some advice on how to move forward with this hatching shader.

I want my hatching texture to span the world-space/object surface of it's material rather than being applied as a filter based on my screen position (you can see in the video that I move my POV and the hatching remain constant in my screen instead of being based on the object it's on)

[spare plank]

(sent the wrong file)

Is something like triplanar mapping the way to move forward with this?

[warm torrent]

Yes, you could sample the overlay texture with triplanar projection
Easier done if the filter is in the objects' material rather than a full screen post process shader

[spare plank]

thank you very much, I'll try it out and see if I can do it 🫂

[pallid elbow]

im trying to follow this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv58IcIhfmA But i want to do it in Shader Graph. Any idea to how to aproach it?

[warm torrent]

What do you mean by do it "in" shader graph

[pallid elbow]

in the video explain how to do it in normal shader and i want to do it with shader graph. idk if im explaning

[warm torrent]

Texture Sheet Animation module works by UV mapping the generated particle meshes in a flipbook layout
So it works regardless of shader, as long as your shader is using the UV0 channel for whatever you want animated

Flipbook or "Grid"

Probably works in Sprite mode as well, as long as your shader is also using _MainTex texture reference as you would with any sprite renderer compatible shader

[pallid elbow]

im trying to do a shader that in each particle chose a diferent texture in the set of textures i did. is not really a sprite sheet is more like randomly chose a texture. in normal shader you can do it puting the texture sheet Animation in mode "sprites" but in shader graph... idk

[warm torrent]

If your frames are on a grid on your texture, use Grid mode in sprite sheet animation module

[pallid elbow]

there are on separete textures

[warm torrent]

You cannot use separate textures, even without any custom shaders
Unless you set unity to generate a sprite atlas out of them

Maybe easier to compile them into a grid and use Grid animation mode

[pallid elbow]

oke

[pallid elbow]

i will try it, thnx a lot

[finite flame]

it says the visual effects target is depreciated, what is the new way to work with this? (i am trynna follow an old tutorial)

[warm torrent]

iirc you just check "supports vfx graph" in shader graph graph settings

And then use the shader graph output in vfx graph

But check the docs for your version of unity

[dusty creek]

is there a premade ray marching/fragment/pixel shader that renders 3d metaballs i can get? i'm looking for one that i can just attach to the material i'm using for my particle effect and has color, metallic, and roughness (emissive and transparency would also be cool but i only require those 3) sliders and the ability to adjust their LOD and how close they need to get to connect to each other

[dire tundra]

Question because I'm not sure if this is a good idea
I'd like to make a rocket trail shader effect, something like the image shown above. I was talking to some people and one of them had the good idea of using a bezier curves SDF(which people have actually done it seems! They're quite laggy but that's a future me problem)
I could create fixed points on the rocket occasionally, and create a bezier curve that passes through all of these, then, with an SDF, create a volumetric effect that tapers off the closer you get to the rocket(you can get distance along the curve thanks to this SDF method)

Before I spend at least 10-20 hours of my life at this, does anyone know of a simpler way of doing this? I could use particles but I'm stubborn and I like shaders.

[dire tundra]

Also I didn't even mention the fact that most formulas to create bezier curves don't even pass through all control points. You have to use some very specific algorithms if you want a curve that smoothly passes through all points. So this seems very complicated for what might not be?

[dire tundra]

Figured it out. It's actually 1000 times easier to code, faster and, (most embarrassingly) more accurate to just make a ton of line segments and create an sdf off of that

[vernal osprey]

Hey, guys! I am trying to create fog on my game. I have searched that there are several ways to create a cool realistic fog for example with Volumetric Fog but really not sure how to implement it in URP. Does anybody know here about volumetric fog?

[thick depot]

Am I misunderstanding VFX graph?

I've got some SDFs baked, but they're not at the correct scale

This cylinder was baked at 32 Pixels-Per-Unit with these dimensions: (1.5, 2.5, 1.5)

When I use that very clean SDF it makes it 1,1,1 by default

The green box is 1,1,1

But some noise goes outside of it for no reason as fas as I can tell?

This is how I spawn it

here is the VFX so you can test

Anyways, so what I'd assume would be the correct approach is to assign a Field Transform using an Oriented Box

However, when I scale it, the whole thing gets super out of whack and noisy

It's most visible with the cube

It's a perfectly normal cube when at size 1,1,1

But as soon as I change the Y size, it no longer resembles a cube https://gyazo.com/39d9132007458e46170bd16e6c81abb8

It gets all these completely random noise on the sides, why?

And this happens with all my shapes, some worse than others.

[thick depot]

If we scale the perfectly normal cylinder from this image, we get whatever this is:

[neat hollow]

Does it work as expected with uniform scaling? I'm not sure if SDF likes being non-uniformly scaled

[slim cape]

Trying to do a shadergraph where I only apply some effect to the top section of the triplanar material, I initially tried using a gradient reference to have some effect, which kinda looks like something in the preview but in scene its looking completely unnaffected by the opacity. I also think I will need to check the Y somewhere later todo the actual effect I want but I am not too good at shadergraph atm. anyone know what is going wrong?

[clear lantern]

Does anyone have starting pointers for how I'd be able to make a flame effect that moves according to player and camera movement with the shader graph/code?

[willow sand]

Can I achieve this effect with sprites where I can clone the sprite, set the color to pink and offset it by a little to the left with a shader?
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/870633414884225074/1427299640553898084/IMG_8462.png?ex=68ee5be0&is=68ed0a60&hm=33b846bb7e909811994e1126f0f71a3d013ff595109ff3b125396794b7fd4440&

[warm torrent]

That's part of the effect, but there are pink lines drawn on the character itself too

[willow sand]

That's what I want to automate with code, imagine I only have the sprite without that pink part

[strange dragon]

i made a custom toon shader to use on terrain but im getting these annoying artifacts around where the light is tangential to the geometry. is there any way to prevent this from happening

[warm torrent]

They are casted shadows
Normally the lit shading's light ramp conceals the edge from shader shadow to casted shadow, but with toon shaders you usually end up making a more generous light ramp so nothing can hide the border

[strange dragon]

yeah thats what i was assuming should i switch to smoothstep

[warm torrent]

Not really a way around it that I know of, your toon directional attenuation must place its shadow edge to the tangential halfway point, or closer

Or you must give up casted shadows
The softness isn't related to it, but softer edge is more likely to reveal the shadowy side

[strange dragon]

hmm alright thanks

[warm torrent]

Also #1390346776804069396 is for shaders and lighting

[strange dragon]

oh mb

[graceful saddle]

I am at the start of making an effect, but to start I wanted to spawn in a summoning circle.

The problem im running into is that somehow each size of the circle differs from the next or previous

and I dont understand it at all

do they not all have a lifetime of 5, and are controlled by that lifetime with age>time (0,1)?

[neat hollow]

Based on the vfx graph, all I can see is that you're adding to its size based on the age and your curve.
What exactly do you mean that it differs from previous or next?

[thick depot]

Does anyone know how I can sample a random point on the surface of an SDF without using Set Position Shape SDF?
I want the particle to be created somewhere else then form a beam toward that point on the SDF

[graceful saddle]

So every time I summoned this circle the size would end op different

I couldnt wrap my head around why it would do this, but I ended up swapping add size to just a set size

[neat hollow]

Yeah add size will add on to its size every frame whereas set frame will set it directly what you have specified in the graph

[thick depot]

Weird question, is there a way to make VFX graph play in reverse? Probably not, right?

[molten flower]

I don't know the best place to ask this but, what is the best directional light rotation?

[dusty creek]

hi, i'm making assets for a platform that doesn't support transparency in textures (VRchat Quest) so i have to use these flat plane meshes instead of the quads with transparency like i normally do, so how do i replace the particles in my particle system with these and keep the billboard rendering? also it seems like one is facing the wrong way, how do i fix that?

[warm torrent]

Doesn't support alpha clipping either?

Anyway, mesh particles can use "view" render alignment to be billboard towards the camera plane
But you'll want to export the mesh to face the correct direction

Or you have to consider the offset in the particle system and apply a 3D rotation

[uncut bear]

Shader noob question:

I have a greyscale color shader that takes in a greyscale texture, color mask and N colors to apply.

This works great until I hit the 16 input limit on shaders

Is there a better approach? Let’s say I want 30 modifiable colors on a given sprite. How do I work past the 16 limit per shader?

[signal quail]

Hey fellas, I got zero experience with this, how do I add basic shadow casting on dynamic objects and static shadows on static objects?

[raven olive]

im kinda new to unity and never worked with the particle system, can someone explain to me?

[ionic shuttle]

you can just add one to your scene, press play somewhere the bottom right corner of the scene view iirc and it should be pretty self explanatory from there, you can hover on most settings to see what they do

it's overwhelming yes, but also very powerful

[zinc nacelle]

Sol solecito

[graceful sierra]

So i have a particle system that uses a skinned mesh renderer to apply the particle system to the player like an aura but when the player is being animated the particles dont move?

not sure if i need to enable something or not

settings

[shut cliff]

Not sure how it's meant to behave exactly.. But the particles have a lifetime of 500 seconds, meaning they'll hang around there for almost 10 minutes until they die before the next ones can spawn. Try setting the lifetime to something shorter like 0,5 seconds

[graceful sierra]

thats how i had it before but i dont want it flickering

i want it to stick to the player without despawning

like this

[bold kelp]

Hey!
I’m using ribbons in VFX Graph, but when the emitter moves quickly, the trail stretches and becomes way too long.

I can’t shorten the particle lifetime (it affects the core effect), but I’d like the trail to stay visually short and stable regardless of speed.

Any ideas on how to limit trail length at high speeds?

[warm torrent]

The Particle System can't do this, but VFX graph can
However, it's also possible without either
The dots that make up the character might not be particles at all, particularly because they don't change over time at all
So they could be tiny low poly spheres, or more optimizedly they could be quads with a billboard shader that makes them look exactly like particles

[graceful sierra]

ohhh

well the video i sent is made in UE4

so it may be different

how could i make a shader of it then?

[warm torrent]

UE's default particle system might work more aking to VFX graph in this sense

[graceful sierra]

okay

but im more used to unity so ill probably figure out how to make a shader for it

or the low poly thing you said

[warm torrent]

VFX graph is a tool in Unity

[graceful sierra]

vfx ?

i thought it was called shader graph

[warm torrent]

They are different tools

[graceful sierra]

or is it a different tol?

ohhh

oh wow

i just searched it up and ive never seen it before

looks really cool

ill be using it in my projects now

[warm torrent]

It simulates particles on the GPU so it's about a thousand times more efficient
But as a drawback the simulation is isolated to the GPU in most cases, and not all devices support it

[warm torrent]

The shader method would use "billboarding" to rotate a quad towards the camera regardless of point of view
But do the rotation independently for every quad in the mesh, so the center of each quad will have to be baked into the geometry or inferred with some clever maths optionally
I can't find many tutorials about that method but it's most commonly used for rendering trees to rotate each branch or leaf without needing many meshes
In your case you'd also need to project the bone weight from the center of each quad to its vertices so they follow the weighting uniformly (though the bone's rotation may be an issue anyway)
That could be then extended using the same logic to animate the scale or color of the billboards relative to each other, as a bonus
But at the end of the day it'll be much easier to do with VFX graph if that's an option in your project

[graceful sierra]

yeah VFX then

[ruby agate]

Hi everyone, brand new to diving into vfx and learning how to use the vfx graph package, would anyone be able to tell me how I can make my vfx follow the parent object's transform?

I'm able to move it using properties in the editor, but I can't quite get it to move just by playing around with it in the editor

[ashen robin]

Two easy ways about it is one: child the system to the object it needs to follow and set the system's internal space to Local (up in the top right corner of context), or two: send in the transform data by declaring one as a property in the graph and exposing it in the editor

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.visualeffectgraph@7.1/manual/PropertyBinders.html
These also help bridge that scene data to the graph

[graceful sierra]

Is VFX Graph supported on URP ?

Everywhere I've seen says it's only on HDRP

[ruby agate]

Top right of this for the internal space yeah?

er, I'd set all of those to local?

if so, I did try that, and no luck I fear

[warm torrent]

Where exactly are you looking
It's been supported on URP for years
Since Unity 2019.3. to be precise

[graceful sierra]

Oh

[ashen robin]

Well, depending how the particles are behaving they don't necessarily need to follow the transform, but I assume if you did move this parent that the particles would also move with respect

would need to see the whole system otherwise as you may be creating a subsystem that does not inherit those values

[stable monolith]

Hey so I'm working on this trail effect for my game, it works just fine by itself, but theres an issue I need some help with

A VFX Graph uses an empty at 0, 0, 0 and targets an emitter object using a property binder script (i.e. Property: Target and Target: Target (Transform) as seen in the attached image)

When I add more than one target (For wrists, ankles, body and anything else I'd want to have a trail), the particle system prioritizes the last in the list instead of them all

I can provide more images if necessary

[ashen robin]

Easiest way to go about this is just make multiple instances of the visual effect component, especially if you're using trails.

[stable monolith]

Yeah I had a feeling it was gonna be like that

[ashen robin]

Like you can send in multiple transform values but then you need to index it per trail which is a pain since I don't believe you can send in an array of transforms

[stable monolith]

Yeah that would’ve been nice

[ashen robin]

which leave you to doing it via scripting

[stable monolith]

5 transform slots from a script and I could just drag and drop an empty for the head location, wrist location, etc

[ashen robin]

Yeah that's probably fine too especially if it's only for this usecase

[stable monolith]

I’ll look further into it 👍

[rigid linden]

Hello there ! I was wondering if there was a technique to create a sort of trail using a mesh !
Kinda the same result as a rigged mesh in the end but using vfx graph. Thanks in advance !

[warm torrent]

What "sort of" precisely?

[hidden wharf]

yeah kronnect has one called Trails FX on the assetstore, so it's possible

[warm torrent]

It has more than one type of mesh trail, but I guess you mean this
https://youtu.be/7vvycc2iX6E

[hidden wharf]

yeah that sort of thing

[rigid linden]

I was thinking about this tweet and was wondering if there was any other way to achieve this but not using a rig ! https://x.com/MunozArthur1/status/1402584140646694918?t=nI2gh23pVTXJPdeXIKAPQQ&s=19

Arthur Munoz (@MunozArthur1)

Always try to find the best way to animate your creature/character.
Here is a dragon rig with a main controller for the dragon flow.
Done in #3dsmax.
Cancelled project by Leikir Studio.
#animation #gamedev #3Danimation

X · Jun 9, 2021, 11:11 AM

[warm torrent]

Kind of, but why without a rig?

[ruby agate]

Is there any way to store the position of a particle as it dies?

I'm trying to make a forked lightning effect by spawning a a cone position shape where the previous particle dies, but I can't seem to get the new cone to spawn where I want it to

Is there another block I can add before/after to make that function how I want it to?

[ruby agate]

I was hoping there might be a way to store it like I mentioned here, and then call that value by attaching it to the cone node in the "arc cone" drop down? But I'm not sure if that's a possibility

Nevermind, I figured it out, all I had to do was swap the cone block with the inherit position block above it

[urban nymph]

Hello, I coded the particle system for the game called Metin2 for Unity exactly as it is and turned it into a tool, but I'm having serious problems with optimization. I also created it with the Unity particle system. (Left: My particle system / Right: Unity particle system)

Does anyone have any ideas?

[hidden wharf]

are you wondering where the differences are coming from? you made the left one yourself yeah, and the right is recreated with the built-in particle system?

[urban nymph]

Yes, exactly like that.I wrote the particle system for the game Metin2 1:1, but the optimization is terrible 🙁 Every time I create an effect, I lose 100 FPS 😄

[hidden wharf]

unity's particle system has gotten pretty optimized over the years, lot of job integration and pooling / instancing going on

[cloud field]

I need help.. I'm absolutely clueless on where to start and how to start with creating an exp particle a player receives after defeating an enemy or interacting an exp dropped by the enemy. There is not a single tutorial out there for particles like those...

[warm torrent]

There's nothing unique about an "exp particle" and each game that has one does it their own way so we don't know what you have in mind
Which is probably why there are no tutorials for it either
But because it's such an open ended goal any particle effect experience will bring you closer to that goal

[hidden wharf]

yeah do you have an example of what this should look like?

even a little napkin doodle etc

[full sparrow]

It can be whatever you want. It doesn't have to be a particle at all. make it a different colored damage number if you have that already that set up.

[hidden wharf]

I think you replied to the wrong person btw

[full sparrow]

Oops

[chrome skiff]

I have a question of which I have no idea how complex it is. So basically I am trying to extrapolate Unity URP shader grass (the one that has wind in it, made from an actual mesh) into a VFX graph that interacts with the scene. So far I have managed to make the desired effect with a sphere collider but I am very new to the VFX graph and entirely new to scripting of this kind.

My issue I currently have is, of course, that this sphere is a child of the system and has to be an entry to the system. Is there a way to make the system take any and all sphere colliders with a specific gameobject name or something? I'll upload the VFX graph too. Obviously to take "infinite" numbers of specific sphere colliders the VFX graph won't simply just use the one sphere entry, but i really have no clue where to go from here. I've looked all over the place and the one video I found was for using physical grass blades with colliders, of which the shader graph grass does not do. The grass I use will exist in the order of tens of thousands of blades.

This is how it looks (with the sphere pushing the grass as an example)

[ashen robin]

If you're using sphere colliders all you really need to send in is a world position then you can use that to compare and calculate from a radius. So this leaves you with having to send all those positions to the graph, well the easiest way would be some sort of array which you can do with by sending in a texture of those positions, or using graphic buffers to send in that data via scripting

Well, technically if the colliders are different sizes you'd want to send in a size of the radius with the respective position

[chrome skiff]

The idea is kind of to have actors with sphere colliders for grass displacement and vehicles for box colliders

[ashen robin]

https://qriva.github.io/posts/how-to-vfx-graph/
Some info on how to use graphic buffers

[chrome skiff]

I’ll take a look sometime soon

[ashen robin]

I'd make buffers from position then radius size

[chrome skiff]

Sample size from actor prefab right?

I’d prefer to have a set sphere size per actor at scale 1

Actually screw it, I’ll just keep it a constant radius regardless of actor size

Easier that way

[ashen robin]

Well, if all sphere colliders are going to be the same then you can just consider that as const

I'd just include the size for the heck of it

[chrome skiff]

So then how exactly do I do the calculations “per object position”?

The VFX I have does it using grass position relative to a single sphere position + radius

[chrome skiff]

Sorry to bother you again, but theoretically would it be better to simply assign actors and player to their own layers and then get the position of any gameobject in those layers and assign those positions to the VFX graph?

This way I can play test it without having scripts designed for real AI actors

[ashen robin]

You can always create properties in the graph and expose them to modify them from your scene, but the limitation here is you need to explicitly set a limit on the graph as you cannot send in an array of data

So your options for that is via shader, via texture, or those graphic buffers

[chrome skiff]

I’m not sure I follow. I’m extremely new to unity development, I’ve worked with unity for years but only on shallow level stuff so mainly particle systems and models/animations

[ashen robin]

you can expose properties in the GUI and say send in a single vector3, or multiple vector3s, but each one of those are a unique property instead of declaring an array of vector3s

so if you run into a situation where you need to send in a handful of positions that's more than you've declared, then you're out of luck

technically the buffers are similar in that you do manage how many you want, but you can always extend that array and it's just generally easier if you have hundreds of entries

I do feel like there should have been some support for declaring some sort of an array even if you wouldn't modify it further with the GUI

[chrome skiff]

I’m on the scale of hundreds anyway

Even thousands but it depends how well I can optimise the game

[ashen robin]

right then go with the buffers and just declare more than you can use would be the idea

[chrome skiff]

Right so 10k lol

[ashen robin]

you can always resize it, but generally a good idea to just declare a large amount

it's an array so you're always having to remake it if it grows

[chrome skiff]

Yeah it’s mainly gonna be something visually amazing in a highly dynamic gunfight sim

Draw distance for 3D grass in this case is about 100-150 metres

Ofc I could increase draw distance at lower density

Btw do you know how exactly to “mask” my grass being applied on the terrain? Or if I can paint my terrain first with grass and then pull some mask out of it?

[ashen robin]

I've not tried my hands at making grass with the tool. I find the instancing unity provide does a good job already

and what I'd do is send some render texture of the positions to modify the movement of the grass from a secondary camera. But what you're doing sounds like a neat idea too

[chrome skiff]

I just have no idea how to do the “masking” so the grass doesn’t cover every square metre of terrain

[warm torrent]

10k colliders?

[chrome skiff]

Actor count is configurable and maybe be changed at runtime but generally I'm aiming for anywhere from no bots to 1000 bots. The aim is 1000 bots but I have to have realistic expectations

[warm torrent]

The way it works is that every collider in the graph will be tested against every particle every frame
So it can get very expensive very quickly
Especially if your particles have just one blade of grass each rather than many in a bunch

[chrome skiff]

The unity grass blade is 12 verts and it's "technically" billboarded but not quite. It has global directionality but the faces ALWAYS face you. So it has no backface rendering

Draw distance for them is about 100-150 metres

[chrome skiff]

Technically I don't even need a collider to exist for this, all i need is the actor position and an internal parameter for "radius". Position and radius is sufficient for my code setup, no need for collider

[warm torrent]

That's not what I mean exactly
More blades of grass per particle means you need less particles
So less particles to test against your "colliders"
CPU side colliders can use bounds checks to never test colliders against each other if they're not near each other but no such feature here

[chrome skiff]

The sphere collider just makes visualising easier

[warm torrent]

Every collider or effector or whichever you have in your array will increase the cost of every particle

Because they all are affected by it, and do a distance check to determine how much

Maybe you can have 10k of those colliders in the array, though I'd expect a practical number of them to be closer to 10
But that's all down to testing what the actual impact is

[chrome skiff]

Would it matter if I toggled the effect off if the grass is more than X metres away?

[warm torrent]

Just saying that you usually end up needing to optimize features like these

[chrome skiff]

Draw distance 150 metres, but what if I set an effect distance to 50 metres

Would that matter or would the calculations still be done?

[warm torrent]

As far as I understand boolean ports can skip nodes entirely, and the calculations too

So that would help optimize it when there are fewer

[chrome skiff]

Don't kill me but I was told that booleans/branches don't actually skip the calculation, but using a lerp with an integer (0 or 1) interpolating float does skip one or the other calculation

Alas that was for shader graph so I'm unsure if that applies to all things in unity

[warm torrent]

https://discussions.unity.com/t/keywords-to-enable-disable-features-of-vfx-graph/892745/3
Correction, the boolean node supposedly skips blocks, not nodes

[ashen robin]

Yeah, it could be quite expensive with all those actors, I was thinking maybe creating a texture from those positions to give to the vfx graph to map against

so each blade of grass samples the texture of its position and if value > 0 then shift according to neighbor texture data

[chrome skiff]

My VFX graph doesn't just have "push" or "no push", the bend offset strength depends on the closeness to the sphere centre. They start bending at the radius and bend harder the closer to the centre they get, if that makes sense

[warm torrent]

Shaders are different, with them you'd need to use keywords for disabling features which are always per-material (or per shader variant specifically)
I have never heard of a lerp being able to disable anything, and booleans/branches are compiled into lerps anyway executing both sides regardless of input
Unless the boolean is a keyword, that is

Anyway, can't say in advance if it's needed here but typically you'd prioritize setting the effectors in the array by distance to camera
So even if you don't have one for every character, you have those colliders where they matter

Maybe a separate array for vehicles which you can expect to be larger so seen further away, box shaped and requiring rotation as well, so the sphere effectors don't have to carry that data

Using "colliders" and "effectors" interchangeably

Like Mao says a texture can be a good idea too, that way the cost of the displacement is the same regardless of how many characters you need treading in the grass

Though you have to render them again by an RT camera or by a renderer feature
But once that's done you can process the texture to turn it into an SDF to be able to change the smoothness and size of the colliders, and to calculate slope of the SDF so the displacement can be directional

Since it's a persistently existing texture, that enables the possibility persistent grass trampling as well

But it gets tricky to have many textures like that, so you'll probably want to center it on the camera/player character and fade the edges

[chrome skiff]

I still have yet to think of a good system for vehicles. Since players/actors are approximately "circular", then using a simple position and radius is sufficient. Vehicles aren't circular, most are rectangular, so idk if I should just use the same method or a different method for them.

As I said the current method makes the grass "start" bending at the radius and fully bend near the centre

[chrome skiff]

I actually honestly have very little conceptual idea of what this means 😭

[warm torrent]

If you can get away with just a different size sphere, less work for you, but boxes can described as distance functions just like spheres
https://iquilezles.org/articles/distfunctions/

[chrome skiff]

Is that distance function like the shortest distance to the box surface?

[warm torrent]

Yes, or you sample a point and get a value about how close the shape is

[chrome skiff]

This is pretty useful tbh. If I use the general formula then I can detect to use negative distances for computing "bend strength"

[warm torrent]

Yes, can use those the distance value whichever way, as whether it's negative or not just describes how close you are from the shape's arbitrary surface

Which is why you can control the "softness" of an SDF so it can have an effect at your sampled point regardless if it's further away from the surface or inside it

[chrome skiff]

I'm just having a tough time interpreting what the hell "maxcomp" is

Oh, so does that mean (in node scripting) that I split the vector, calculate max, and then combine it together again?

[burnt coral]

Should be a float so need for a combine node, just maximum nodes.
For a 3d coord, Split, Max(R,G)->Max(in,B)

[chrome skiff]

Oooh I think I get it. My only problem is what this means in world space. I feel like q is more of a local space vector relative to the box lying on symmetry axes. Ofc q in my context is "grass position" and R is the box X, Y, and Z dimensions measured from its centre.

[burnt coral]

You mean p, yea should be in a local space. If you don't need rotation, can probably just pass the box's world pos in as a property, and subtract from the grass positions. p = grassPos - boxPos. Otherwise pass a matrix

[chrome skiff]

Rotation would very much be needed unfortunately. Luckily the amount of vehicle instances in the game would be HEAVILY reduced from the amount of actors. So processing the vehicle information would probably be significantly cheaper

Rotation is needed because vehicles have direction and climb over terrains. Actors only use a sphere (or at least a theoretical sphere, that is, a position + an internal radius float) so only position is needed.

[rigid linden]

Ups, sorry for the late reply ! It was just a thing I was wondering, if there was another way to achieve this effect using VFX Graph/Shaders :d

[warm torrent]

Mapping the mesh to a curve comes to mind
Like is done here:
https://thegodotbarn.com/contributions/shader/231/cubic-bezier-curve-mesh-deformation

The technique has a pretty significant drawback in that it distorts the mesh a lot
Any inward curving shrinks and outward curving stretches the proportions
So for a dragon with limbs hanging about like in your example it'd look weird

[coral dagger]

Does anyone know if animated 6 way lighting is possible using just shader graph and a billboard? I can see that shader graph supports 6 way lighting but unsure if its only for sure with VFX graph or not

[cloud field]

uhm.. why does it glow in the editor but not in the game?

[warm torrent]

It would do that if post processing is disabled on the camera

[fierce thicket]

cool

[summer mountain]

Wow, cool

[warm torrent]

#🏆┃daily-win and #1180170818983051344 are for showcasing

[whole sonnet]

hello , does anyone know how i can create this effect with shader graph , i want light around player ansdeveral other object , i cant use 2d lights cuase they are to much for my game

[ionic shuttle]

in a fullscreen shader, you can just check the distance to the player (or any of the other objects you want to be circled) and if it's greater than some radius, set the pixel's colour to black

[warm torrent]

You don't need shader graph to do it, but it's an option

Sprite masking if using sprites, image masking if using UI images

[ionic shuttle]

masking could also work now that I think about it yeah

[warm torrent]

In shader graph the calculation would be a distance comparison as mentioned, or a blend operation with a texture in case you need a particular non-circular shape
The shader could be applied to an UI image, to a big rectangle sprite, to a fullscreen renderer feature, or every sprite can use the shader so no extra layers are needed (but a bit more tedious to manage)

[ionic shuttle]

though if you're using shaders and want a dynamic amount of objects to be circled, afaik, there's no way to do that without writing shaderlab code

[warm torrent]

True that

[urban charm]

i have a collision effect which works when the spaceship collides with an asteroid. problem is, that the said collosion effect is not the one which i currently have it equipped with.
https://paste.mod.gg/apgmfmqshrjl/0

need help?

[hot blaze]

Hi, the background glow is a shader right? someone know where i get it? is for an animation.

[ashen robin]

Make a sphere in blender, flip the normals, grab some noise, scroll that noise over the sphere UVs with a gradient

actually can just use unity sphere with world uvs which would probably be better since uving a sphere is not fun

Well, you only care about a half-sphere really so not even an issue then

[whole sonnet]

thanl you

[warm torrent]

This doesn't show us what the "original" effect should look like or what the actual result is
You should record a video showing the correct effect in editor and the incorrect result when it occurs

[urban charm]

got it working, thx for the reply though!

[graceful sierra]

i cant seem to get the skinned mesh renderer to work!!!

[dusty creek]

does Poiyomi Toon Shaders work with the latest LTS version of unity?

[urban charm]

So...i know there is a particle system in unity and i know that you can also use the UI toolkit to make a particle system. how are they different?
and what are there use cases...as in why would you wanna use something over the other?

i don't rly know whether it's a qs for #📲┃ui-ux or #🧰┃ui-toolkit that's why i posted here and on #💻┃unity-talk

[ionic shuttle]

well the normal particle system is in world space, and anything related to ui toolkit is in the ui document
-# also since when does ui toolkit have a particle system.. did i miss something?

[urban charm]

lemme

i created a hyperlink damn

[ionic shuttle]

that's ugui, not ui toolkit

[urban charm]

so....particle system, UI toolkit and ugui are diff?

ahhh my brain hurts.

[ionic shuttle]

particle system is just that, a system for making particles - it's not related to ui
ui toolkit is a newer system for making user interfaces using the ui builder and style sheets
ugui is the older gameobject based system for making user interfaces

[urban charm]

so...particle system is used for making particles solely, ui toolkit is used to make ui and uigui is just the ui toolkit from the past?

[ionic shuttle]

ui toolkit and ugui are completely different

ui toolkit is the newer solution but it's not quite up to speed yet and a lot of people prefer using ugui

and ugui, instead of using a separate system like ui toolkit's visual elements, uses normal game objects

[urban charm]

so wait a sec...why would you wanna use diff if you can already make stuff using unity's particle system?

[ionic shuttle]

ui and the particle system are completely different things

the particle system is for making particles, little visual effects, i.e. dust clouds, explosions, whatever

[urban charm]

wait i did not phrase that well

[ionic shuttle]

and ui is user interface, which is stuff like menus and heads-up displays

[urban charm]

then what would the star background i want to make be considered as?

[ionic shuttle]

it would be a particle system, each star being a particle

however making it cover the whole background might be a bit of a pain in the ass

[urban charm]

and what if i wanted to make a particle system which interacts with UI? like if i press a button, a particle effect is displayed

could i do this using the ui toolkit?

[ionic shuttle]

you can display the particle effect normally through code when the button is pressed

[ionic shuttle]

probably technically, but it might be a bit annoying because the particle system "lives" in a different positioning system - it's in world space, while the ui is in screen space

[urban charm]

not really....cus it only considers whether the thing goes above a certain x and a certain y

[ionic shuttle]

well if you want to display it at a specific position i mean

if you just want to display it, you can do it like normal

basically, if you just want a background with particles, you just make a particle system and put it in the background haha

[urban charm]

you know what...i am gonna make a couple dozen agme objects called stars and just yap this boundary thing code onto them

[ionic shuttle]

that's if you want the stars to be separate game objects

[urban charm]

if they aren't game objects...i can't bound them right

so they will eventually move out of the background

[ionic shuttle]

with particles you'd usually just respawn them after a certain amount of time passes

[urban charm]

wait i can do that?

[ionic shuttle]

that's how most particles work

[urban charm]

lemme see how that works then

[ionic shuttle]

each particle usually has a lifetime, after which it despawns

and (for something like this) you'd usually spawn particles at a constant rate (say, 1 every second)

(you don't need to code any of this by the way, it's all handled by the particle system)

[urban charm]

why is this blue?

i set it to white

[ionic shuttle]

give them a material

-# also that's pink not blue haha

[urban charm]

another question, do i need to make a circle for textures or is there a pre built one...?

[ionic shuttle]

you can right click in the file system and create a circle sprite

[ionic shuttle]

you need to make a material (right click -> create -> material) and set its texture to be the circle iirc

[urban charm]

oh

[urban charm]

my stars are beautiful

[urban charm]

i want my strs to grow big then small so as to make them twinkle. i see that i can only really set one graph for it...

nvm

[ionic shuttle]

you can also randomize it between two curves if you want to!

[urban charm]

like two diff curves?

i don't know how to do that...i only see one curve....

[ionic shuttle]

yeah! if you press the little arrow to the right of it and select random between two curves

[vagrant juniper]

hey hey all 🙂

I try to make currently only the foam and depth of my orthographic water shader but it is not quiete right.

[ashen robin]

Don't really understand the transform node here. Reference to what you're following

[chrome skiff]

@ashen robin sorry if I pinged the wrong person, I believe we spoke earlier about graphics buffer for putting world positions of objects in specific layer(s) into a VFX graph. I sent an example code I found from the link you sent to ChatGPT and described what I wanted from it, do you think this would work?

I haven’t had time to work on the VFX graph since last we spoke.

To recap I’m using world position of actors in 2 layers (AI actor and player layer) and a private float for radius (to simulate a sphere) to push grass away from actors and the player

Also considering there could potentially be a thousand actors moving through grass, would it be better to grab positions every few frames and lerp the actor world position (don’t need pinpoint precision for grass displacing)? Or would that cost more than just getting all actor coords every frame?

[ashen robin]

Really I wouldn't do this for more than a handful of actors. You're having to do a distance check against each actor for each particle would not be scalable at all.

[chrome skiff]

Then how would you manually handle this so that only the nearer X actors have their positions pushed into the VFX?

[ashen robin]

You need to populate some medium that all particles can just reference instead of per actor

[chrome skiff]

Could you explain this in more detail. I am new to unity 6 and that basically means all of visual/shader graphs and I’ve got very little coding knowledge too.

[ashen robin]

For every actor you're comparing against each blade of grass which would probably be O(n^2)? So yeah that's going to tank your frames pretty quickly

[chrome skiff]

I understand optimisation techniques as a whole because I’ve done a lot of research into it, as well as just applying logical reasoning, so I do understand there is gonna be a somewhat big cost

[chrome skiff]

Presumably so. I still want to try see if I can have some interactivity.

[ashen robin]

You need to calculate all positions beforehand and map it to some singular sheet of data, this way each blade of grass needs to only reference this sheet

[chrome skiff]

The actors will have structs associated with them that store position and velocity. Wouldn’t I just draw from that information?

Also does VFX graph use GPU instancing by default?

Every blade of grass is the same mesh with a shader that manipulates vertex position

[ashen robin]

The logic you should be checking for is instead of comparing against distances, you instead check if the location the grass is occupying has any sort of disturbance in the general area usually through some type of vector field / SDF

for one you can skip any sqrt operations completely if the location it's at has no other occupants

[chrome skiff]

Yeah that would be ideal. From what I’ve seen in videos online (but never showed how) is to use a mask to apply the grass onto a virtual terrain (grab terrain and slap grass on a virtual surface) which is how I intend to eventually do it. Or even do grass by surface gradient. How I can define if an actor is in that mask, I do not know yet

But how would you know if an actor is in it without complex logic? Obviously you need some vertical dimension as well as horizontal, right. But wouldn’t checking if an actor is inside it still be about as expensive as just pushing the positions into the graphics buffer? Or am I missing something

[ashen robin]

One solution would be using some secondary (orthgraphic) camera that can feed you information of the players general area

using that you can use it to only render those actors you care about and send this texture to your particle system then by calculating relative coordinates you can map exactly where each grass should move

you could also use a secondary particle system and child them to your actors and render that instead to create a larger disturbance field, while also saving you from rendering these actors twice

[chrome skiff]

Ok so let’s say we can create a mask texture for if grass appears on the terrain (either full white or full black, no in-between colours). And the camera uses that to determine if an actor should be pushed into the buffer. Wouldn’t that still need some kind of distance calculation?

[ashen robin]

don't need to buffers, all you need is a texture

and the pivot location of the camera

[chrome skiff]

Wait hold up how does this work. They create grass + a disturbance around them?

[chrome skiff]

Player or ortho camera?

Ortho I’m presuming

[ashen robin]

ortho is easy to calculate

[chrome skiff]

When you say “texture” you mean a render texture right

The extent of my knowledge of camera textures is dual rendering 😭

[ashen robin]

yeah any type of texture you can blit to

[chrome skiff]

So the ortho camera would be set to only see the actor/player layers, right?

[chrome skiff]

What are the cons of this method?

[ashen robin]

Mostly draw distance related? Can always reduce the texture size

also a single camera would only give you a 2D-top down rendering that can fail if it's occluded

eh, maybe not that big of a deal if you just dont render any other geometry really

[chrome skiff]

But that can be solved by setting it to only render the player and actor layer, right?

[ashen robin]

right, so I guess another problem could be more depth related, but I guess you can also generate depth on that secondary camera as well

so yeah, not a big problem besides render distances and having to use a larger texture if you want precision

[chrome skiff]

Yeah you can just find the vertical axis by knowing if the actor is about 1 metre vertically from the terrain surface right

Given it’s in the grass mask.

[ashen robin]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/288887968960086016/1339380847249199286/Unity_b4mwLnDafr.mp4
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/288887968960086016/1339358915954999336/Unity_742E997g2a1.mp4
Some older project

[chrome skiff]

I’ve got my current render distance for the grass (handled in shader graph) at 100 metres

[chrome skiff]

What are the giant red spots?

[ashen robin]

uh assuming I was testing out larger areas of disturbance

[chrome skiff]

So those are static “disturbers” and you used a line/trail renderer for some kind of dynamic displacement

[ashen robin]

anywhere it's red the grass will react to

and yeah im using a trail renderer here

[chrome skiff]

Wait I think I might somewhat understand. I set the camera to render actor layer so it sees actors as white spots. Then it multiplies this texture by the mask. The displacement is then done by what result is white.

Or is that computationally insane?

[ashen robin]

camera culls everything but the particle system and uninitialized space becomes transparency (er rather value of R becomes 0 here I think instead?)

[chrome skiff]

But is my idea of multiplying the two textures the right idea or is it costly?

Yeah black is anywhere there aren’t actors, and black on the mask is just where grass isn’t applied

Obviously storing as one colour channel is probably better but I’m trying to conceptually understand this

[ashen robin]

there's effectively no mask here. You render something or you don't which is done by the camera cull settings

[chrome skiff]

The mask would be created by the user to apply it to the terrain in patches rather than as an entire coverage.

[ashen robin]

yeah true. I do have specific polygons that do create a larger field, but you can just render your actors as is

but yeah if the actors are complex then you want some secondary low cost polygon

[chrome skiff]

Since I have a limited understanding of the camera render texture, how exactly does it “see” the layer. Obviously the actors have a mesh but then that adds dimensions to the actor. I’d rather just have position so I can modify the grass via a pre defined distance of influence.

To be fair the actors wouldn’t take up more than a few pixels each on a 4x4km terrain but still

[ashen robin]

camera culls by layer so I suggest having a GrassMask layer for the polygons

stick the GrassMask polygons as child to the actors, cull everything else

[chrome skiff]

Yeah true. Then the issue comes where I’d need to make the size of the polygon be such that it occupies only one pixel which would depend on the size of the terrain. Larger terrain would need a bigger render texture too. Argh this is so complicated.

[ashen robin]

Unless you're rendering the whole terrain at once it shouldnt be a problem

[chrome skiff]

If the actor is in its actor layer then is it still fine to have the grass polygon as another layer? I remember having issues in the past where the parent layer overwrote a child layer

[chrome skiff]

Ohhh right you want the ortho camera to be vertically above the player, right?

[ashen robin]

hierarchy can be made up of different layers just fine

[chrome skiff]

So it provides automatic distance culling

How does this translate if the player leaves the terrain bounds?

[ashen robin]

even with perspective, I couldn't expect you to need the whole draw distance moving the grass as you're either culling it or using LODs where you couldnt even tell

[ashen robin]

oh ok so yeah you can do a full terrain ortho camera is what you're thinking and that can work if you think in terms of splatmapping, but the idea is have a moving origin that you reference and keep coordinates relative to that

that floating origin being the area your player is occupying

[chrome skiff]

Right so the ortho camera is above the player and sees let’s say a 150x150m square. Or maybe it’s better to allow it to inherit the main camera yaw rotation so that the ortho camera sees the viewport (albeit with a square/rectangle) rather than a simple square around the player

Let me rephrase. Ortho camera can be above player but translated horizontally along the player’s LOS so it sees the top-down of the viewport which would be more useful since it doesn’t do any actor rendering behind you.

Argh this is so complicated, optimisation sucks.

[ashen robin]

camera 2 always looks down over player. It doesnt care about actors outside of its range as you're probably not rendering them anyway with camera 1

[chrome skiff]

That’s not exactly what I’m saying. Think of it this way. If you have the camera right over the player and look down, you’re making a render texture that also renders actors behind the player (outside the viewport of the main camera/player camera)

I’m saying it could potentially be better to put the ortho camera above and be translated somewhat ahead of the player’s facing direction so it creates a texture that encompasses all of the viewport (some distance from the player) and then some

[ashen robin]

You can probably have multiple cameras to help add to the precision, sure

I'd have the overhead ortho camera though at least

[chrome skiff]

Here like this

White is player POV

[ashen robin]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1258667886151729163/1420331786927341609/shader_stuff.mov
Here's one with the moving origin idea

[chrome skiff]

(Obviously camera render would be way longer)

And red is the ortho

This is top down btw

Red encompasses a 150x150 square and is placed just close enough to the player to make sure the player is always within the square

[chrome skiff]

How does one even implement moving origin

I’ve seen the impacts of floating point error and I know I’ll encounter issues on my map sizes

[ashen robin]

yeah it's not needed. All you really need is to keep the area you're rendering with relative coordinates to compare to that texture inside of the vfx graph

the grass* I just do some global shader variable

[chrome skiff]

My problem is that since you have a mask that applies grass, it has associated UVs which map to the horizontal surface of the terrain. If you move outside the terrain then how does this work.

[ashen robin]

not entirely sure how feasable it is to do a very large game with a floating origin honestly. I'd probably just use unreal at that point and use that double precision cause I can't be bothered lel

[ashen robin]

Not entirely sure what you mean but everything is done by world coordinates

well, if you mean texture uvs then remember 1 pixel of that texture is w/e size it is relative to the projection range of your camera

[chrome skiff]

Well you know how I said to do a displacement you multiply the render texture by the mask (or a portion of it) to find where the actors overlap onto grass? That’s all well and good if the render texture is inside the grass mask but what happens when the render texture starts to leave the grass mask

[ashen robin]

there's no concept of leaving for the texture. It renders anything in its fustrum if it has the specific layer it's not currently culling

if there's not actors then you get a texture of 0 value

[chrome skiff]

Say the white is the terrain and the red is the ortho camera rendering the actors

The render texture is now partially outside of the grass mask (the grass mask texture has UVs that map to the terrain exactly)

Would this cause some error or something where the render texture would be wrapped around onto the other side of the UVs

Of course from the perspective of the VFX graph the particles are generated within terrain bounds. But the rendering of actors is done from the player. My idea to multiply the mask by the render texture to get a simple displacement thingo would work when the texture is within the mask but I honestly don’t know what happens when it’s not

[ashen robin]

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

oh right you're doing it with the vfx graph too eh

[chrome skiff]

Yeah lol hence the channel

[ashen robin]

It would wrap yeah I see what you mean or smear depending

you would have to check bounds

[chrome skiff]

Also let me just update your knowledge for this. The shader used by the VFX needs a bend direction and a magnitude. For solid white obviously magnitude can be 1. But direction is needed hence why I wanted to generalise actor locations.

[ashen robin]

shader is cool because if it doesnt render it doesnt need to check

;)

[chrome skiff]

The direction is the grass pos - actor pos

So the grass pushes AWAY from the actor

[chrome skiff]

So it’s already frustrum culled?

[ashen robin]

shader instancing is pretty good and it'll try to cull everything as much as possible

[chrome skiff]

Alas the shader only needs direction and magnitude of influence info, it’s almost exactly the default grass shader from the shader graph unity scene

[ashen robin]

Im not entirely sure of the instancing cull capabilities of vfx graph as usually you do set those bounds

but again im not sure how the grass work with it. If it's a single blade of grass per particle then it should cull similarly I would expect

[chrome skiff]

It is a single blade

[ashen robin]

usually shader instancing tries to cluster stuff as much as possible in the rendering so you do sometimes end up with stuff rendering outside of the frustum but it's still pretty good

[chrome skiff]

Basically, the default shade of graph for grass takes a wind direction and strength and I change that wind direction via a lerp with the direction from the grass position and actor position

[ashen robin]

I'd read up more on the culling for what you're doing to make sure it's not rendering it all if you do only see a single particle

[chrome skiff]

The lerp uses the ratio of distance to actor and radius to find how much the new direction affects it

[ashen robin]

rather there's debug tools inside of the graph to show you how much is being rendered I believe

[chrome skiff]

Can I show you the setup in more detail in 40 mins

I need to get to my pc

[ashen robin]

Im heading to sleep, but here's a neat video on it too using it for fog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqYnukFe374

MinionsArt also has quite a bunch of videos with similar techniques and more indepth

[chrome skiff]

Before you go, is there a way to generalise a splotch on a texture to a point?

[ashen robin]

Their snow mesh deformation video is pretty cool

[chrome skiff]

So I can approximate a location, I mean

Like a discrete point location

[ashen robin]

Well, like I said you need the relative coordinates of the camera which would be the center of the texture.

[chrome skiff]

Like if I have a circle or something rendered on a texture in white or some random shape is there a way to reduce it to a single pixel that’s approximately the centre of the shape?

[ashen robin]

then you can pinpoint where it is by using the projection size of the camera

[ashen robin]

I'm not entirely sure of the math of it all, but a single pixel I would expect be a very large texture

assuming you have a large projection size

so you treat the texture like you do with splatmaps, you don't care for exact precision

[chrome skiff]

One pixel for every metre

[ashen robin]

right that's the idea

[chrome skiff]

Hmm I’ll play around and let you know.

Because then what happens when the actor is between two pixels.

The render texture would show two grey pixels then right?

[ashen robin]

ideally your actor should cover more than 1 pixel

because when you check for the disturbance and it does realize it is being occupied then you need to check neighbors to figure out how to bend

[chrome skiff]

In that case that’s why I wanted to know if I can reduce a 2D shape on a texture down to its centre point only.

Because I need a direction vector

[ashen robin]

if disturbance is from the north neighbor only -> bend south

[chrome skiff]

Direction vector being grass - disturber location

[ashen robin]

if disturbance from all 8 neighbors -> flatten grass

[chrome skiff]

Fuck me

Can this be done in VFX

[ashen robin]

Not sure, I've only done it with vertex shadering

I would assume so though

[chrome skiff]

Are we talking 4-8 arbitrary directions here

Like front back left right and diagonals

[ashen robin]

you can check the texture at any stage of the shader or the graph

only thing you couldnt really do is have grass proliferate values

[chrome skiff]

Wdym by that

[ashen robin]

grass folding on other grass creating a chain of disturbance

[chrome skiff]

Oh no lol the grass is only disturbed by the actor, not itself

That’s why I need a discrete centre

I can bend them according to a direction and a weight which drops off

No need to proliferate if I can just obtain a discrete location

[ashen robin]

world position - camera coordinates divided by projection size divided by 2

I think that will give you the area to work with I forget

[chrome skiff]

But that brings us back to the unoptimised version of just knowing the coordinates right

[ashen robin]

not sure what you mean but this will give you the area to sample the texture

[chrome skiff]

Oh wait do you mean world position of player?

[ashen robin]

camera unless it's locked onto the player, sure

camera is the origin

[chrome skiff]

Oh so ortho cam position minus world origin / projection size*2

On another note is there a way to try the graphics buffer but only populate it with those in the actor layer that are seen by the ortho camera? Or like define a cube set to be a trigger that passes world position of those inside (using actor layer) into a graphics buffer?

[ashen robin]

if you want to use graphic buffers I would do a large collider around the player that grabs all actors then send them in per buffer

[chrome skiff]

Collider being a trigger right

[ashen robin]

trigger colliders yes

[chrome skiff]

Do they know if something is in them per frame?

Or does it only know the collision with its surface

[ashen robin]

OnTriggerEnter, OnTriggerExit, OnTriggerStay

[chrome skiff]

So enter -> put in the buffers, exit -> remove from buffer, and stay I assume you just log the position per frame

[ashen robin]

Stay continuously polls the area so if you can get the subscription event of enter and exit working id use that

more of a micro optimization though

[chrome skiff]

I mean I’ll need micro optimisations lol

I’m dealing with a lot

[ashen robin]

True, but if you aren't keeping a leash of everything after entering it'll be stuck in a buffer if you never release it

so when stuff dies or something you'll have to call cleanup

otherwise Stay can just iterate over everything each frame and handle it itself

but again, if you're doing hundreds of actors then I wouldnt use Stay, nor buffers ;p

[chrome skiff]

I think I’ve gotten my AI to kill all coroutines on death but I don’t think I need to handle death here

Since when they die they fall over

And their position only moves on respawn

Which means they still should influence if they’re within the bounds.

[chrome skiff]

Well firstly I could tie the size of the collider to quality settings. Secondly, what’s the best collider for this? Like what’s the most optimised/quick running for this?

Sphere? Box?

[ashen robin]

which ever works with your rendering projection

[chrome skiff]

I thought we wouldn’t need a render texture if I know the positions lol.

[ashen robin]

yeah but you dont need a collider extending further than what your camera renders

[chrome skiff]

The collider will be far smaller than render distance

[ashen robin]

use w/e makes most sense and grabs the least colliders that may not be in render range

sphere I think is generally quickest collider but again microoptimization when you'd already have hundreds of colliders in your scene present at a time

radius checks are just generally quick

[chrome skiff]

Yeah that’s fair. I’ll do the sphere so that it just encompasses the player on its far side

[ashen robin]

actually non-rotated box colliders are quickest

[chrome skiff]

That way nothing is put in a buffer from behind the player

[chrome skiff]

In local space it wouldn’t be rotated but in global it would

[ashen robin]

AABB -> Sphere Colliders -> Capsule Collider -> rotated box

I thinkkkkk

[chrome skiff]

What does AABB mean

[ashen robin]

axis aligned box

[chrome skiff]

Oh so symmetry aligned

Box is cut in half perfectly on all axes

Well if we create the buffer from what’s in the collider and let’s say the radius is about 75m (diameter 150) then would it really be necessary to restrict the buffer by what’s in the grass mask?

Yes ofc it’s a micro optimisation but maybe running through the hoops to check if it’s within the mask might cost more?

[ashen robin]

I'd just go test it all out. Even though the buffer idea will probably give problems later on I'd just do it to see how to use them

[chrome skiff]

Yeah fair. Thanks for your help dude you’re amazing.

Just another question

This collider, would it have its own layer

Or a special gameobject name?

So that the script for the buffer can actually know it

[ashen robin]

If everything is already on an Actor layer and you're looking for all Actors then you shouldnt need another layer

as you always want the player data too which is an Actor so no reason to exclude them

[chrome skiff]

Oh so the collider attached to the player as a trigger doesn’t need anything special? But how does the script specifically to access it rather than any other trigger colliders in the scene

[ashen robin]

just filter Actors on the trigger collider

[chrome skiff]

That’s not what I mean. How does the script access the collider.

There’s a tonne of colliders in the scene and the player will have its own colliders

[ashen robin]

Actually maybe I'm thinking of this wrong. Trigger colliders would be called on each individual collider which can work but not what you probably want. I'd just do overlap sphere then

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Physics.OverlapSphere.html

Trigger would be fine assuming each individual object subscribes by itself, but it's better if you've a single object that collects them instead as you do a sweep

Or maybe trigger colliders can get that behaviour but it's been a minute since I've used them lel. I do prefer casting via physics API

[chrome skiff]

Wait can you explain in more simple terms why not to use the trigger collider

[ashen robin]

honestly I'm half-awake and I'm doubting something that's probably fine. I prefer the API calls anyway

if physx actually had a collider.Cast (for the Unity API) I would use that instead but no

Yeah trigger should be fine if you wanna do it that way. I'm thinking like oh it's the one entering the player area that would call its own trigger method, but both individual objects would call their own trigger methods I would think. That is if both had trigger colliders

[chrome skiff]

The camera is on the left edge of the sphere

Just inside it

I don't have a "player" just yet so I'm childing the sphere to the main camera for now

Is there a way to keep the sphere level with the main camera instead of childing it, because if the camera rotates down then the sphere goes down too which isn't ideal

[chrome skiff]

I don't know if I've done this right at all. Originally with the sphere on the player all I needed was a sphere node to plug position and radius into other things. I instead replaced any position connection with the output of this:

However I don't see anything displacing in editor or play mode

This is the code I'm using

[clear spruce]

Aren't you accessing the element of index buffer.count which doesn't exist in 0 based indexing? Same as doing myList[myList.Count] in C#

[chrome skiff]

Hold on I've done a bunch of work but I still don't have it working just yet, I'll send my updated stuff

I've tested that the buffers exist and the game knows the positions (lines go from centre of trigger volume to the actual actor positions that should be in the buffer)

Alas still no dice

So this is the code I'm using for passing what's inside the trigger volume into the buffer

I've also checked and the buffer can increase itself in realtime

I'm trying to update the grass in update according to the buffer like so

This is the HLSL code I put into it

It's meant to (at least I hope) do the same things as these nodes (Interaction Weight used to be an attribute in the update block but I removed it so I could incorporate the whole HLSL thing)

If someone could point out what's going wrong that would be amazing

The two attributes I pass into shader graph vertex shader is custom1 (normalised direction vector3) and custom2 (bend weight influence)

WAIT NO IT IS WORKING

If I have one actor it works

So this must mean that multiple actors are destroying the bending calculations

[chrome skiff]

Ok I got it working now, truly amazing. lol

Thanks for all your help today @ashen robin

[chrome skiff]

Can anyone tell me how to fix this lol, it happens sometimes when I load unity

It results in this happening:

Meant to look like this

[placid forge]

i have a dissolve shader and i want to apply it on a gameobject that composed of many spriterenderer but i want to apply the effect on gameobject as a whole not at indivitual spriterenderer

[ashen robin]

A single shared material would do just that

No reason you should have multiple instances with spriterenderer anyway unless each of these materials have different shader code

[placid forge]

i want it to apply shader as a whole not at each indivitual sprite

[ashen robin]

Well, like I mentioned, is there a reason why you've multiple different materials for your sprites

if yes, then your options then are to store all these materials in some list and iterate over them, or make a global parameter to control the fading here

[placid forge]

im not?

there are two spriterenderer to compose a card and im use one share material on it with the fade effect but i want to somehow use the effect as if they are one big sprite

sorry im bad at english

[ashen robin]

So it's the text part that's not fading which you do want? Is it a different shader or is it the same shader but different material

[placid forge]

im not putting the material on it yet. just want to demonstatrate what i need

[ashen robin]

Well, the options remain. Use a shared material for everything that needs to fade together, make a global fade parameter in additional to the local fade parameter of the shader, or collect all material instances and fade each one individual by iteration

[warm torrent]

@placid forge @ashen robin The miscommunication here is that the goal is for the shader to fade them as if they were one object, not just fade them separately at the same time?

In that case the fade should be calculated relative to the card's bounds which you'd pass to the shader as material properties

But if the fade needs to be done semi-transparently rather than with clipping/dithering, it can't be helped that the individual parts will be seen through each other during the fade

To make uniform fading possible the card's parts would first have to be rendered to a texture that's then used to create one combined card which can then be faded

#1390346776804069396 is for shader questions

[placid forge]

yes thats what i want to ask . thank

[ashen robin]

Oh yeah I see what you mean. Honestly probably easier to just rasterize it then run the fade over it as a single texture / rect transform

[neat maple]

someone seen thsi before? as soon as i connect the multiply to the set life ratio, this error pops up and stays at this locatino on the screen

[chrome skiff]

I get this all the time it means nothing

It’s a bug in the editor

[neat maple]

indeed, everything seems to work.. well, ok!

[vernal ore]

anyone have any good resources for making full screen shaders in URP. im trying to make effects for drunkess and some other things.

[cobalt scarab]

#1180170818983051344

[fluid peak]

You can do it with a custom Render Feature and a Blit pass in URP. That lets you run fullscreen HLSL shaders for effects like distortion or color shift. Check Unity’s Blit sample on GitHub it’s a great start.

[fathom thistle]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1434743151729311846/1434743152937402399/image.png?ex=6909702f&is=69081eaf&hm=4b566fd130ed014e4193211199369b6f0dfe0e7ddcaa41985eaa01b2d2c6a79e& anyone knows what this guy used to make this hacker background?

I got told this was done with unity by some blender professionals , so came here to ask

[ionic shuttle]

-# probably ai

[fathom thistle]

U sure ?

[ionic shuttle]

cant be sure for certain, but definitely looks a little off

[fathom thistle]

Ye the characters are weird

Although I’ve seen a blender material with some weird characters as well

[warm torrent]

The designs are blobby nonsense, and there's multiple copies and poses that are different but not in any consistent way so they're fairly obviously ai gen imagery

If they were 3D at all I'd assume they were ai gen meshes
Can't imagine anyone modeling those by hand, multiple times for each variation

Models can be made weird but it's not a human kind of weird to have one half of a hoodie melting into a vest

[vernal ore]

I’ve been looking at full screen renderer feature and a full screen shader graph. Is this the same thing that you mentioned?

[fast canyon]

Hey, does anyone know how to create a fog effect for a building game like boom beach? I have a building area where players can build on and i want a fog around it, when i upgrade my building area than the fog needs to be deleted to a certain extent (until the border of the new building area) any tips or videos that explain on how to do this?

[warm torrent]

It sounds like you're describing a tile based "fog of war" feature

[fathom thistle]

The characters are blender , but the background could be ai

[fast canyon]

yess!

[fathom thistle]

https://void1gaming.itch.io/free-matrix-shader-for-unity-urp/devlog/413875/free-matrix-digital-rain-shader-for-unity-urp-is-now-live
u think they used this?

[warm torrent]

Unlikely
I don't think any part of what you're seeing ever was in-engine, or 3D to begin with
But if you want to imitate the style for some reason, that shader could be useful

[fathom thistle]

yeah after a closer look even the characters look AI

not even eyes are in there

[gentle iron]

I'm lacking vocabulary to search for a solution to my problem, would love if somebody here knows what I'm talking about:
I am working on a building game where the player can place walls and windows on walls. Wherever windows are placed, I need their shape to be "cut out" of the wall.
So, roughly like you can see on the screenshot. That uses a special shader on the wall and another shader on the sphere and works basically like a stencil.
Issue is, that as soon as I have two walls with windows, the windows peek through the walls.
I feel like I'm missing some basics of how to approach a use case like this (I'm basically just copy pasting in the hopes of anything working, really).
I've heard about volume based cutouts, stencils, rendering orders and masks. Can someone here tell me where I might get the most useful approach for this setting?

[warm torrent]

Is this showing the issue you want to avoid?

I don't see the part about two walls or window peeking through

[gentle iron]

Ah, no, this shows a first try. It works alright if I have just one wall and a window, but if I place walls in front of another with their own windows, the wall in the background disappears.

I basically would like to have the effect on my screenshot, but so that I can still see the wall material through windows in other walls

[warm torrent]

So "basically like stencil" is stencil? Just hoping to understand what you're working with currently

[gentle iron]

Yes

[warm torrent]

Using multiple stencil IDs in a way that they don't overlap is one option

But you could alpha clip in the shader by a distance function or by projected texture just as well instead

[gentle iron]

Would you happen to know a tutorial about that?

[full sparrow]

If this is a shader issue #1390346776804069396 might be able to help out

[warm torrent]

Not off the top of my head
The concept is very simple
You alpha clip by the alpha value
Your alpha value would be determined by a shape that fits your window
Maybe a box or sphere/cylinder, or projected texture if it needs to be a more complex shape

[gentle iron]

Ah, sorry, didn't mean to pick the wrong channel =)

[warm torrent]

Based on your window shapes you might know already which of the clipping shapes you need

[gentle iron]

Hmmm alpha clip sounds like something I can look up.

[warm torrent]

It is
Easier than stencils
By all means make a thread in Rendering if you get stuck

[full sparrow]

I think stencil buffer is what you want to look up

[gentle iron]

Thank you, at least I have a better starting point now =)

Guess you'll see me over in rendering in the coming days ;)

[ashen robin]

I would just paint alpha values and cut it. Stencils operations will 'propagate' through similar walls if they are stacked behind each other due to the nature of how stencils work.

oh whoops forgot to scroll down but yeah Spazi's the idea

So technically in your shader you'll have an additional overlay texture where you paint your negative (alpha) values upon

Can be a little expensive if you are making a bunch of these walls as you need to create a unique mask texture per wall, but you can probably use a lower res texture if that becomes a problem

[modest pelican]

Question about VFX graph:
If I want to set an attribute on a particle to a random value that remains consistent for that particle, I seem to be able to do this in the Initialize context as well as the Output context (not the Update context, though, because that results in a new random value being set every frame).
Which of these is better? I notice that doing it in the Initialize context means the attribute becomes part of the particle's attribute layout in memory, which I think means the effect takes up more memory, which would be a downside of doing it in the Initialize context and make it the lesser option. Is there any downside to doing it in the Output context? Does it have overhead in terms of calculating the random value every frame (but in a way that apparently yields the same result every frame for the particle)?

[compact pelican]

Is there any way to make something like this intersect with all objects on scene? My player has a tool they control, and I've made this vfx graph to set as its visual "functionality radius" But it looks terrible when it goes through everything. Haven't been able to find any info on this for some reason. Collision shape only works with Planes and ignores everything else

[warm torrent]

What it does here is "intersect"
What do you want it to do?

[ashen robin]

You can try collide with depth buffer as a quick solution, but it's not something you'd consider precise

https://discussions.unity.com/t/unity-6-collision-improvements-in-vfx-graph/1557951

[warm torrent]

You can also pass meshes into the VFX graph as relevant collision shapes or SDFs, but is that what you really want
Collisions might not look much better than a sharp intersection

The kind of shaders that are used for "force field intersections" can be used for particles as well, to do pretty much anything visually based on depth proximity

[compact pelican]

Intersect as in collide with meshes instead of passing through them

[compact pelican]

Yeah you're right. After looking around looks like a shader graph would be optimal, gpu-wise as well, the graph does look better though.

[warm torrent]

Collide as in bounce? Or what

[compact pelican]

Thanks for the input

[compact pelican]

Yeah, same as the forcefield intersections you were talking about.

(visually)

[warm torrent]

So changing color or alpha? That's what those shaders typically do

"Intersect" is still vague

[compact pelican]

I'm terrible at vfx, the thing I'm trying to achieve is to visualize the field inside of which the players' tool has an effect, so they always know its radius (the vfx is connected to the tool and displays its radius). The current VFX graph I have visually looks good, but to polish it I want the particles to collide with objects around them, and not just pass through everything like a ghost, like if you push a soft ball into a wall, it needs to be a diegetic interface (inside the game, not a part of the UI). After looking around all day it looks like VFX graph won't work for this, although I am still not 100% certain.

[warm torrent]

For the particles to squish/push away from the surface, or react in any other way, as it nears is possible, but a bit tricky
For accurate collisions like that you'd need SDF volumes generated from each mesh, and then passed from scene into the VFX graph by proximity to fill a buffer of active SDFs

But much easier to do some shader effect based on depth buffer, even if the options are much more limited there

[compact pelican]

Say I decide to allocate a couple days for the SDF volumes, how bad would optimization be? Is it hard on the gpu? It's just one (small but important) element in the game, do you think trying it out would be counter-productive?

Even then, tweaking a forcefield guide to make it look closer to what we need wouldn't be too hard I guess

(indie game, nothing too serious)

[warm torrent]

Probably not too bad, but it mainly depends on how many SDFs the vfx graph needs to be calculating at once
Usually you'd have to determine that by a proximity check
I'd first allocate an hour or two to SDFs and the force fields to test their viability first

The system to pass SDFs dynamically to the vfx graph I expect is more difficult and more work than the vfx effect itself otherwise

[compact pelican]

Gotcha. Thanks for the help! Sounds like too much stuff to do for something that'll probably get changed 47 times :)

I'll check out the forcefields and see what can be changed.

[warm torrent]

As Mao noted collide with depth buffer is a very simple and quick alternative

[compact pelican]

Dang, the brain rot got to me. I was wondering why it did not work until I realized that it works only through the camera 💀

Yeah, just what I needed. Time to stylize it. Thank you very much! Couldn't wrap my head around it. @warm torrent @ashen robin

[warm torrent]

Post feedback requests and progress in #🏆┃daily-win or #1180170818983051344 please

[arctic spear]

oh ok, sorry and thx!

[chrome skiff]

Is there any way to access and reduce quality of shadows casted by VFX graph?

I don’t want to change the global shadow quality I just want to reduce the quality of my grass VFX system

Currently I’ve got hundreds of thousands of blades which cast and receive shadows and I’d prefer if they cast shadows with the smallest impact possible or even just have random blades cast shadows on start

I’m not fully knowledgeable on shadows but am I correct in assuming casting is generally more expensive than receiving? Also from my testing which involved only one light (the sun) I can conclude that I’d also like the grass to ignore any other lights except the main light because the lag would be unimaginable if the shadows multiplied

What I mean is, my grass receiving lights is fine but I’d rather be able to reduce shadow casting cost and restrict casting only to the main light

Anyone know if this is possible?

[ashen robin]

If you want to use only directional lights then where you calculate your lighting data for the shader you need to omit additional lights and just include the main light

https://xibanya.github.io/URPShaderViewer/Library/URP/ShaderLibrary/Lighting.html
Bunch of the method calls in there, but as you scroll there you'd see more complete methods which are those that are used by the standard URP lit shaders

https://www.cyanilux.com/tutorials/urp-shader-code/#simple-lighting
Cyan's some resources on it, but they lead you through the more developed lighting modules using Lambert and Blinn-Phong. Ideally what you want to do is take those methods and just remove all the additional lighting calls, or more specifically just comment out #pragma multi_compile _ADDITIONAL_LIGHTS if you choose to use the blin-phong and similar method calls.

[chrome skiff]

Will that allow me keep light reception from all lights but exclude lights for casting? Or is it gonna exclude lights for everything?

[ashen robin]

I would assume this is just for secondary point lights. I've not messed around with it too much as of late

https://github.com/Cyanilux/URP_ShaderCodeTemplates
Cyans got a bunch of templates there to get an idea to stucture it all. You're just basically copy pasting selective methods onto your shader

Anyway, you've better answers from #1391720450752516147

[chrome skiff]

I ask here because I felt it was VFX or shader graph dependent/limited

[ashen robin]

I'm not seeing any exposed properties on the default VFX graph shader that meet your requirements, and I don't believe you can use the shader graph here to omit these extra lights, so you may be looking into the custom HLSL block feature

Usually anything light/shadow is not really modifiable within the shader graph unfortunately. Maybe more recent updates but not something I've looked into as of recent. Well, not entirely true, just some limitations on it.

[untold gull]

Hello, how can I edit and play particle effects while not having all those gizmos and orange outline popping up? Makes it hard to figure out how it actually looks.

[untold gull]

Got my answer (Gizmo toggler in the "View options" menu)

[inland tusk]

I can’t for the life of me find set get custom attribute in vfx graph any more in unity 6. I’ve enabled experimental blocks in visual effects in preferences and restarted. Any ideas?

[inland tusk]

Ooh you create it in blackboard first now ok

[fast canyon]

Trying to make a fog of war effect for my building game but there are no tuts on how to do this, anyone has any tips or advice

[full sparrow]

You'll want to look up "fog of war shaders". Take peek over on #1390346776804069396 for more shader talk

[dusty echo]

Hi! With the Visual Effects Graph, is there a way to search for and adding system subgraphs? I currently only see block subgraphs

[modest pelican]

I think you can just drag a VFX graph asset into another, and it will create a system subgraph node for it.