Shader Forge - A visual, node-based shader editor

Is there a way to outline models that doesn't involve backface edge extrusion/sobel edge detection? Both of these look like ass and I'm surprised that I'm completely unable to find an alternative that doesn't require post-processing.

 

This isn't about me I'm just offering an example case of someone who is interested in making shader packs. I'm not the only one who has an interest in doing so and the author is not entirely against it either.

a) I've already been in private conversations with the author about this.
b) He and I have already come to some private terms as to the selling of shader packs on the store.
c) I've already submitted my first pack to the asset store meeting the terms he and I have agreed to.
d) Other people will sooner or later be doing the same thing.
e) SF is still in beta and the terms may change with version 1.0
f) I don't leech off people's work.

Hippo you may be right that most people will use SF for their games etc and far fewer will be developers. But this is a diverse ecosystem.

 

Well so long as each shader pack sold on the store has to stipulate it's been made in shader forge, that's fine by me. I would prefer people buy shader forge though to support the author's work and also enable them the power to tweak shaders to their exact liking. I see no benefit from purchasing shaders made with shader forge, when shader forge itself can be bought, and used with 1000's of examples from Unreal Engine shader graphs on the web.

To my mind, the ideal kind of shader to buy is something that cannot be be made easily with SF - like Echologin core (it's much faster) or Marmoset (it's a toolchain with shaders).

Each to their own though. Are his terms forcing people to mention that it's made in SF? that sounds incredibly reasonable for people selling shaders (But unreasonable if you're just using them in your games).

 

Hi,
First, thanks for this tool

Question : I wonder why my shader does not work when mesh tessellation is disabled ?

without Tessellation


tessellation enabled


Pulsing flesh

 

Things are getting a little crazy in this shader now, but here's what I'm doing now:

1. Light attenuation does not get the job done here, so instead I'm grabbing the distance between the light and the object, manually plugging the range of the light into the material, then remapping it so the value is between 0 and 1. This ensures I have a uniform light distribution across the whole object. This is very important. Unfortunately, this means that everything goes apeshit when multiple lights enter the equation Is there a better way? This shader doesn't play nice with directional lights. I also need to put the inverse-square law in there somewhere.

2. Blah blah blah, ambient light is implemented by multiplying ambient light against the final product of the shader. This also ensures light is uniform. I don't think I'm doing anything wrong here. The results work.

3. Unfortunately, as the light gets further away, things like the saturation of the texture go all weird because I'm not able to use light attenuation here. I tried using the remapped value and a desaturate node to lower the saturation the further away the light is, but this made things worse. Is there a way to get the saturation to smoothly lower as if a light was actually moving away?

4. The UV coord. node isn't there in the latest version ever since I discovered it didn't actually do anything. Does it do anything? Should it?

I have to admit, if it weren't for Shader Forge, I wouldn't have gotten even remotely close to getting this to work. I'd probably just be staring at a mess of Cg and a pink humanoid model asking myself what I was doing with my life.

 

I've been trying to get the new depth blend node to work but so far it appears as if it's largely none functional. I can get it to work under certain instances but most of the time it glitches out if I turn. I am attaching the following script to the camera but it only seems to work in the editor and moving away from a test cube seems to remove the effect, what am I doing wrong?

I've also had 'some' luck in getting a radial fog shader working, however my 'view' appears to be off center.

 

I think is not good that one can't sell the shaders that one created, this is like if you make a 3d model with 3ds max or maya, and autodesk tell you that you can't sell the model, because you are not writing the coordinates of the vertex using opengl or directx yourself.

SF is just a tool that facilitates to create shaders, like 3ds max facilitates to create models, and the content that is created is property of the creator of that content.

Also it says on the description of the asset store that you are buying a commercial license, normally one can think that you can make money with the content that one creates with the tool. Maybe if the description would said Educational license or something similar is another story.

 

It seems some of you have simply misunderstood the license, because you are allowed to sell assets/models/games using SF shaders
(For all of you who actually did know the license and let people know, thanks!)

The license is pretty much *only* to prevent people from making a pack of shaders created in Shader Forge, and selling them, because it's essentially giving everyone indirect access to the benefits of SF, without having it themselves, which I'm glad some of you have already stated. I hope you understand my concern in that case!

Consider a site like CGTextures. It's a website that sells textures, which has a very similar license. They don't allow reselling of textures, but you are allowed to sell assets/games using the textures, because they aren't in direct competition with the service itself.

I think it's perfectly fine to sell SF shaders on the asset store if you edit the shaders to only contain the SF metadata, without the shader code itself. That means that you need to have SF in order to use them, so it's no longer bypassing the system

 

I'm not sure what effect you're trying to achieve. It sounds like you want to do this:

Create a new shader. Plug your texture into diffuse, and plug in a value of 1.0 into Light Wrapping and Transmission.

As for your points:

1. Remap will also remap outside the range you specify. If you remap (-1, 1) to (0, 1), and send it a value of -4, it will output -2.5, so you'll want to clamp it after the remap node. (Might be nice to have a checkbox on the remap node for clamping the output)

2. Alright, if it works in your case Ambient light is a bit more complex than being multiplied by the final product though

3. This is probably a result of point 1

4. In your case, it doesn't make a difference, because you're plugging it directly into the UV inputs, which is the same as their default values

 

Totally agree.

 

I kind of see both sides of the argument. But also...many assets on the store are to help you make something. Why not be able to sell what you make?
I mean...if I make a terrain using some of the landscape creation tools, I can't sell it? People use Unity to create and sell trees all the time. Mesh creation tools, among many others.

 

Unity takes a cut on asset sales and also benefits from having a wider variety of assets that compliment its engine.
How would shaderforge benefit to the degree that unity does in that scenario?

I think having to own shader forge is a good compromise. People get to sell shaders, while not biting the hand that feeds them.

 

Oddly enough, I had the same idea at some point last night because eventually I just did this when I realised how many redundancies I had in there that could be handled through standard blinn-phong.



Now I just need to figure out how to make an outline shader that isn't based on model scaling/backface extrusion or the sobel edge detection method and do some final tweaking.

edit: with further testing, there's some minor gradients, but it's good enough that I can test it in-game.

 

Okay, hopefully this will explain what I want. This is just for the light levels, but assume pitch black means that the entire mesh will be black even when textured.



I want the models to be uniformly lit the closer they are to the light source, but with no gradient applied by the light at all. If an object is partly intersected by the light, I still want it to calculate as if a portion of it was being lit, rather than just the area before the light terminates. If an object is outside of any light source, it should only receive ambient light.

So, if a texture were being applied here, it'd look like this:



edit: Also, I can't do what I just did there since I all I did was make some material instances and manually colour everything :v

 

Ah, I see. Interesting issue.
I don't think it's possible to make it right now in Shader Forge, because you can't access the light radius, which is necessary in this case.

 

Yeah, that's what I've been running into, which is why I had the adjustable value of 15 in the old version. I'm sure there's some way I can hack something together smoothly though, I just need to invent math.

 

I've been trying to get the new depth blend node to work but so far it appears as if it's largely none functional in the editor. I can get it to work under certain instances but most of the time it glitches out if I turn or move the editor camera in any way. I am attaching the following script to the camera but it only seems to work in when running.

I've also had 'some' luck in getting a radial fog shader working, however my 'view' appears to be off center and I've tried everything to fix it however it appears that there is some sort of rendering bug somewhere.

 

I had similar off-centre issues with a translucency shader. I've lost it since, but I believe you need to remember to include the view position in there as well.

 

I've tried EVERYTHING (literally tried every node and a rediculus combination of nodes), it appears there is a bug in the rendering code as I always seem to be in the same 'position' off center.

 

That'd certainly explain some of the odd results I've gotten with some of my shaders using that same node. I just figured I was doing something wrong.

NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE IF YOU'RE STUBBORN ENOUGH!





Edit: The new version only supports a single light source per scene. Everything is going to have to be super carefully lit, but now that I have a rough working version and working normal calculations, I should be able to fake everything.

 

Please vote on this bug http://shaderforge.userecho.com/topic/383935-/ let's get it pushed to the top and fixed

 

Not to put blame on others, but, I think you guys just did the math wrong

 

I've been experimenting with SF for a while now and in general I am pretty happy with it. However the slider values don't get passed on to the material in the scene/inspector!?!?
Also the PBR mode extremely desaturates the diffuse texture:
How can I avoid that?

 

All properties are per-material - the sliders in SF are just the default values, which is displayed in the SF viewport, so tweak them directly in the inspector instead of in SF to see the changes of the material in the Unity Scene/Game view

Multiply your diffuse by some value or check the box that says "Double incoming light" under lighting settings.

Note that the PBL implementation in SF will change soon, due to not being entirely correct, so this behaviour might change in the future!

 

Hello,

Shader Forge is awesome! I have had a few issues though. I'm not sure if anyone has experienced it but whenever I try using DirectX 11 tessellation with displacement it seems to crash my graphics driver when I move around the scene in the Unity's viewport. I'm not sure if it is a Unity issue or a driver issue but I am running a Radeon HD 7870 with Catalyst driver version 13.12 in Windows 7 64bit if that helps.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

Glad you find SF awesome!
Do you get the same problem with these shaders?
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/SL-SurfaceShaderTessellation.html

 

Interesting point. Shaderforge may not benefit to the degree that Unity does, because it depends on Unity. Which may be big part of the problem.
I can use WorldCreator 2, Photoshop, Word, all kinds of programs. None of them require a cut from the profits I make, from my work. Can you imagine the outcry? And many of them don't require me to own the software to use the results in my work.

What if Unity allowed people to compile assets, with a sort of stripped down Unity UI, that allowed them to run them as standalone exes instead of depending on the Unity environment?
In fact...I'm surprised this doesn't happen more. The apps would be useful to many people, instead of just Unity developers. No more having to worry about Unity compatibility.

 

I will most likely just remove that part of the license, and just mention it as something I would prefer, rather than enforce. Someone mentioned that you aren't allowed to write your own licenses (According to Unity's EULA) for asset store releases. (Although the one restriction I wrote wasn't about the asset itself really)

I just hope this doesn't end up drawing away a massive amount of potential customers for SF, because it's extremely easy to make high-quality shaders and sell it, with minimal effort with SF.

I didn't make SF with the intention of having people to resell the shaders it writes directly. It's a tool for making your games, projects and assets look better with ease.

 

AHA that works!, cheers man I've been trying everything and couldn't get it working, must have tried close to 400 different combinations. One last question I have is how would i view depth in the editor? or is it not possible yet?

 

For what it's worth, as a potential customer - I dislike the license as it stands right now.

Honestly, I have no plans to sell shaders so in theory it doesn't affect me - but I really am not comfortable with one of the potential tools in my toolchain basically imposing restrictions over the output from that tool. This goes for both the "You can't sell" and the "you must mention Shader Forge" clauses.

Just my $0.02, but I believe removing it is the right thing to do.

 

For what it's worth I think it's completely fair to only allow SF-specific metadata to be sold, - I agree that without that condition the developer runs at risk of Asset Store getting lots of shader pack releases made in it and covering the most of the popular functionality, negating the need to buy SF in the first place for a potentially significant part of the community.

Not to mention enormous amount of UDK-based samples freely available on the net and can be easily translated to SF, making amount of work necessary to create quite a lot of popular shaders quite small and making a sale of such an asset questionable.

With that in mind, it's only fair to post SF-based shaders as SF-specific data that can be easily compiled by it, but can't be used separately prior to that. I don't see a point in free licenses made for the sake of being free, there has to be a reasonable justification for that, better than "it makes me feel uncomfortable" or "I put my creative energy into translating that UDK tutorial and should be able to sell it".

Whole situation is a bit similar to getting just one Unity Pro license for a whole studio, except if anything (like image effects) made using that one license but could then be used in any Unity Free editor afterwards. It's not the case with Unity, of course - none of the image effects sold on Asset Store will work without Pro: so I don't see a problem with SF shaders using SF-specific code, only working with it installed too.

 

Hey Joachim,

i have a really strage bug using Shaderforge, do i have to treat normalmaps any differenty to use them properly in it?
At first i thought it was my custom node setup, but nope it's also broken with just a very simple node setup, look here



you see it looks actually more correct with just vertex shading, i've never seen such a result using normalmaps. Do you use a different tangentbase than unity does? It's really really weird.

 

Your normals are set to interpolated instead of normalized. Switch to normalized and it should look correct

 

you mean the one in the normal quality preferences? makes no difference here, i can post screenshots but they are identical on my machine :/

 

In my opinion, this isn't something to worry too much about. The big advantage of a shader graph is not in writing another POM shader, it's in writing custom shaders which are specific to your data and needs. IE: packing things in channels, procedural variation, masking, etc. The 'popular functionality' is already available in the asset store, shader forge doesn't actually add any benefit there; the benefit is really in the customization.

If anything, I would hope anyone selling a shader pack created with SF would include both the compiled output and the SF files, allowing you to tweak those shaders in SF or use them as starting points for your own work; that's a huge added value for the buyer. Commonly finding these files in shaders you bought would bring more people into using SF and understanding shaders at a deeper level, which is a good thing for everyone. That seems to have more benefit than anything being included in the app store description.

 

Interesting, sounds like a bug then, I'll have an extra look

 

I also have a couple of other questions, i'm sure those have been asked before, but the thread is already pretty long.

- are there any plans to implement a zoom function? slightly complex shadertrees already become too cluttered and you pan over them all the time.

- is there an option to connect an output to main? say i have some nodes connected far away from the main part of the shader, now i have to drag it over to be able to connect it, a drag/pan option would also be great, that if you you drag and get close to the border of your window it will pan for you

- are there plans for a group function? if i have a part of a shader done it would be great to group and close it into one node, shaderFX had this option, it really helps cleaning your shader tree, if not Unreal like commenting boxes would be great.

- how would i go about wrapping a ramp over the lighting of a model within custom lighting? In UDk it would be the lambert used as UV input on a ramp.

 

http://shaderforge.userecho.com/top...to-see-all-of-the-nodes-being-used-connected/

http://shaderforge.userecho.com/top...gether-unless-they-are-both-visible-onscreen/

http://shaderforge.userecho.com/top...odes-to-encapsulate-frequently-used-functions

So, yes, those have been asked before
But feel free to open new requests on the feedback page if you want to!

 

i'll look there now if i have something in mind, if i don't find it i'll use that page, thanks!

 

( I just found a bug, you can't use light attenuation without light color, but, you get the idea! )

 

@ the Developer.

Just a though on the "You cant sell shader packs" clause in the licence terms. : Why not make your own UBER-shader pack, and beat everyone to the punch? Some people simply can not, will not, or Do not want to make their own shaders. Those people will probably not buy a shader editor. But, if those people saw a really awesome HUGE pack of pre-made shaders, that had a shader editor included, they might snatch it up so they could tweak the shaders included in the pack.

This might also let you cross post your store page. You can have a Shader pack advertisement in the shader section (huge Made with Shaderforge logo of course), a Shader editor in the Editor extension section, and the Combo-pack in both for +1 more advertisement in each section.

It seems to me like you obviously make shaders to test the functionality of your product. Why not bundle them up and sell them ? You will nail the noobs, and the elite 1 one swoop it seems.

It probably would not cost you too much to Buy shaders from the community, or hire one of the shining young people here in this thread to make them for you. The blueprints are all there with the UDK tutorials, you could probably hire a render monkey for around $7 or $10 USD an hour to connect the dots for you if you are pressed for time.

The guys who buy it for the shader editor will also appreciate the examples. It will cut down on people asking questions. I would definitely have paid the extra little bit for an included bundle of ready made shaders I can tweak!

Hell put one together, I will still buy it! (if it is under $100). I learn more from example than from lesson.

I think this is wonderful product. It does everything I want as far as my own project. The licence is the only thing that brings me sadness and fear.

EDIT "Be careful with the Combo-pack" idea. Unity store might just say they Require you to only sell the bundle. It might be wise to first release the 2 separate packs, and then the Combo-pack later.

 

Hey Acegikmo,

Shader Forge is really great and I'm enjoying it so far! One quick question though: Is it possible to have a fully transparent material retain its specularity? Whenever I lower alpha to zero, specularity goes away. Am I just missing something?

 

In order to use Alpha, alpha blending hardware will kick in, which will take the final output color of the shader and blend it with the background based on the alpha value. That will mean whatever your color is, it's going to disappear to nothing if alpha is 0. The way to retain the specular would be to somehow alter/influence the alpha values based on the specularity, so that pixels that have some specular value have their alpha set (multiplied by? added to?) it.

 

Was just wondering, I've made a shader with an ambient occlusion map (I've disabled the ambient light, and use the ambient lights node for the lighter areas in the ao map, thus allowing me to use a flashlight or other dynamic light sources. The shader works really REALLY well but there is one problem, the fake light from the ambient occlusion doesn't affect the normal map, is there a way to cheat and have the brighter parts of the image act as a sort of light source on the normal map?

 

Hello,

Sorry for bothering you all, this topic is quite advanced for me but I did not find one for beginners.

I am having some trouble with a simple shader. It is a basic distortion field. It works great in Unity but when testing it on Android (Nvidia Shield) it gets really weird. Can anyone help a little?

 

I tested the Alpha version and it was working on MacOSX , the beta in the asset store seems to use A DLL.
So will the Beta / Final Versions Work on OSX?

 

Glad you like it!
This is something I've been giving some thought, and I'm not entirely sure how to deal with this. Essentially, the whole idea of "alpha" is a bit strange, realistically.

For now, set the alpha to something very low, and the specular to something very high, and it should show

Well, somewhat, the issue is that ambient lights don't have a direction. You can throw in directional lighting math yourself, but, from where would the ambient light shine?
What you'll want is an AO map based on the normal map, which many normal map applications usually are able to generate as well.
(I think UDK has 4 lights in their ambient setup though)

 

Both the alpha and the current version use a .dll, which works on both Windows and OSX

 

I just wanted to say again (after the review on the Asset Store Page), that this is one of the best Assets one can get for Unity.
But there are 1 or 2 questions I have regarding SF:

1. You clearly say that SF does not support Deferred Rendering. I can somehow say that I got the basic Unity Diffuse Lighting model working as a Custom Lighting Shader and it's running perfectly with Deferred Rendering and multiple lights and shadows. So is there something specific which isn't working?

2. My shaders seem to work fine, except if I put them up on a Pro Builder Mesh, they start to ignore some lights (on some faces), divide the Light strength by 2 (just guessing the number as it feels like it has halfed). Is there maybe a way that you can check (if you have Pro Builder) why this is happening and what might be the cause? As it would really help to get the SF shaders working on Pro Builder Meshes. See the image attached.


One can clearly see, that the upper part does not receive the lighting (I left textures for better visibility). This also happens in forward lighting by the way.

3. Why are we not allowed to sell SF shaders currently? I just hope it's because of the beta state SF is currently in.

Other than that, I really love the tool.

 

Glad you like SF!

#1 / #2: I think you answered #2 with your first question
Forward rendered shaders has a pixel light count limit of about 3, depending on the quality settings, after that lights will pop in and out depending on how important Unity considers them, which is why you're getting the issues mentioned in #2. The reason it works while deferred lighting is on, is because you can render things in both forward and deferred at the same time, they aren't exclusive.

#3: I'm worried people might start selling shaders to such an extent that others will be able to get the benefits of SF without actually owning it themselves. However, this restriction is going away in 0.21, simply because I'm not allowed to have a customize the asset license, which I missed in the Unity EULA.