Alloy Physical Shader Framework by RUST LTD.

Hi everyone. Just wanted to let those of you who've recently requested alpha access. We just finished with our last major internal framework revisions, and will sending you all out an alpha (and a little video to get setup) this weekend. Thanks for your patience

 

@n00body, has the Alloy version with this update been released yet?

Thanks.

EDIT: Also is there an issue with the Alloy SD4 shaders and SD 4.6.1? They are greyed out, so I grabbed the latest files from the Alloy plugin and copied acrossed. Unfortunately whilst this made the Alloy shaders appear, the native SD PBR shaders then became greyed out. When I tried to use the Alloy shaders to view my 3D view, SD crashed soon after. It seems to be an issue with the common/parallax.glsl file that causes the problem.

 

I won't be upgrading to Unity 5 for quite some time (likely 2016) so while being able to get the v2.x package perpetually would be nice I understand the annoying issues with providing versioning on the Asset Store.

A head's up when the "final" v2.x build is done should be sufficient, I think.

 

Hey Xen,

When you said "this weekend" last Friday, did you mean last weekend, or this upcoming? I'm unclear on the status of the alpha. I assume you guys are just hard at work and things are still coming ... I just want to plan accordingly.

Thanks,
Dale

 

@DGordon
Sorry about that. @xenius is flying home today so he was caught up in getting ready for that. I'll handle it for now, so just PM me your invoice number and Skype ID and we'll go from there, okay?

 

Hey, Just had a quick question. Is Alloy 3 going to be very specific for Unity 5 or could users of Unity 4 benefit from this version?

Thanks,
Sam

 

@iamsam
Alloy 3 is Unity 5 only, since we decided to take full advantage of its new features to make our shader set far more flexible and powerful than we could in prior releases. For the time being, we will continue to support Alloy 2 on Unity 4 for people who have project commitments.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. Wow will need to port everything to Unity 5 soon, cant go ahead without Alloy

 

@iamsam
Let me offer some clarification. It's not like Alloy 2 will stop working if you move it to Unity 5. I was just saying Alloy 2 will be the only option for people using Unity 4. While you can keep using it in Unity 5, we strongly recommend switching to Alloy 3 if you are going to make that move anyway.

 

Hey, Thanks for the clarification, that will surely help users like me in deciding what to do moving forward. We are in the process of deciding how to move ahead with our projects and I believe we surely would like to use Alloy 3 especially the new feature that integrates substance. Do you know when you would like enter the beta stage, since we would surely like to participate in helping out testing Alloy as we use it extensively in the project. Thanks again for replying soon. Sam

 

@iamsam
You can already try out Alloy 3 as part of our alpha if you are interested. The major difference between it and the beta at this point will be the presence of examples. However, if you have used Alloy 2 then you should have a pretty good idea of how to use Alloy 3.

PM me with your Alloy 2 invoice number and your Skype name so we can discuss getting you set up with Alloy 3.

 

Hi Everyone!

Just a note to all of you who requested alpha-access, I just sent out links this morning. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to PM me!

-Anton

 

Do it faster

 

I think you should be patient.....

 

Don't think like that anymore...

 

Now now, no arguing. Let's not let this turn into a Livenda thread

@ksam2 : We're launching the site on monday. You shall have your pretty then.

 

Okay, you guys win. I bought Substance Designer and hooked it up to Alloy. Wow.

Keep it up .

 

We're looking into using Alloy for a project which requires some outdoor scenes. I know you have a terrain shader, but it looks like it only accepts normal mapping, and not actual PBR? What about POM, etc? We also own RTP, are you guys going to offer some of the functionality they do at some point, or are you sticking to indoor scenes?

EDIT: I just want to add, theres a reason I still want to use Alloy even though we have some outdoor scenes heh. Not knocking anything, just need to know how to weigh things. Thanks.

 

Hi @DGordon We have a terrain shader in Unity 5 that is full-PBR. Its supports normal mapping, per splat-per-pixel roughness, has some per-splat options, and uses our detail mapping for a whole-terrain color, normal, occlusion basemap. The shader also supports near/far blending. I'll have some shots soon.

As for POM, not at the moment. Our performance tests showed it ran terribly. We probably don't imagine doing many of the things RTP does, as they involve some even more aggressive channel packing than I tend to feel comfortable with from a quality standpoint. More importantly, Unity has stated that they DO intend to replace the terrain system in 5.x, so putting a tremendous amount of time into a more robust system doesn't make a ton of sense.

 

@DGordon
I suspect part of your confusion with our Terrain shader is that we use each splat's base color's alpha to store roughness. A fully white alpha means the surface is completely rough and might look like it is just diffuse all over. We're doing the final touches on some enhancements to our map packer tool that will allow you to easily make maps that store color and roughness together with specular AA pre-computed and pre-applied.

 

Oh okay, glad to hear it . Please let us know (or PM me) when you have something to show and explain, as I'd like to do some tests with it sooner rather than later.

Thanks!

 

Not just a pic? I would like to see how skin shader looks

 

Hey,

Are there any compatibility issues with the new webgl build or should it just work? I'm unclear if *everything* is supported by html5 or only select pieces of functionality. I know when the Windows 8 build came out there were a *lot* of issues with compatibility because not all libraries worked on it.

 

@DGordon Honestly, your guess is as good as mine right now. I haven't yet had the time to test out WebGL-anything, though my understanding is that it is feature-restricted compared to a build. I believe glossy cube reflections aren't supported (or are otherwise broken currently).

 

I am very glad you did this. It will make your life so much easier . I hope to do a production reel on using Alloy soon.

 

Goooood morning fellow PBR Practitioners!


Alloy 3 for Unity 5
I'm happy to announce that we're ready to start talking publicly about what we've been working on for Alloy 3, alongside the relaunch of our web-page: http://alloy.rustltd.com/

In short, we've built an entirely new system from the ground up. Using many several of the features that are new in Unity 5, Alloy is now more flexible, and comprehensive than ever as a set.

We're feature-locked now, after extensive testing with a number of our partners over the past couple months, and will be entering beta soon (at which time the beta version will be pushed as a sub-package to the Alloy package on the Asset Store. We'll also be releasing videos over the run-up to GDC.

New Features
Before jumping into the details of the shaders themselves, I want to mention the two lighting enhancements that have been added with Alloy 3 that I'm truly excited about. The first is Proper lighting falloff also known as Inverse Square. What this means is that lights are appropriately bright near their emission point, but steeply fall off with distance. This is _essential_ in getting a more physical, tangible photo-real look for interior environments. Be aware though that you may need to go about lighting spaces a bit differently now, as the curve is considerably different from Unity's default

The second, which I have had no end of fun playing with over the past few months, is Spherical Area Lights, or more specifically, an approximation of them that Epic came up with that's simply _fantastic_. One doesn't realize how _wrong_ smooth materials like metal look with impossibly-punctual light highlights until one can actually give them some size. We've overridden the component for spot/point lights when you're using alloy, and added a script component that allows you to easily change light size now. I can't wait to see what you guys make using this!

Set Details
Instead of having dozens of explicit variants, the set now uses a system of toggleable property groups, allowing you to add features to materials just when you need them, in two simple clicks. These property groups can be added to almost every shader in the set and include:

Parallax: Add Parallax, or Parallax Occlusion Mapping
AO2: Add a second occlusion map using UV0/UV1. Great for Arch Viz!
Detail: Add Mul or Mulx2 Detail Mapping
Decal: Add an alpha-blended Decal Layer over your material.
TeamColor: Use masks in a packed texture to tint regions of your material.
Emission: Add animated emission with associated mask texture.
Rim Emission: Add textured and animated rim lighting.
Dissolve: Add alpha-cutout style vfx dissolve.

Beyond those features, Alloy now contains a number of base shaders beyond the core that are setup for more exotic effects and use cases:

Car Paint: Deferred-Compatible! With angle-dependent hue and metallic flakes.
Transmission: SSS-approximation that's great for cloth, paper, foliage and wax.
VFX Transition: Two whole materials, which can be burned between with a glowing edge.
Weighted Blend: Two whole materials, with soft blending and vertex color support.
4-Splat Terrain: With per-splat, per-terrain PBR params, and detail layer for base-map.

We've also built on the success of the beta skin shader in Alloy 2 that many of you loved, and now have a full character suite including:

Pre-Integrated Skin: With tinted AO, diffuse bump blur, transmission and more.
Hair Shaders: With anisotropic highlights and several alpha styles.
Eye Shaders: With Parallax Occlusion Mapped Iris and transmission
Eye Occlusion: Designed as a layer over the eye to properly ground it visually

On top of all of this, we now have a full SM5.0 Tessellation set as an optional import. Bumpy goodness for all!

So that's it for announcements for now. We'll be pushing to beta next week, so if you're not already in the alpha, don't worry, you'll get your hands on the set soon! We'll also be filling out our documentation over the next month, putting together videos to make your lives all easier.

We've also got some more cool announcements over the coming week, so stay tuned!

-The Alloy Team

 

Wow. Awesome. Thank you.

 

I'm looking forward to this.

 

Really enjoying Alloy 3. I like the new toggle property groups workflow much better. Great job guys .

 

I concur ... I hope in a future update, I can create frosted glass...

 

Hey @n00body and @xenius, I was looking around for new shading ideas, and I thought about having a feature update of Alloy that allowed the rendering of rounded corners (quite similar to how it is done in Modo and other offline renderers) on low poly models to give the illusion of a sharp corner on a pillar being rounded. (nothing on earth has a sharp corner like that)

 

@Neptune_Imaging Something close to what you're talking about already basically exists, and is called Phong Tessellation. It has some fairly substantial issues though, in that it doesn't handle UV/smooth group edges very well at all, and the surface tends to get disconnected easily. Modo/Blender/etc. are able to give you smooth previews precisely because they're not concerned with data-use performance. Auto-edge-smoothing like that is still a long way off in a usable-in-realtime context.

 

It was worth a shot ... I'll have to stick with modeling those rounded corners

 

Alpha testers: Quick fyi for you. If you're trying to use the terrain shader, stick with beta20, as in beta21 Unity made some changed to their terrain shaders, and broke everyone else's. yaaaaaaaaaaaaay *shoots self*

 

I'll have you know that the awesomeness of your shaders forced me to buy a new computer just to use them in all their glory.

I'll send you a PM with the bill. Thanks .

PS: Loving the skin/hair/eye shaders ...

 

I'm looking to throw some wolves into the mix. I assume Alloy does not handle fur shading at the moment ... are there any fur shaders that you guys tend to use? I just don't want to pick something up and find out it doesn't play well with Alloy ... thanks!

 

@DGordon We looked into some fur stuff aaaages ago for a contract project, and generally found that while you can get fairly decent fur working, it only works on an island (meaning it only gets 1-2 lights, specified in the shader), and has a host of other limitations. If you look at the trend of high-end hair renderering at the moment, its almost always done in veeery narrow contexts, so trying to build something for a generalized system probably wouldn't be successful.

 

Allo Friends!

I wanted to let you all know that we have pushed beta1 of Alloy3 as a sub-package on the Asset Store. You will find that it is zipped up, so that you do not accidentally attempt to import it into Unity4.x

Please note, the beta we've posted is for Unity 5 beta 22 ONLY.

I'll have a video up soon (hopefully by the end of the day) showing how to get everything setup.

 

Are there any differences to be aware of between the alpha and the beta?

 

@DGordon
Yes. Here they are:

1. Unity removed their implicit x2 for light intensities in Beta 22, so we had to as well. This means that light intensities will need to be adjusted to compensate.
2. Terrain is currently broken because Unity changed it in beta 21. We're investigating options and working with them to get it fixed.
3. We added a new Oriented Blend shader that allows you to render a world-space textured area on top of a material.
4. We modified the Weighted Blend shader's properties to be more like the new Oriented Blend shader.
5. We added Substance Painter 1.2 support to our preview shader, including normal map manipulation.

That's the major stuff I can recall off the top of my head.

 

what is beta 22?
all i can get access to is beta 21...

 

A later version is released to to the closed beta group first. If you can only see beta 21 now, that means you are in the public beta group.

 

Hey guys and gals,

I wanted to drop a link here to our first Alloy 3 blogpost:
http://alloy.rustltd.com/blog/index.php/2015/02/03/alloy-3-now-in-beta/

It's similar to the post I made here last week, but has a few more shiny pictures, and most importantly, a quickstart video (at the bottom of the post) for those of you testing out the beta!

 

I will upload some pictures soon, alloy works really good in beta22, really ! i will install more packages to test compatibility to forward here.

Beta 22 still have a bug when you change ApplyRootMotion, it breaks animation to idle

 

@xenius !

High five on getting the Beta out! Will you be by any chance adding the Decal Bumped Rim, Distort Bumped Rim and Detail Bumped Rim shaders back into alloy? We're using those in our 4 build for some excellent looking glass and ice but can't see them in Unity 5 with Alloy Beta 1!

Best Wishes,
Tim

 

@Desktopdaydreams
I highly recommend watching the @xenius quickstart video. Particularly at 4:27 where he covers the new tab feature system:

The long and the short of it is that we're using Unity 5's more robust shader management system to have a few high-level shaders with a bunch of optional features you can add via our new custom inspector.

So for example:

1. Decal Bumped Rim -> Core shader with the Decal, Detail, and Rim Emission features.
2. Distort Bumped Rim -> Glass/HighQuality shader with the Rim Emission feature.
   
3. Detail Bumped Rim -> Core shader with the Detail and Rim Emission features.

Does that help?

 

Hi @n00body,

Thanks for that, We'll take a look!

Best,
Tim

 

Hi @@n00body,

Looks like that did it, cheers! I'll try and get round to upload some screen grabs of our Ice tunnels at some point!

Cheers,
Tim

 

Hi Guys and Gals!

Just wanted to give you all a quick update on things. RC2 just dropped, so we're sluggin away at updating for it (some GI changes, etc.). There'll be an updated beta build in the Alloy Asset Store package before the weekend is out!

-Anton

 

Damn, already? I am eagerly awaiting to see the changes.