Shader Forge - A visual, node-based shader editor

I actually forgot about that one. I'm not sure how long it would take to implement it, as it would mean running the BRDF twice, but, I'll look into it.

It also depends on how you handle the depth buffer. You might want to fiddle with depth writing too and the depth test mode

 

Hello,
I'm trying to use lights to reveal other texture, I thought it would be easy.. but no success so far, any ideas please?

 

Many people understandably try this approach, but it unfortunately doesn't work due to how forward rendering is set up.

In forward rendering, it renders additively for each light source in the scene, which leads to things like this

 

Thanks for answer,
So, It comes to.. making the LIGHT TEXTURE with substracted MAIN TEX.
Light texture can be prepared to have substracted main texture:





[edit] or in SF it works like this:

 

Acegikmo,

Could you give us any information about whether Unity's normal map handling changed from Unity 4 to Unity 5?

We use object space normal mapping for a particular effect. In Unity 4, we did a particular conversion from our Object space normals to Tangent space in a SF shader.

In Unity 5, that same conversion only works when a particular object is 2 of the possible 4 cardinal directions it can face. The other 2 are subtley off.

Knowing more about any potential changes in normal maps between Unity 4 and 5 might help me repair this issue.

thanks.

I solved this... it turned out to be a color space issue.

 

I'm trying to make a simple cel shader that adds a tinted shadow to an otherwise flat-shaded model. I'm using vertex colors for the main color of my mesh, but the final result is tinted across the whole model rather than just in the shaded areas. If I replace the vertex color node with a color node it seems to display properly, without affecting the lit parts of the mesh. Any ideas as to why this would happen? Thanks!

 

I'm quite tired at the moment so not sure if I'm talking nonsense... but why are you using the emission slot and not the custom lighting one if you want to tint the shadow?

 

Honestly I wasn't really sure what the difference was so I just went with emission because it was more familiar to me.
Unfortunately, that's not what's causing my problem.

 

After "Add", I think you should put "clamp 0-1", you've got values over 1 there .

 

Perfect! Thanks so much

 

You just want to tint whatever is in shadow-- you might consider putting an IF node in there so you can just tint the bands of the posterization that is black or non-white (looking at your Bands input there.) Also, rather than adding, you might consider a Blend Mode: Screen so that you don't get color values that clip as ptm_oo mentions.

I made a shader that does something like this, and the IF bit is how I created discrete shadow coloration.

 

In shader forge we can use texture sampler as input. Can i grab texture result from shader? As example - I multiply two texture sampler - and grab result for Blit? If not, can i make this through code? How?

 

Or even better, use a lerp node with
A = shadow color
B = Light Color or white/lit color
T = your shading calculation / normal dot light

That saves computation times, makes the whole thing clearer and can be used with different bands of posterization, a gradual change or any kind of dot product.
And the calculation wont overshoot the dot product unlike the add node as people have mentioned.

You can't export or reference computed results from a shader to another one.
If the resulting texture changes at runtime/often(more than once per 5 seconds I would say), you might want to look into "compute shaders". You could also render the texture to a renderTexture but that costs just way too much for something as simple as that.
If it doesn't have to be changed that often then change the texture file using the CPU, multi-threading might be necessary depending on the texture resolution and how often you change it.

 

How to tie the lifetime of the particles with the parameter shader? Scripts? Is there a solution?

 

Not really, but you can read the alpha value of the vertex color. That is the parameter that is being set when you do "Color over lifetime"

 

Thanks a lot

 

I'm having exactly the same issue. Did anyone find a solution yet? This problem makes all the SSAO assets out there technically unusable if you require vegetation. Currently you have to use Unity's default Screen Space Ambient Obscurance post-processing effect. It's the only solution I know of that renders correct SSAO, including Shader Forge's forward vegetation shaders.

Except of course there's the rather huge issue that Screen Space Ambient Obscurance looks horrible at anything beyond 50 meters from the camera (it's a static grains festival). With no way to adjust the maximum distance of course (where would be the fun in that).

 

How do I fix this shader to it work correctly with the Color over lifetime parameter of the particles? I want that alpha changed from 255 to 0. Now the particles dramatically just die without the soft decay.

 

@Vladnes Multiply a vertex color

 

@Vladnes Update Shader Forge to latest 1.16 version. It has examples for particle shader when you create new shader.

 

Thank you, I have found that I need

 

Finally, after more than a year of waiting, we have now managed to get a huge sale, starting in about 5 hours
https://twitter.com/JoachimHolmer/status/615791983819231232

 

Shader Forge is now 65% off
http://www.u3d.as/6cc

 

With the right textures, could I make my own decent water shader (perhaps with things like wave deformation, caustics, rippling etc) with Shader Forge? If yes, how easy might it be?

 

Water shader is definitely possible. But you might want to split some effects over various shaders (like caustics).
Have you ever done anything with shaders before? Do you have basic knowledge? Have you been into visual node based scripting before? If so you should be able to put something together within a day or two based on UDK tutorials (they are a great source of information).
If you are new to this field you might find decent looking water to be a bit of a struggle for your first project.

 

It would be my first venture in to nodes. I'm just coming up to speed properly on C# and Unity having done programming in other languages before. I do like the way nodes work.

 

Hi,

Just got a little question about your amazing work : is there any possibility to make incredible shaders working with 2D sprites ? (like the Sprites/Diffuse one)

Thank you in advance !

 

Hi there,

Thank a lot for the great deal, i am a happy new customer.

Regards Peter

 

I don't know yet, that i will need this asset, but I couldn't resist for that price. I hope there will be no conflicts with the Alloy shader asset.

 

It is possible to make :
- Sub Surface scattering shaders for skin ?
- Fast vegetation transluent shaders ?

 

It should be! There is a 2D shader template you can start you shader with, which is set up properly for 2D. You can then alter it however you like

 

SSS is definitely possible. The cheapest way is to use the light wrapping input of the main node. Other techniques tend to be quite advanced, even when making it in a node-based editor, but, Google should help you out there

Translucency however, is almost always a pain, and you won't get away from sorting issues without sacrificing something. The easiest way is to use alpha clipping instead of alpha-blended transparency. SF also has dithered alpha clip support, if you want semi-partial transparency

 

Hi,

Before purchase i wish to know how shaders created by shader forge work for mobile devices(Both 2d/3d) in terms of CPU/GPU load?

Thanks.

 

Depends!
http://acegikmo.com/shaderforge/faq/?Q=mobileopt#mobileopt

 

There are a couple features I find that are missing!
1: ColorMask, we need this to keep the alpha channel untouch while still using alpha blended stuff. Our alpha channel contains how much we should heat distort, then we do heat distortion as part of the post process chain.
2: ZWrite, I need to be able to turn this on and off.

Then I have a wish for a feature that might be a little bit more complex.
The ability to create my own output structure, in this case the 4 textures that are output in deferred, but unlike unity's current deferred mine is slightly modified!

 

Thanks for the requests! You can already disable ZWrite though. It's in the blending settings, at the very bottom, called "Write to depth buffer"

ColorMask should be straightforward, I can make sure that makes it into the next update!
Not sure about the buffer setup though, that is, like you said, quite a bit more complex

 

Well, the buffer setup does require you to create a non-surface shader, but after that it's quite simple on the code side.
After the in-parameters from the vertex shader, you simply use the out keyword, ex:

Code (CSharp):

1. frag (v2f i, out target0 : SV_Target0, out target1 : SV_Target1, out target2 : SV_Target2)
2. {
3.        target0 = tex2D(_MainTex, i.uv);
4.        target1 = tex2D(_Spec, i.uv);
5.        target0 = tex2D(_Normals, i.uv);
6. }

 

It's more a matter of interface. The main node can no longer have sensible labels if you have a custom deferred setup, so I would have to add branching/exceptions to the way the main node works

 

Or in that case replace the main interface with those labels. I'm aware that not many people would use it, but the few people who are experienced enough to use it will often be forced away from shader forge otherwise.

On another note, a couple of missing nodes:
Clip
Discard

 

I will use Alloy perhaps for that task.
Thanks for your feedback, i already purchased shader forge as this is something that should be standard in Unity, and i couldn't loose this discount opportunity this time

 

Alpha clipping /fragment discarding is done using the Opacity clip input of the main node. You can, however, do it with the code node too

 

Is there a way to get the camera vector into a node?

 

Transform a vector 3 with the values (0,0,1) from view to world, using the transform node

 

Splendid. Really glad I bought this while it was on sale, it's way more fun than I expected!

 

Bought this yesterday and love it! I am a shader noob so I am sorry if my questions are stupid and get rolling eyes. As an example is it possible to blend a bunch of textures on to a cube sphere mesh and then somehow save the rendered texture output as a new texture of some common format so I could reapply the saved texture using a standard defuse shader at a later phase of my workflow? Reason I ask is to create a workflow using unity alone that will allow me to optimise my output for mobile platforms.

I have achieved this result in mud box but MB is overkill for what I want to do.

Thanks for creating such a great unity extension.

 

Hey Ace, I got Shader Forge yesterday and I'm trying some stuff with it.
Right now, I want to have a crystal ball effect on a plane. I think refraction is going to be the way to go, but I can't seem to get the proper effect. Everything is warping in weird ways with the refraction shader that is in the example assets.
I've tried several different normal maps, but none of them seem to do the job.

This is the closest I got:


This is the level without shader:


And the normal map on this screenshot:


It seems to push everything to the top left... I use orthographic camera, so it positioning shouldn't really matter. Any idea?

 

Make sure it's marked as a normal map in both the texture and the node in the shader

 

Looks like I missed the sale, bummer.

 

Not sure, if Shader Forge is at fault, but I hope someone can point me in the right direction. I used the material Phong and Gloss(0.3), strangely I get these artifacts with Gloss. Activating Lightmapping reduces the effect, but it's still occurring! Using PBL as material has a similar effect as activating Lightmapping. Couldn't recreate the effect with Unity PBL.

I take any input I can get
Cheers!

 

hi everyone, i got stuck on my shader for a while now, so i'm asking a bit of help ^^'
i'm doing a triplanar shader with a lot of param ( rotation, auto scaling, etc) , i removed all those options to focus on my little problem : i don't manage to make a proper mask with the object normal :



there is an Abs node between the transform and the mask.

the problem is that in the scene it give me this result :


only one face work, but if the object rotate, the texture become dark too . i don't really understand where is my problem.

thank you ^^