[Best Tool Asset Store Award] Amplify Shader Editor - Node-based Shader Creation Tool

Oooo. Ouch. The deprecation of the old Append node strips it from any shader that uses it. Sure, you get a log entry saying it was deprecated and to use the new one, but that breaks ANY and ALL shaders that use Append! And you don't even get an indication of the shaders that were using the old version; the node simply disappears from the network. That's...bad. Very bad.

 

...In fact, can you make the v1.1.0 dev07 package available again? I can't risk opening any more shaders in the editor and having them get foobar'ed. I'm hoping only the one shader I opened in the ASE editor was affected...

 

Yes this is very bad indeed!
It should have only shown the deprecated message but not remove the node from the graph.
This is quite the huge bug!
Expect a new build as soon as possible on the website.

EDIT: We've reverted to v1.1.0 dev 007 on the website until this issue is fixed.
Again, expect a new build with it fixed really soon!

 

We've been doing some tests on our end, creating shaders on older versions and importing to the newest version and unfortunately is importing correctly.
Can you let us know which ASE version your original shader was created with? Is it possible for you to share that shader with us?

Also if possible it would help could describe your import process? You imported the new version on top the old one with the ASE window opened and it failed?


EDIT: We were already able to finally reproduce this issue and are already working on a fix.

 

Good news everyone!

We just uploaded a new build into our website with that nasty issue fixed. It was not an issue from the 'Append' node itself but oddly enough from showing the deprecated message.

On newer Unity versions showing notifications on a Unity Editor window cannot be done inside an ScriptableObject constructor and now throws an exception. Which is exactly what was happening on our case, blocking the old Append node to be fully created and assigned to the graph.

Apologies for this huge inconvenience!

 

You guys ROCK! Thank you SO much for fixing this so quickly.

I'm glad you were finally able to reproduce the issue and rectify it. I think we're in disparate time zones, so I wasn't able to respond immediately to your request to upload my shader. I figured the old Append node not being instantiated in existing graphs was probably some kind of weird Unity "thing", and the behavior was somehow wasn't fully apparent in your regression testing.

Again, many many thanks. Cheers!!!

 

Hi,
is there any documentation about the HeightBlend node?

Thanks.

 

Hello, I've been getting my hands dirty with shaders using ASE - thank you for empowering me to do so!

Did this proximity reveal effect today, only took about 10 minutes!

smooth video link: https://thumbs.gfycat.com/FlippantFavoriteCentipede-mobile.mp4

 

anyone knows how to create a holographic recticle sight? with parallax?

 

Hi, thanks for the ASE, it is quite flexible to make own shaders.

I am building a shader with reflections and parallax effect that is close to CubemapReflections from the samples. Idea is, in a scene with a constant spot light, shader will be providing reflections with a parallax effect to a rotating (with gyro inputs) glass surfaced texture. What would be the best approach, are there any samples at the ASE that you think could be combined to CubemapReflections to get close my goal?

 

Hi there, Just got this add-on the other day, and has been amazing, However one problem popped to mind with the transparent cutoff setting, or perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but when I mask opacity there is a trace of white where I have masked, Any way to have that completely Masked out? (Metallic and smoothness have also been masked)

 

Hey ... I wonder if I can go from substance node to triplanar ...
Can I mod the Substance node and expose the texture property ?

 

Do you mean the heightmap texture blend? That's a community node, if I recall correctly it blends the two first inputs in a special way using a blend factor.

That's pretty awesome. Love the animation

I think your example is very specific but maybe take a look on the parallax fake interior example, see if that's something you want to achieve and then try to replace the "layers" with your reflections.

Did you try changing the mask clip value? You should get what you want by putting it to 0 or 1. Also keep in mind what operations you are doing to that channel, if for some reason they get remapped to a smaller range you might never get the result you want. If you share your shader I can be more sure about.

Yes and no? The thing is, the triplanar node is just a way to simplify the process of doing the triplanar effect, but it expects traditional textures to sample from. We could indeed add more options to it and support substances but the node is already one of the biggest ones and it was never intended to replace all possible triplanar cases. You can take a look at the node based triplanar sample and mimic that using substances.

 

Hi,

I work actually on a shader to see through wall, when characters are hide behind, and I have some problems with that. II'd like to use the characters position on screen and then, creating a map to use in the opacity mask output. I did that for 1 character, with fixe position, but I have a hard time to iterate for multiple random char... Does someone tried to do something similar with shaders ?


Thks.

 

Hi guys,

We just uploaded a new build into our website.
Here are the release notes:
Release Notes v1.1.0 dev 11:

• Fixes:
  • Fixed incorrect behaviour on creating connections through Alt + Shift
  • Fixed out of bounds exception caused by removing ports on shader functions
  • Fixed issue with 'Triplanar Sampler' node not deleting correctly in some occasions
  • Fixed ordering issues with Stencil Buffer example
• Improvements:
  • Overall improvements on nodes descriptions

Happy shader creations!

 

Is there an example of a world space shader anywhere.. I need to write a shader where the texture stays put in world space even if the object moves.. Basically so it looks like the object is moving thru the shader instead of being stuck to the object.

 

Hi may i know when is the ETA of the noise generator?

 

Hey Paulo .. thank you for your reply .. we met at Unite as well ( I was in same hotel and I came to visit Amplfy duting Unite ) Yes, I agree with you . I am not thinking about triplanar node as is a extra support you are giving as node, but more to the substance node .. I am wondering if the node can be extended in a way that you can reference to the texture and not to the RGBA .. in my case it would be usefull for my asset...I have already in place a function that allow user to drag a substance into the inspector and after I can get the texture, save in a specific path and update the shader .. so really not crucial feature, but nice to have

 

that's should be nice

 

Have notice that I can't use vertex color with transparent shadows. Trying to make particles that drop shadows and fade out. Is there a way to do this?

 

Did anyone know what will break the time node animation in editing mod?
All my time node only animate as play mode, even those amplify simple, but it use to animate in editing mod.

 

I'm having an issue with the LOD Crossfade toggle in Unity 2017.1. My Unity 5.4 shaders will throw certain errors since they use LOD Crossfading. Creating a blank shader in 2017.1 and enabling the crossfading will throw the same error, so suppose that's the way to recreate the issue.



Apparently since 2017.1 the crossfading is enabled by adding the "dithercrossfade" surface shader feature rather than using the keywords in the vert/frag shader. Although I can't get it to work

I'm a little bummed Unity doesn't upgrade the shaders automatically :/

 

@Amplify_Paulo
Did you try changing the mask clip value? You should get what you want by putting it to 0 or 1. Also keep in mind what operations you are doing to that channel, if for some reason they get remapped to a smaller range you might never get the result you want. If you share your shader I can be more sure about.

I figured out the problem, It had nothing to do with how I had setup the shader, it was because of the new ambient occlusion post effect that was released from unity. It would seem that by cutting out the alpha from the albedo doesn't cut it from the render path of post effects. Is there a setting? or have I stumbled across something?

 

You can take a look at the triplanar example, which has a switch that changes the effect between local and world space.
But the basically principle is using the world position as the input of the UVs of a texture sampler. Like this:

To be honest, I can't tell you for sure since we are time constrained with many other features and support but I'll see if we can push the priority on this one. At least for a perlin noise version.

Ah, I remember you, how are you doing? That is actually a good point, we'll have to take a look and discuss that. Thanks for pointing that out.

Seems to be working fine here, what exactly is your setup? Can you share the shader?

Does closing the editor windows and reopening help? Also be sure to have this checked:

Hey Jonny, how are you? Thank you for the warning, the good news is that we are aware of that bug and already working on a solution, so maybe in the next build we'll get a fix. To be fair to unity, sometimes they do upgrade shaders automatically, like when they only change a macro definition or something, in this case however they changed quite a bit so we have to do it ourselves. This will be a ongoing battle whenever a new version comes up. Thanks for reporting, these things get past us because the release notes don't really tell the whole story, so it's one of those we rely on the customer for feedback. Thx

Uhm, usually these bugs have something to do with depth but having the blend mode at masked should prove sufficient, I'll have to take a look.

 

Like @Amplify_Paulo commented we fortunately were aware of it and working on a fix. We already uploaded a new build into our website with it fixed.
Please let us know if everything is working as it should on your end.

 

Cool beans, thanks guys! Opened the 5.4 shaders and recompiled successfully

 

If you get the latest one in the website you should be able to compile in recent versions of Unity as well

 

Just bought Amplify Editor and I'm totally overwhelmed with it, I'm just loving it. Great job, guys! Now as far as I understand, the Custom Lighting mode was introduced not long ago and it is not 100 percent error-proof. So can anyone tell me if this is normal behaviour? When I set shader to Custom Lighting and there is a Point light in the scene, the light's falloff does not gradually fade out but rather chops off. You can see that on the screenshot. As you see, shader consists of a simple gray texture fed directly to Emission channel of the output node, so no lights should interfere at all, however there is this this bright square which bounds are affected by Point Light's Range. Can someone tell me if it's supposed to be that way or it's a bug?

There is a workaround: you can multiply texture with Light Attenuation, but that's something I really, really don't want to do. I tried searching this thread and did not find anything relevant, sorry if it was discussed already. Thanks!

 

That's intended behavior. The thing is, it's up to the user to do the lighting (hence the name) but there is one caveat (at least for the immediate future), unity's custom light for surface shaders only supports forward. The reason this is important here is because multiple lights are added to the model, thats the reason you are seeing the bright square. The reason is a square tho is because you are not specifying anything to make it attenuate like point lights do. So you need to do it yourself. This eventually fallbacks to what you figure it out already, you have to use the light attenuation node since that's represents the smooth light attenuation for points lights and the shadow attenuation for direction lights. I understand that you might not want shadows at all and for that you have multiple solutions. You can set the shader to not cast shadows in the general properties or if you want to do something more fancy you can use the node "world space light pos" to get the type of light (I know it's a weird node to have that information but that is using an internal unity value, we may separate this at some point to prevent confusion). With that you can filter out directional or point lights. You could then use light color (which also contains intensity information) to make something with them.

Here's a simple example:

Doing your own lighting is already confusing enough but we are aware that we might need to improve some on it to prevent confusion so please keep the questions coming if you have them, we might change some stuff around user feedback.

cheers

 

Hey Paulo, thanks for your elaborate reply! Yup, you're right, it's a bit confusing... I think I understand the whole concept, it's just I don't understand the math. I'll try to elaborate. I've made these 3 screenshots.

On screen (1) the setup is simple: there is a Light Attenuation node been multiplied with other light data and the texture. Lighting works like it should.

Setup (2) is almost the same, I am just adding a toon ramp and feeding the whole path into it's UV. Now, since calculations work left to right I assume that nothing would be different in terms of light, but suddenly - woah! The square is back again. Note that Light Attenuation is still there and working.

In setup (3) I'm just adding a workaround - multiplying the whole chain with a Light Attenuation the second time. And that's what I can't understand - Light Attenuation is already present in the whole multiplication chain but it's as if lights are being applied directly to the ramp texture for some reason... The result is not that good - lots of rich black which I avoid, colors are a bit off and I'm losing lower part of my toon ramp which is essential for coloring shadows.

Maybe there is a better way? I feel like I'm missing something vital here.

UPD: oh, I think I get it, looks like I've got a paradigm mix-up. Amplify creates a surface shader which inevitably is modified by Unity later on (and the "lights add" pass happens when the surface is already drawn if I understand this correctly), and I need a fragment shader which would do the lighting from scratch. This is the issue, right? I'm actually new to hardware shaders so I don't fully understand how stuff works.

 

mind sharing how did u do the cellular noise nodes?

 

Hi guys,

We've just uploaded a new build into our website.
Here are the release notes:

Release Notes v1.1.0 dev 13:

• Fixes:
  • Fixed issue with reading incorrect legacy port info into 'Lerp' node
  • Fixed issue on cycling through deleted nodes when using the Nodes Search Bar
  • Fixed issue with incorrectly moving nodes nested into multiple 'Commentary' nodes
  • Fixed issue on Undo not registering internal node movement on 'Commentary' nodes
  • Fixed issue when using 'Virtual Texture Object' node on Vertex ports
  • Fixed issue with incorrectly moving selected nodes while resizing side menus
• Improvements:
  • 'Simple Contrast' node now always store its result on a local variable
  • Greatly improved 'Commentary' node:
    • You now can use box selection inside the node body
    • You now can create Wire nodes by double clicking on a wire inside the node body
    • You now select and drag the node via its header or by pressing anywhere on the node body having the Alt key down
    • You now need to double click the node header to be able to modify its comment directly from there

Notice that we made some changes on how to interact with the 'Commentary' node in order to improve its usage. Please let us know if you find any issues with those or don't completely agree on what has been done.

Happy shader creations!

 

Hi! maybe there is a little bug in Texture Sample nodes.
Every time I set A sample nodes as Normal Map(the source come from Texture Object), Next time I reload the shader, amplify just forgot it. I must set it as Normal Map again.

I am using Version 1.1.0.007.

Anyway, what different as Normal map vs texture? is that the range from 0 to 1 remap to -1 to 1? some like X*2-1?

 

Hey, sorry for the delay, custom lighting does requires you to know how lighting and unity works, unfortunately it's not something easy to teach and deal with in editors. It's not just because unity surface shaders then generate shaders that is the problem. The problem resides in the way forward rendering works and how you do your calculations. Lets assume you didn't have the extra "add passes" for a moment. Without them you can't have more than one light source for your objects. You also need to know how unity deals with different types of lighting, the smooth falloff of a point light comes for a texture that is sampled based on distance while the directional light is simply a color value. The first you get from unity using their macros for light attenuation which is usually coupled with shadows, the second is not. All I'm saying is that if you want to use custom lighting there are a few good tutorials out there that teach you the basics and we also included a sample "customlightingtoon" that shows how you can use different nodes to achieve a toon ramp shader with light information and rim lights. Go take a look and notice how we do use light attenuation twice in the tree, with time you'll feel more comfortable with it, and again, if you find any issues or things we think we can improve on please tell us. It's a difficult topic to solve because it's highly dependent on user knowledge so any suggestions are welcome.

We'll need to investigate that. Certainly seems like a bug. A normal map is encoded differently in disk, this is because it uses clever math to encode less and thus being able to get normal maps that are highly compressible. This also means you need to read and use them differently inside the shader, this we call unpack and remap respectively (the later one being the calculations you were referring to). The texture sample node handles all that when you tick "normal map".

I suspect that the image you are using as a normal map is changing the node since the node detects the type of image and changes automatically to the right type of sampler. I'll investigate.

 

Just to let you know, your two noises links are the same.

 

This is my WIP without "volumetric" or "parallax" using ASE in one shader without any mesh.

 

Oh, that's nothing, you guys are replying waay faster than other products' support teams anyway and I really appreciate that. Also not many product teams watch discussions in their product forums. Yeah, I'm starting to really understand that shaders are not that simple as material editors in apps like After Effects/Blender/Cinema, where what you see is what you get.

That's actually the first thing I started with, this shader is awesome and I learned a lot from it (and there is still a lot to learn from), but it is not useable for me "as is" because with it the lowest color in scene (i.e. when your lights are dimmed) is black and I want it to be the lowest in the ramp (purple, for example). It may seem like a minor problem at first, but just you try to tackle it, ha.

Anyway, after a lot of trial and error I came to some solution - I started with WorldSpaceLightPos tip you gave earlier. This solution gives me colored lights and one directional light (only one for some reason) all at once, and the shadows are the right color. There is still room for enhancements though, and it looks like the chain could be simplified, but I think I'll stick with it for now. Although if you have a tip on how to mod this setup, that would be cool. Oh yeah, interesting detail - throwing in Normalize nodes here and there in the Compensation chain gets me wonderful Point Light results but totally cancel out Direct light. Weird.

 

is it possible to blend normals at the intersection of two objects?
Defferred rendering.

 

So yeah, Still persisting after messing around with all the click boxes and options and combinations, still cant find whats the problem. the ambient occlusion still affects the whole object.

 

Hi All, i have asked Amplify directly but didn't get an answer. Does this shader editor allow you to use UV channels other than 0 and 1 .. i need to use UV 2 & 3 for my shader requirements (i was previously using ShaderForge but recent bugs have made is un-viable).

 

Joe? Apologies for the delay but we have a queue of emails to get to, we are preparing an answer for you as we speak.

Short answer, yes.

Edit
Reply sent.

You can use as many UV channels as Unity allows you to use, currently 4. The UV Channel is set directly in the node proprieties tab under UV Set.

 

While it's not entirely impossible it's not something I would recommend solving with shaders, when you blend normals you have no good way to smooth and rotate those normals at near intersections in realtime so the result kinda looks off. Also, you really don't have a good way to tell where those intersections are. You would also need to know the distance to other surfaces, you would need something like Unreal's distance fields system and even that doesn't cover all cases. You would need some sort of system that fetches the normals and feeds to the shaders. I've actually tried using some sort of analytical process before, like blending a flat ground plane with something else and again the results didn't transition okay. The best way is to have an offline script that overrides the object normal with whatever is intersecting with, but of course doesn't support runtime changes (there are quite a few in the asset store or you can even write one yourself, it's not too hard).

Hi killa, this is a hard one. We did several tests on this one and so far we know this is a unity 2017.1 issue only. For some reason pretty much any shader that isn't the standard one isn't writing normals when you put the shader in alphatest mode, which is the type of shader you want to produce. Without them, the AO script breaks and it looks like the depth isn't correct. This seems like a bug since the release notes don't mention any changes in that regard and we tried the same repo cases in multiple unity versions an only the latest one doesn't work, we even tried shaders written from scratch as well as vertex frag ones, so we'll report this as a bug. Unfortunately doesn't seem we can do much more until unity replies back. :\

 

Is there a way to dither the alpha clip factor like Shader Forge supports? Or at least, is there a node graph setup I could use to implement a similar effect? Also, speaking of Shader Forge features, is there a way to easily tile the screen position, like the dropdown in SF offers here?

 

The way our dither works it's generating dither according to the camera, you could then use it to change a texture but I guess it makes some sense having an input so you can drive the dither without extra nodes or calculations. Should be simple to add, I'll take a look in-between features to add it.

About the screen position, our node is a bit different, the default screen position is a raw value which might not always be what you want because is skewed by the depth, useful for many other things. The normalized version isn't skewed so its just a short hand for doing screen space effects. I'm guessing what you want with the tiled version is having one of the axis resize according to the screen ratio. We could add it as well, it's just it's usefulness is highly depended on your setup, do you want it to tile on X axis or Y axis? it would be weird to have just one option but we don't want to have a bunch of them as well and make it more confusing so we let users do it for themselves. To be fair tho we do want to make things easier for users so we'll take a closer look if it's something worth adding, thanks for the suggestion

Here's a two ways you could do it X and Y respectively:

 

Perfect! I'll look into getting this screen space mapping to work and just use a workaround dither texture for the time being. Thanks for the fast reply!

 

Hello again guys!

I´m trying to make kind of a translucid water shader by combining ASE´s power with Substance Designer´s.
I´m using an animated texture that I am driving through a substance as the transparency texture for my shader.

The shader is basically an implementation of the Parallax Occlusion Mapping shader you guys provide in your example with a few added features such as transparency.

The problem I am having right now is that the transparency kind of flickers, and this seems to be very ¨cam orientation dependent¨... So I´m not sure if this might be a problem that I am not considering while using the Screen Grab Position node or something (maybe I need to normalize it just like you recommended Murgilod?). The other thing that I have noticed has a huge impact on how often this happens is whether I have the "outline" option active on the shader or not (it happens more often when the outline is active, and when that is the case the alpha tends to be replaced by the outline color (I'm guessing it's just seeing the "exploded mesh" that the shader is generating for the outline that is behind the mesh holding the material with the shader??).

I am willing to provide screen shots of my node setup however it is very big and I feel that given the fact I am new to this asset I feel like it might be unnecessary as this might just have a simple fix.

Is there a reason why this might be happening?? Should I provide a quick video about both my game and node setups to help identify the possible problem???

Thank you so much for all your support,

It's a great asset the one you guys have created!

 

Hey there

We would like to implement our own height fog but still make use of the lighting nodes (Lambert, BlinnPhong, etc). Is there any way? Or will we need to use custom lighting, implement BlinnPhong by hand in every shader then apply fog before emitting the color?

 

Hello ASE team,

I have come to the conclusion that the problem is at least 99% related to the outline, I am trying to be able to control the parameters of the outline directly through the inspector, stuff such as "turn outline on/off" since I am probably going to have to exclude it in a pass in order to not consider it once I render the transparency of the water shader that I'm working on.

Is there any way I could do this? I haven't been able to find a way to expose that parameter.

Thanks for all the help and the wonderful product.

 

So I am still waiting for the possibility to make arrays. Is this already possible?

I hope you guys remember my really early post almost one year ago:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/a...sed-shader-creation-tool.430959/#post-2793373

You have today an example with a "ForceShield" Scene. This is supercool but what if I want to not to have limit to ONE impact / hitposition? So I would have same blueprint for the impact again and again.. up to 10 times. I would lose mind and overview.
if I want to make possible up 10 impacts I need arrays. I hope this is possible now.

EDIT: I see you have Shader Functions. Maybe there is tricky part to solve this problem

To imagine and as example please watch this small video:

Here you see there is multiple impacts.

 

Hello there, I am currently working on another shader which replicates another shader created in shader forge :

.

However I'm having some issues with Component Mask not being able to mask RGBA and Texture 2D which I cannot find a fix for . Current Picture of what I have are attached.