Advanced Surface Shaders - RELEASED

I'm not sure, I've never used substance textures. If they are output as standard textures that can be used with other shaders then yes, they will work.

Ok, sounds good. I'll try to get this in in the next version.

 

Do you have an estimate when the volumetric shaders will be fixed for the Rift? I would love to include them in our project before the deadline.

 

Does the skin shader have subsurface scattering?

 

Cool, will keep an eye out for the update. and thanks.

 

I found a work around for the hard edge... I need to access the alpha of the volume object via script, "previousVolumeColor" I believe.

I I'm looking into it now, but some help could be good ..

 

This will be in the next version which will be submitted today and probably available on Monday or Tuesday.

It has an the 'bent normals' approximation used in games like Uncharted. It's a fast solution that gives similar results to slower, more exact solutions. There'll be more options and versions of the skin shading in upcoming versions.

There'll be the ability to have a non-linear falloff for volume depth visibility in the next version which should give you what you need. In the mean time, if you tweak the 'Visibility' and the alpha in the 'Volume Color' in the volume component's Inspector, you might get an effect close to what you want. Don't bother changing the colour or properties of the material on the volume as that material is regenerated from the volume's setting and those changes will be lost.

 

Is there some specific settings when exporting (to web) with the Volumetric Objects in the scene to have them working properly? Currently my exports all have a giant pink objects where the volume object is when I export from Unity. Inside Unity it looks great. I tried changing from forward lighting back to deferred lighting with no luck so far...

 

Does the asset come with a tessellated skin shader? If not, can you create one or will it be possible for me to implement it as a designer?

I'm looking to create a skin shader that has tessellation based on distance, with both edge length and phong strength. As an example; say I have an 8k polygon model, when the camera is close to the model it tessellates and when I'm further away it has no tessellation. Is it possible?

Thanks!

 

Any luck with that so far?

 

Volumetric objects also seem to be creating errors/exceptions when I build the game to standalone (DX11, windows). It works fine in the editor though but that's no good for me obviously since I'll eventually need to build the game for release. Any luck with the fix for this yet?

 

Having some trouble with transparency.. I must be missing something., but it just doesn't work at all.

Generated a Transparent,Specular shader, and a few others, the alpha value of the main color has no effect, and if I use a texture with transparency, similarly, no effect. The material always remains fully opaque.

Unity standard transparency shaders act as expected given the same settings. I am using latest version 2.2.

 

Can you create a tessellated skin shader with this package? Thanks.

 

My needs also require lightmap support on the tessellation shaders. Any news?

 

In the Volumetric Objects in Unity3D video, at 35 seconds in, you create a Box Volume GameObject from the GameObject/Create Other/Volumetric Objects/ menu and a Box Volume GameObject appears in the Hierarchy. You select it, then suddenly I can hear a click (as if you hit a hot key) and the Box Volume appears in the Scene so that you can drag it around and position it as if it started off as a Prefab. How did you get so quickly from getting it into your Hierarchy to being able to see it in the Scene and freely drag it around and place it? Did you hit a hot key or something?

 

Bump since volumetric objects are still not fixed and it's been a loooong time...

 

Will there be Unity 4.5 support?

Right now it seems that this pack isn't working with this version.

 

I apologise. It's been a while since I've been able to dedicate the time to updating this pack based on new Unity updates, but I'll be doing so this week.

I'll have an update submitted within the next couple of days.

 

Nice! Thank you for the quick reply

I almost thought this great plugin would be dead.


Until the update will be released I found a workaround: Copy "AdvancedSS.cginc" and "AdvancedSSFunctions.cginc" in the Folder "Shaders" and every Folder ABOVE. Even the Assets folder itself. I made a picture thats shows where I had to put the files.

 

To be honest I've had a couple of false starts on directions to go for major updates as Unity has announced new features that have made me change my mind. I'm not interested in working on features and selling something that will be replaced by built-in Unity features before long.

Now that Unity 5 approaches and the fully deferred rendering pipeline will be available as well as the built-in physically based shading solution, I can better plan how to add to and improve this package going forward.

 

Hi, thanks for this awesome package! I was wondering is it possible to somehow plug in a texture2D to mask off the area that can be affected by the rim light? Would it be possible to include this feature with a future update? I have not posted in the forums before, so I hope this is right place to ask something like this. Thanks again.

 

Thanks for the update, good to see the shaders are still being supported.

I'm having issues with pink textures in 4.5, any idea on when the fix for those may be deployed on the Asset Store or otherwise? Looks like Unity 4.5 just doesn't want to include the AdvancedSSFunctions.cginc file in some of the shaders.

 

Unity 4.5 seems to be forcing shaders to compile #include lines that aren't part of their conditional path. Mobile shaders and some effects have deeper paths that require different relative include paths. Since this isn't working in 4.5, I'll have to switch to an absolute include path in the shaders. This will mean that the root AdvancedSurfaceShaders folder should not be moved from it's default location. I'll log a bug and see if it's something Unity will fix.

A temp fix while waiting for the update, if you have the package in the default location (Assets/AdvancedSurfaceShaders) then you can open up the AdvancedSS.cginc file (located in "Assets/AdvancedSurfaceShaders/Shaders") and remove the following lines (which are around halfway down the file):

Code (csharp):

1. #ifdef ADVANCEDSS_MOBILE
2. #if defined(ADVANCEDSS_TESSELLATION)  defined(ADVANCEDSS_ANYBUMPEFFECT)
3. #include "../../../AdvancedSSFunctions.cginc"
4. #else
5. #include "../../AdvancedSSFunctions.cginc"
6. #endif
7. #else
8. #if defined(ADVANCEDSS_TESSELLATION)  defined(ADVANCEDSS_ANYBUMPEFFECT)
9. #include "../../AdvancedSSFunctions.cginc"
10. #else
11. #include "../AdvancedSSFunctions.cginc"
12. #endif
13. #endif

and replace them with this line:

Code (csharp):

1. #include "Assets/AdvancedSurfaceShaders/Shaders/AdvancedSSFunctions.cginc"

 

Excellent, that fixed it. Sucks that Unity seems to break a lot of things when they decide to "fix" something. I wish they actually developed games with their engine so we wouldn't feel so much like lab rats on patch day.

PS: I updated my asset store review as promised, thanks for the support. Any chances of updates to the volumetric objects? My problems with them went away with 4.5 but I'd really like to see if its possible to get light scattering in the volumetric objects, akin to one of the other assets out there called Volumetric Fog.

 

When I deactivate a Volume game object in the editor, I get an ugly error message - how can I get rid of it? I'm using the Volumetric Objects asset.

[edit]Also, with a Volume object in the scene, it always asks if I want to save when I change the scene, even if I didn't do any changes. It would be cool if you could tackle this, too, because I change between scenes a lot.

 

Hi

Are the volumetrics working in Unity Free as well ?

Thanks

 

Hello, I require a shader for mobile that supports normal, specular and external light maps. Does this asset include or able to generate such a shader? Many thanks

 

Hey Matt will you be working on making this package compatible with 4.6.1 soon? Great work so far, did a review including all bugs faced on the asset store page, was my first place to tell, for whichever reason:/

@nasos no it seems not to be, look up my review on the asset store page:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/1093

I got a request on vertex blending in the generator though, wouldn't it be wise and easy to preselect the texcolor in the fragment function based on passed vertexes by the vertex func foreach texture & foreach texture channel / sampling choosen in the generator. Unsure if u get my point but basically I my idea is to avoid processing the special shader properties foreach texture channel / sampling, but rather pass a correct mix texture already sorted by the vertex blending. I'm quite unfamilar with shader writing, have just basic understanding from a while ago.

Anyway, hope for some updates soon :||

 

Hi,
any hope for a unity5 update ? ( volumetric objects in particular).
tks

 

Volumetric spheres are broken in Unity 5

 

To be honest, most is broken in U5. Does not support PBR either So an update would be great indeed! But even then I wouldn't trust the dev anymore to update it regular so I can always count on it.

 

Is this asset still being updated and supported??

 

Sadly, no. The shader mixer still works as far as I know, even parallax does. But you can't create own parallax maps without a tool costing 80$ according to the docs And the Volumetrics don't work either.
So the whole thing is useless more or less atm, even the standard shader does better parallax.
And for the shader mixer I won't buy this asset, there are many better shader mixers out there.

But initially this was a great asset, don't know why the dev dropped the support.

 

still no update....too bad we loose those awesome volumetric objects in u5

 

Exactly one year without a message from the dev. So, another 'lost' pack.

 

Sorry for the lack of information on this pack. I first released this in July 2011 so I hope you can understand it is difficult to continue to maintain and update it after that length of time as new versions of Unity come out changing the shader system.

I am now actively working on a new version that is a complete rewrite to suit the Unity 5 standard shader system. I've been working on the most efficient way to add functionality to the standard shaders (metallic and spec workflows) without having to duplicate them or modify them directly. I've got a good workflow for this now and it will allow me to add a number of new shader effects to the standard shaders while making it easy to maintain/update them as new Unity releases come out.

I'm utilising the new material/shader GUI system this time around so there'll primarily be 1 shader with customisable effects like the current standard shader(s).

Example Parallax Occlusion Mapping in AdvancedSS Standard Shader:


Additionally I will be updating the volumetric objects for Unity 5, but I'm intending on writing a completely new volumetric object/lighting system which will need to happen first.

I expect to have the first release out fairly soon with some of the most important effects that I feel are good additions to the standard shader such as Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Rim lighting options and some more control over emission (e.g. based on lighting for faking retroreflective materials). I'll include the old shader generator and volumetric objects in a zip file and they will be updated to work in Unity 5 as well where possible.

 

So great to have some news !!
Tks a lot ! waiting volumetrics a lot

 

I am a new Unity user, and am trying to use Unity for a research project in astronomy at school. I have a 3d cube that is 512 on a side that contains simulated data from the epoch of reionization. Each point in the cube corresponds, essentially, to a density of ionized hydrogen. I have been using Blender to render this volume using the 8bit raw voxel format (https://www.blender.org/manual/render/blender_render/textures/types/volume/voxel_data.html). The data values at each point in the cube have been used to modify density, emission, emission color, etc., of the volume. The end result can be seen in the following image:



Is there any support in your code for this sort of volume modification? I have watched the youtube video "Volumetric Objects in Unity 3D" and seen that you can apply 2D textures to a volume, creating the stripes and cloud textures demonstrated in the video. However, is it possible to obtain a similar result to the image above using your asset? Is there any support for "3D textures" such as a cube of data that can be used to modify different parameters at each point in the volume?

The end goal of this project is to be able to render volumes of simulated and observed data, and to be able to fly through them and watch the cube animate over time-steps or data sets. Hence I am looking into using game rendering software other than Blender, as their game render engine does not support all of the same shaders as their default blender render engine.

Any answers you have would be great. Also, please let me know if my post was confusing or if you have any further questions.

 

No support for 3D textures in volumes currently, but I'll add that in the next version. Unfortunately I'm so busy working on our current game every day that I have a hard time making time for other things like this package, but I'll do my best to peel myself away long enough to get something out soon. I've done some tests with 3D texture rendering with box volumes before:

It's not the most exciting texture, just a generated 8*8*8 texture with random colours and alpha values;

 

Works on Unity 5. Just replace

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. float t1, t2;
3.  

with

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. float t1 = 0;
3. float t2 = 0;
4.  

at line 100, SphereVolume.shader. Do the same with ConeVolume.shader (line 157)

 

In the 3D texture example, how do two same exact cubes look when next to each other? Does the volumetric effect make it look like a real rectangular prism or can you tell that there are two cubes next to each other?

 

It would look like a rectangular prism if both cubes (pixels?) had the same alpha value. Note that my example above has those visible cubes as it's a low res 3D texture with no filtering so each of those cubes is 1 pixel. You could also do something like jburba posted above, but I just made a quick 3D texture for that example.

The shader itself doesn't really care about one pixel versus another or one shape compared to another inside the 3D texture, it's simply grabbing a colour from where it needs it and the whole thing is treated as one shape.

I'll do some better examples soon when I'm getting closer to releasing the update.

 

I'm excited to see them. Looking forward to the release!

 

Hey there,
Looks like the volumetric cones are rendering behind other objects for some reason.

 

Is this asset abandoned? I really could use the volumetric objects. Will this work in 5.6 or 2017 ?

 

Nope, completely abandoned, sadly...
Depending on what you're after, check out Fog Volume 3 and UBER Standard Shader. Both feature a specific subset of features specifically and work absolutely wonderful!

 

I don't know if it is abandoned but i'm using many parts of it in my projects (still 5.6) without issues or console errors.

 

Wow, unexpected. Tested it out in 4.6.1 three years ago with the current version (no update since then!) and even then stuff was broken (atleast what I was planning to use). And as there are many other assets that do their thing better by now and are getting frequent updates, unless you have the money, no reason to spend on ASS