Alloy Physical Shader Framework by RUST LTD.

PERFECT, and it looks so realistic too!! And I was also trying to do distortion and couldn't figure that out... :/ Will be doing some research today on how to do it...

 

Just purchased the package.

How do I install the alloy for substance designer 4 stuff? Not seeing anything about it in the documentation.

 

You have to load it into the 3d viewer of Substance Designer 4

 

@SeanM3D
We stopped exposing f0 since we switched to parameters that are in line with Disney's "Principled BRDF". This allows us to better integrate with Unity, and provide artists with intuitive parameters that make it easier to ensure their materials are physically based. We decided to expose Specularity because we had an extra channel, and our customer polling showed that the designers wanted more material control. To get the "hardcoded 0.04" from before, all you have to do is set Specularity to 0.5.

The reason we are only supporting Skyshop SH is because that is the direction that Marmoset plans to go in the future.

@Neptune_Imaging
Distortion will come later when I do a proper eye shader with a parallax cornea. For now, can you make due with just the translucent shaders?

 

Yup... and it looks so good!! I am looking forward to do refractions with this...

 

I am liking this transparent shader way better... I will most likely add a gradient map on the alpha to drive the specularity, less specular near the iris... I also like that Fresnel kicks in when the specular bar is set to 0...

 

Is that skin using the Alloy shader?

 

I wish it was :sad:. I am using this for skin http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/172008-Pre-Integrated-Skin-Shader-announcements-and-feedback

 

Can't remember you ever exposed f0... What that in the last Update prior to this one?

Is Specularity linear in its influence on f0? I mean, does a Specularity of 0.25 yield an f0 of 0.02 and a Specularity of 1 a f0 of 0.08? If not, how can I convert from Specularity to f0?

Thanks.
Sean

 

@SeanM3D I think noobody was speaking about a pre-release version of Alloy an older Design Pattern.

Specularity maps linearly. 0=0.02 f0, 1 = 0.08 f0, .5 = 0.04 f0

 

@SeanM3D
Yes it is linear, and yes those mappings are correct. The idea is that Specularity makes better use of the texture channel precision and is easier for artists to tune since it occupies the range [0,1] rather than [0.02, 0.08].

Actually, we used to expose f0 in the prerelease version of Alloy, but that was fraught with problems. If you wish to learn more, please PM me.

EDIT: Slight mistake in my mapping. I meant [0,1] -> [0,0.08].

 

I hope you guys don't mind me chiming in, but would you guys mind if I did a video tutorial on texturing with Alloy? I will keep it simple as possible and illustrate an understanding on using a PBR system such as this one?

 

+1

 

@OneShotGG The Substance Designer 4 stuff, is easy to pop in. Im going to make a video soon, but for now, here's a quick how-to page with some pictures for ya: http://alloy.rustltd.com/?page=blog&post=using-substance-designer-4-alloy-preview-shader

 

The shader file alloy.glslfx is missing in the package.


EDIT: I found it in the Alloy 2.0 Unity Package.

 

When trying to set the reflection model to Skyshop and then trying to add a cube map it does not work. Just keeps saying empty in the slot. No errors in the console. Any ideas?

 

I've had that happen on my end too... In rsrm and all reflection modes

 

Hey, could you add a skin shader to this package? If yes, I would definetly buy it! But this is a missing thing so far

Anyway, good work!

 

I can confirm this is happening to me too :/

 

About to drum up some funding, so asset creators can wish me luck, because while i dont know how much i'll use everytging just yet, knowing its there is comfrting. What i'm particularly interested in at the moment is your translucent shader as I can't find an example it anywhere yet as it's described, it sounds immensely useful, are you able to give examples of it working visually? And if it can be altered to represent media like wax and also murky water, as the description seemed to imply it could be both leaning towards transparent as well as translucent (Could get very impressive results with that behaviour as in something like a burning candle that genuinely burns down over time, visually changing its nature based on temperature)

 

@Everyone: So sorry about the editor bug with the custom inputs!! We'll get a fix out in the next 48 hours! In the meantime, a stop-gap that might work would be binding it via material.setTexture in a script. I don't believe this is a shader bug, but rather one in our custom inspector. I'll post here again soon as we have it fixed.

@SoBit: Skin Shader (actually a whole family of them) are in the works. We'll post progress pics soon as that's really rolling along.

@Lazygunn: To answer your question with a series of comments, the translucent set in Alloy right now is your standard alpha-blended approach (like an Unity transparent shader), but with energy conservation, and sets of added features (such as distortion, rim, etc.). When we do the skin (SSS) shader family, which is a different sort of representation of translucency, there will be a shader in there that would be perfect for something like wax.

As for murky water, that is almost always accomplished via a multi-pass rendering solution, so falls outside the perview of just a shader. Typically, what's done is that a pass of the environment below the water is drawn, with fog enabled, any caustics are drawn, etc. Then after this, the water's surface (and the rest of the environment) is drawn over it. You could likely do this in Unity, but would require some render-texture/multiple camera trickery. I'm not sure how one would do it in deferred mode at all.

 

Hey guys... here are some notes for those using Alloy and Substance Designer 4. When you export your grayscale outputs, they will NOT have rgb channels! Open it in Photoshop, and you will notice that the color mode is set to index. In index color, there are no rgb channels... It will say index. To fix this, set the color mode to rgb and save. In substance designer, grayscale outputs will usually have a greyscale conversion node before it... To fix this, you can plug in a gradient map and it should export as an rgb image. When you use an index image with the pack map, it will read as all white. Try saving your grayscale texture maps in index color mode and create a pack map..., when you hit visualize, you will get nothing but white. With visualize, you are supposed to see a red color, a blue, a green, and a black and white alpha.

Let me know if this works

 

Ahh, strangely enough, considering these sort of packages are aimed at realism, i wasn't particularly concerned with realism hah, it was more an 'arty' approach to the aggregation of opacity in sea water, wholly from above the water surface, which I have a little idea for now, using an SSS effect controlled by depth. The actual underwater effect might not reflect this appearance at all, but i'm more concerned with the aesthetic than absolute realism. Wondered that with a shader versatile enough to emulate wax, which is more or less transparent when in fully liquid state and opaque when solid, that would be very applicable to what I had in mind. I think I like getting weird effects out of techniques with strong grounds in realism, but the package looks great and i'm interested in what you bring to the table regarding scattering effects

If possible would you be able to show representative sample images to demonstrate the appearance of each shader, perhaps in a few conditions? I'm buying blind a bunch of the time and it would be nice to know whats applicable to what before a buy. I can imagine i may well own it before this comes about but for future customers i'm sure it would be appreciated

 

@Lazygunn. While I would love to have the time to do such a thing, considering how many shaders/permutations already exist in the set, what you're talking about is making hundreds of examples, many of which only fully come into their own with fairly time-intensive-to-produce assets. For now, our focus is on designing and producing workflow/tutorial videos. Considering how small a team we are, I wouldn't count on any further sample/demonstration assets being produced by us until we do our Skin/SSS and Terrain updates. I know it puts a buyer in a difficult position. These are systems with aesthetic output, and buying into one is always an inherently a leap-and-hope moment, with the results being a combination of the power of the product and the content and techniques the customer is able to bring to the table.

If what you're looking for is interesting scattering/SSS/etc. effects then I would of course wait until we get to that update, and we should have a webplayer/video showing off what those will be used for. No firm timeline on that, but certainly not before GDC is over.

@Neptune, when you save out your greyscale maps from SD4, what file format are you using? I always use tga and I have had no problems in packing a map, or having the visualize system work. If the problem is on the SD4 side writing the images strangely, I would try another file format.

 

@Everyone: I wanted to let you know we just put together a quick how-to post on the Packed Material Maps in Alloy, which can be found here:
http://www.alloy.rustltd.com/?page=blog&post=alloy-workflow-how-packed-material-maps

I'll be putting up a video soon with similar content, with a bit more experimentation thrown in, but I wanted to get this out faster, as I know the community here is international, and non-native english speakers sometimes have an easier time with easily-translatable text tutorials.

Enjoy!

 

Sweet! I like how powerful this feature is and saves a ton of time for authoring...

 

@Everyone I have a fix for you! Namely, for the bug of not being able to drop in custom RSRMs/cubes. Just overwrite the file in your project called AlloyTextureDrawer.cs with the file i have attached here. It should be in Alloy/Editor. (drag it in as a move/replace in explorer to that location).

I'll be pushing this in as an update in the store later today, but I wanted to get this to you guys directly to save you a step in re-importing a large package.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2tu3m4xx3vq693w/AlloyTextureDrawer.cs

Cheers!

 

Sweet... thanks a bunch...

 

Purchased, exelent asset, nice skyshop integration. I would like to have tesselation and phong/pn triangeles smoothing. Xenius is there any chance to have tesselation in upcoming uber variant of shader you have talked about?

 

Just one question: When I set the environment mode to SkyshopSH do the spherical harmonics recognize custom cube maps? I.e. if I plug in a custom specular cube is this used to derive the spherical harmonics from?

 

@SeanM3D
Our shaders don't do anything like that, but I can't speak for Marmoset's sky system. You would need to ask them about that one, as we merely use the data and settings that they provide.

Does that answer your question?

 

Greetings fellow developers.

We are getting an odd error when importing to one of our project. We keep getting this error:

Assets/Alloy/ImageProcessors/Editor/AlloyCustomImportAction.cs(158,69): error CS0117: `PlayerSettings' does not contain a definition for `colorSpace'

Anyone else see this one? I have color space set to linear. :/ I do occasionally get this new bug that Unity introduced with 4.3 where the console reports back that it cannot save PlayerSettings, out of memory. However, I tried the work around by copying playersettings from the empty project with only Alloy into it, into my current project and still it throws this error - and Player Settings color space is set to linear every time I open it to double check it. This also prevents all other scripts in my project from compiling - so everything is broken. Doh!

EDIT** I tried the work around some people were doing when they get this error when saving project:
"Unity Could not serialize text file projectsettings/projectsettings.asset because an error occured - we probably ran out of memory."

So I copied my projectsettings.asset file from a build before Unity 4.3 (4.2 to 4.3 forced projectsettings into binary mode for some reason) and now I can save my project again without getting this error. It does not, however, remove the above error that breaks compiling of all scripts in the project.

 

@Seikan1: We've got a full DX11 set on our road-map, which will likely come out once we make the shift to an Ubershader model (to better handle the permutation space). We're waiting to do this for the multi-compile speed improvements that Aras has mentioned on twitter as being coming in the next version of Unity (to do it now would mean a 2+ hour import/compile time, due to the permutation space).

@SeanM3D: Regarding, the custom SH, that is not stored in the specular cube but is, per SkyShop's new behavior, stored in the generated sky itself. The idea behind the custom specular cube input is that it should be used in situations where:
1. You're just using a skyshop filtered spec reflection, and using beast lightmaps/probes/constant color for ambient
2. You have a scene with fairly homogeneous skyshop ambient, but want more specific spec cube reflections for some reason.

If you're wanting to change 100% of the incoming skyshop data for an object, that is done through the Skyshop API now, by binding a sky specifically to the object via script. I know this isn't how things used to work in SS, but we were informed that the Diffuse Cube was being dropped in the near future, and this was the way things should be handled now.

@Tethys: Not sure on this one. This seems worthy of a bug report. Something might have gotten corrupted in terms of serializing your project data during an update, as PlayerSettings.colorSpace has been in the API for a whiiile. You may hate me for asking this, but have you tried exporting the contents of your project as a package, and importing it into an entirely fresh project and seeing if your problems go away? This strikes me as a garbage-from-past-unity-versions problem.

 

@Xenius - Bwahaha, but how could I hate someone who created such an awesome tool?

It would be very difficult to pack our game as its sits at a little over 6 gigs right now and sometimes I get that odd error when trying to pack a huge project where Windows opens as many windows and programs as the app will allow and Unity fails out - it's a rare but documented Unity bug (well documented in the forums by users anyway).

I have Alloy working fine in another project so I was also leaning towards the same theory you shared. Wondering if there is any kind of project cleaning tool or something out there. I will let you know our solution once we find it (I also suspect I might be on Skype with n00body later tonight). Thanks for the speedy reply!

 

this - is - awesome *__*

Edit: Did you also think about hair shaders?

 

Hi! I Want to buy this package, but i dont know one thing - does this shaders works with substances (from substances database). this is very important. Thanks!

 

Greetings friends/developers.

FYI we were able to bypass our problem this morning and get Alloy working. I tried Alloy with a number of different frameworks on their own with no problems at all - apparently in our case it something to do with my build. Anywho, all I did was change the offending line of code to work around it and allow the rest of my project to compile. Since I know my project is set to linear as I set it myself, I did this:

Original code that broke my project (in the AlloyCustomImportAction.cs):
bool isEditorInLinearSpace = PlayerSettings.colorSpace != ColorSpace.Gamma;

My edited code:
bool isEditorInLinearSpace = true;

Problem solved and Alloy now loads in and allows all my other tools to compile and load as well. Thanks for the help and awesome plugin!

 

Thanks xenius, thanks n00body.

I'm not sure if I completely understood. I have a large outdoor scene with lots of houses. The walls of the house and most of their outer parts will be lit by one of the typical sky panoramas that Skyshop provides. Some parts of the buildings however require custom cubes because they are too occluded for assigning the sky panorama as their ambient lighting source.
So I want to go ahead and probe new environment panoramas at selected points. In earlier versions Skyshop would spit out a spec cube and a diffuse cube. Now the new SH shaders only require a spec cube. How do I make sure the diffuse ambient lighting is going to change as well and doesn't continue using the default sky panorama?

 

I think I found a bug or maybe two:

The AO is misaligned when I use Alloy shaders. It should be right at the wall and the doors, but it is offset:



It is correctly aligned when I use Skyshop shaders. I suppose Alloy shaders also use the 2nd UV channel?

I also found that I get too strong reflections when I use SkyshopSH environment mode. The material you see in this image has the Specularity channel set to black (i.e. 0.02) and the Roughness to white (i.e. completely rough) but yet I get this weird glossy appearance of my material:



Any idea what is causing this?

Thanks!

Sean

 

THIS IS EPIC! Pitty Alloy has such high requirements (only got intel HD 3000...) And i probably can't afford it

 

I know you guys said extraction will take long... But it's been extracting since yesterday, so like +20 hours and the bar is at about 80%
Is that normal? My CPU is Intel Core Duo E6750 @ 2.66GHz with 3GB RAM and a tortured hard drive.

 

Hi there,
I've recently bought Alloy and I'm trying to recreate the switch between RSRM and Skyshop reflections.
I'm changing the parameter "_EnvironmentMapMode" for every material in the scene but, although I see the change correctly in the Inspector, it doesn't change in the viewport. Am I missing something?
Also is there a way to change it globally?
Thanks in advance

 

Hi guys,
I´ve got the same problem as JovanD. I can´t get the shader-package installed. It takes ages (several hours) and I´ve got quite a fast computer :-( .
Very frustrated..

 

Sorry for being impatient. It took nearly a whole day to install, but I´ve got it working now and it looks great .

 

As a graphics programmer i wonder why are there any permutations in a "super/uber" shader that unity needs to compile separately, does unity not support conditional branching aka bool checks to properly configure the uber/super shader?

The last time i had to deal with shader permutations, where 8 years ago where SM 3.0 was kinda new and the conditional branching speed was crappy, while the instruction count was also to high for SM 2.0/ 1.3 targets. Back than we simply identified the permutations that where invalid, like bump/spec map without diffuse. We also used default black/white/grey 16x16 dummy textures in texture slots where this made mathematically sense, so we could save the condition check and reduce permutations further.

I would expect a modern "uber/super" shader to only use conditional branching, instead of using defines and compile one shader per permutation?
So from my point of view there should be no permutations that need to-be compiled in a modern "super/uber" shader, so whats going on here in Unity?

Do i miss something here, since this sounds all very strange to me?


Thx
Andy


PS: I only glanced over Unity's shader/render framework and while it seems a little strange i did not notice that conditional branching is not supported for unity shaders?

 

Is it possible to use the Alloy Framework shaders for real time reflections, i.e. mirrors, reflecting floors? If that´s possible could anybody please point me in the right direction?

Thanks,
Michael

 

Hi Hello n00body, my English is not good, please forgive me. First, I really like your tool, really cool.
My project model produced two UV, how do I make the AO map specified on the second UV?
SKYSHOP also specify the AO map in the second uv.
I tried to modify the shader, but an error, please help me.
Thank you very much!

 

J:\AOc.jpg

 

O Goodness! Sorry for the delayed reply to so many of you. For some reason I stopped getting auto-updates via email on this thread. Was wondering why it was so silent. I guess it wasn't So lets get some responses going!

@BrainMedicine: At the moment, Alloy doesn't plug in completely with native substances. We're working with Allegorithmic currently to get this pipeline running, though it isn't likely to be ready until after GDC craziness. You should be aware though, that Alloy is setup to take Allegorithmic's PBR substances only (their traditional ones don't have the requisite maps). My understanding is that they will expanding this side of their database substantially however.

@SeanM3D Basically, what you need to do is create a whole Sky Object (with custom probe) for each lighting environment you need. Then, in your scene, through some script, you need to bind the sky to the actual object (I don't know the specific syntax, but its in the Skyshop package). You're not plugging a specular cube into the object, you're telling a sky-object in your scene to be used by a given renderer. I know its a touch cumbersome at the moment, but this is the structure we were told to adhere to by Marmoset, as they're phasing out Diffuse Cubes.

re: The AO misalignment, I'm not sure what's going on, though Alloy shaders do _not_ use the second UV channel for the AO map. The packed material map is mapped 1:1 with the basecolor map. As for the glossiness you're experiencing, it would be easier for me to see whats going on with a repro case. Could you make up a package with just the offending object in a scene, the sky, etc. and PM me a dropbox link to it?

@JovanD/FogGobbler: That's not normal at all. The process shouldn't take more than 90 mins on a sloow cpu. Sounds like either the editor locked up, or on machines that are very ram limited the import/compilation pass is taking a toon of time. Let me know if you remain unable to get it in, and PM me your system specs.

@Andy2222: Basically, what happens now if you do conditional compiles is that Unity compiles _every_ permutation of the shader on import. It also does this for _every_ platform/build target/and i think Shader Model. Obviously, most of these aren't _ever_ used, so the process is quite time-intensive and wasteful. This is why the package takes so long to import at the moment. My understanding is that this situation will be ameliorated in future Unity versions, so once that happens, we will be able to do more extensive multi-compiling and expand the permutation space considerably.

If we weren't working in SM3.0, one could theoretically just use conditional branching. The problem in this case is that there are so many texture inputs across the set that we would exceed the maximum amount of temp registers/interpolants for SM3.0 (one or two of our fx shaders come right up the limit already).

@FogGobbler: Currently there's no Alloy shader that does real-time reflections (all though you could easily plug in a cubemap that you're doing a render-texture-real-time-capture to. We're also talking to the folks at Livenda about seeing how Alloy could plug into Candela SSR for physically-accurate realtime reflections. I'll post here again when I have more news about that.

@Gulanxiu: Right now, there's no way to make an Alloy shader use UV2 for the Occlusion map. That type of swapping is on the list for the future though. If you are trying to get a repeating texture (like wood) across a surface though, while having Unique-UV-space for the occlusion map, I would use one of the Detail Shaders, with a configuration like this:

BaseColor Map - White
Normal Map - Flat Normals
Material Map - (with black metallic, your baked occlusion in here, middle grey spec, 75% greyish roughness)

Detail Color - Have your wood color here, set its repeats to a large number (like 8x8, 16x16)
Detail Normal Map - Have your wood normals here
Detail Material Map - Have some grain AO for the wood here.


-- Whew, so thats everything for now. Hope I've answered your questions. If you run into anything super-pressing and you don't see a response here within 2-3 days, always feel free to PM me.

 

@ Xenius : Thanks for your reply. It would be really fantastic if it worked together with Candelas SSRR and Redplants SSAL.
Best regards, Michael