Alloy Physical Shader Framework Version 3 For Unity 5

Here's a quick example of something we've put together using the car paint shader (unofficially-officially endorsed by the fine gentlemen at Rust):



It's got great options for controlling the paint flecks, as well as secondary coat colors, to cover a wide range of looks and finishes. Actually exceeded our expectations, especially given that this is just one of many many shaders you're getting in the suite.

 

I am trying to find some more information about the decal system used by Alloy, but not much is available. Does it include a full projection system, or does it just "support" decals?

I just want to project lines on tarmac. Nothing fancy, just flat static meshes. Preferably using deferred decals.

Speaking of road paint, does Alloy include a shader which has retro reflective properties, like with road signs and hi-vis jackets?

 

This is looking purty. Is Candela working in U5 yet?

And @n00body I have a feature request for the hair shader, just something minor. Do you think you can add a normal map strength slider? I was playing around with normal maps and trying to fix the strength and how they influence the look of the hair. Is this possible to work with?

 

Are you using Armor All on this? This look phenomenal

 

Candela works just fine

I seem to be having an issue with the skin shader and lighing, when i walk directly under a light this is what happens:







Any idea why that is happening?


Thanks!

 

That is a strange little thing there... are you using GI? Also on the main physical properties, those should be set to one... the packed map should be already set.

Metallic should be 1 for skin
Specularity should be .35 constant unless you are using Microdetail
And roughness should be at least .7 as a base
And you need a transmission map.

For skin, the scale should be set to 1 if you are using real world scale. Also set up light probes in your scene...

 

I tried both with GI and without GI and I still get the same results (realtime lights or baked lights)
It's basically the shadow I think but it's much too dark and chopping off some of the hand.

 

You need light probes in the scene to capture GI for the skin shader.

 

i see, i will try that, thanks for the suggestion.

 

Would the Alloy team be interested in making a physically based Atmospheric Scattering effect which looks like this?

I would buy that in a heartbeat.

This should also blend in nicely with the existing Alloy shaders without having to modify them.

Related feature request:
http://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/physically-based-atmospheric-scattering-rayleigh-mie-1

But as always, if Unity's build in stuff is crap, there is money to be made ;-)

 

Thanks, it's amazing.

 

Hello, hate to add to the growing list of posts....but will Alloy's translucent skin and/or glass shader allow overlapping and embedded geometry(s)? What I'm looking for is something that can simulate real world beeswax/paraffin candle that's embedded with clusters of both opaque and translucent objects inside it. Thanks

 

You could pull this off through baking but I see texturing something like this could be challenging.

 

Thanks N_I...good suggestion and good news. Will pick Alloy up and do some experimenting with it...goal is to make "fine art" objects where a player/user manipulates a light to reveal what's lurking/hidden inside. Might consult with Rust if I run into major roadblocks.

 

@Elecman: I responded on the previous page that we're probably not going to be doing physically-based atmospherics, as that would most likely be a post-effect and falls outside of the purview of the framework.

@toddheilmann: Feel free to pm me with more details about what you're doing exactly. Sounds interesting (and interesting gets more of my attention).

 

For this effect to work, you could paint the transmission map to fake the objects inside. Or for advanced details, you can bake a transmission map with the object inside

 

Can you please work on skin shader a little more?

 

@ksam2 Would you care to be more specific? The Alloy Skin shader is already the sum of the pre-integrated-skin approach that is used industry wide, and a swathe of techniques from Activision's paper on high-end skin rendering. Everything else fancier that can be done with skin (that we know of) would require modifications to the engine itself.

If there's anything else you would like to see _specifically_ please feel free to broach the technique, preferably with a reference example of that technique in use in a game/demo/equivalent.

 

Sorry I didn't mean it isn't awesome. It's the best atleast for now. But it can be better always

 

@ksam2 Everything can certainly be better, but when you phrase your question "Can you please work on the...." you imply that there's something you feel isn't done or sufficient, but you provided no information as to what that would be.

We are always looking for opportunities to improve Alloy, and take user requests into consideration with our future plans. Just please remember that feature suggestions and requests aren't useful if not accompanied with specifics.

 

As someone who helped with testing out the skin shader rigorously, I think there isn't anything more you can do to it. The quality is up to the artist at this point and careful attention to modeling skin and such. Though I will admit, I kinda miss the metal on skin effect (a la Terminator or metallic lipstick) but I can work around that...

As for the hair, there is some weird issue I keep running into and I hope this will be improved in the future... if I increase the alpha cutoff to one, the hair kinda blends into itself which is unexpected behaviour (unless I missed something). At 1, I am expecting full alpha usage with no blending like in the shot below



So to get around this... I use a lower range like .8 to make it less noticable. And I think a slider for normal mapping strength would be great for hair.

 

Hey guys!

I wanted to share a video (finally) of one of the Alloy demos I put together for GDC (PC build link in the youtube video description). This piece was build in b22-RC3 of Unity 5 while we were putting the finishing touches on Alloy 3. It makes heavy usage of the oriented blend shaders, the particles shaders (for the cool searchlight effect), glass shader for the water, and a mess of other stuffs.

If you're curious at all about the project its a part of, I also (finally) updated my blog for it here: http://blog.nulloperator.com/2015/04/27/turns-out-second-blog-posts-are-even-more-awkward/

Enjoy!

 

Really nice video!

Just as an update to this previous post:

For mod support, and with Unity 5 AssetBundles being free for everyone, I finally got around to loading textures from assetbundles into the Alloy Core shader at runtime successfully without having to use the packer. I packed the maps using Substance Painter's export function, and set Bypass sRGB Sampling in the Unity inspector before creating the assetbundle for the textures. Is there anything else I need to set for the packed maps other than that?

Thanks.

 

I just submitted an updated to my Sci-Fi Collection to work better with POM in Alloy 3.

The images below contain in order 3, 3 and 1 quad poly. The Substance+Alloy POM provide the depth on the panels.

 

Sweet Buttery Jesus, this looks SO COOL>

 

Thanks Neptune .

 

How does Parallax Occlusion Mapping look in VR?

 

I only wish POM wasn't so damn expensive

 

@Elecman
Our artist swears by it in VR.

@Neptune_Imaging
Well it uses a form of ray-tracing, so you had to expect that it would have a sizable cost to it.

 

Less expensive than geometry?

 

@Elecman That's something that you're going to have to figure out on a case-by-case basis. POM is great for representing complex and noisy topologies, but breaks terribly (visually) on veeery steep rapid height changes. It should always be perf-tested in the context it is being used.

 

Ok, will try out the difference. I want to make a material for a forest viewed from above that looks something like this:



I guess this qualifies as complex and noisy. The funny thing is that I have never seen something like this implemented. Anywhere. Yet it should be far cheaper to do this directly one a terrain as a material (using clever texturing) than rendering individual trees, which is the way everyone has done this before.

It won't be suitable for walk-through forests, but for terrain in the distance it should work just fine.

Will give it a try

The biggest problem is that I am not an artist. I wish there was a substance for this...

 

Has the beans been spilled on this yet?

 

@blueivy Not yet, still doing testing on it. I don't want to commit to sharing it publicly until we're CERTAIN it works within a reasonable perf window.

 

Hi Everyone! It's that time again!

Alloy 3.1.0 is on the store
Version 3.10 Release Notes
=====================
Shaders:
- Added "Directional Blend" shaders with support for blending around an arbitrary direction on the surface.
- Added "Vertex Blend 4Splat" shaders with support for blending 4 splats using vertex colors.
- Added a secondary vertex color tint slider to the "Oriented*", "Transition", & "Weighted Blend" shaders.
- Added a Pupil Dilation control to the "Eye/Eyeball".
- Added directional control to the "Oriented Blend" shaders.
- Changed all shaders to now have the Global Illumination control at the top so all types of emission can affect GI.
* You will need to manually set all your static objects to "None", as this control always defaults to "Realtime".
- Changed the "CarPaint" shader.
* Added a primary tint color that is applied in the masked areas.
* "Main Textures" tint color now affects both primary and secondary paint colors.
* Toggle legacy behavior in the config header.
- Changed the "Eye/Eyeball" shader.
* Split up the "Eye Properties" into two smaller sections.
* Added a Schlera tint color.
* "Main Textures" tint color now affects both Schlera and Iris colors.
* Toggle legacy behavior in the config header.
- Changed our Parallax code to reduce the overall cost per active feature and simplify the API.
- Changed "Weighted Blend" & "Oriented Blend" to allow emission to be blended over.
- Changed "Weighted Blend" to remove Secondary Rim, as there should only be one rim term for the combined material.
- Changed "Transition" so that the Dissolve feature now accounts for each layer's parallax texture offsets.
- Fixed the "Particle*" shaders so that input vertex colors now receive gamma-correction.
- Fixed the "Tessellation/Oriented*" shaders which erroniously were set to target SM3.0, and had parallax properties.
- Fixed it so that Fade rendering mode no longer increase opacity when the surface metalness increases.
- Fixed the code we use to transform normals for our Oriented shaders.
- Fixed a compiler bug on the "Eye/Eyeball" shader when using the Dissolve feature in SM3 mode.
- Fixed a Null Ref error when using substances and switching shaders.
- Fixed the rendering modes dropdown to now work with undo.
- Fixed a potential compilation bug in the Glass shader when used on consoles.

Tools:
- Fixed the Material Map Channel Packer so that its controls now support undo.

Shader API:
- Rebuilt our lighting code to give each lighting type its own shareable module, removing the code from the shaders.
- Simplified our texture coordinate macro system so that each texture doesn't need to know about parallax.
- Added a masking system to allow features to be externally masked for different blending behavior.

Known Issues:
- The visualize feature currently doesn't work properly for textures that use world-space UVs.
- Some OSX configurations (running non-standard gpus) seem to intermittently experiencing artifacting. We are investigating.

 

Freaking sweet... especially the eye shader with the dilation and control over the iris and sclera colouring... Is there anything I need to do on the texturing side for the eyes?

 

Wow, what exactly is the core material settings that were before?
Installed 3.1 and everything is pink,
after having moved all my texture materials to Alloy core now I have to rebuild them yet again?

 

@Don Gray
PM me and we'll diagnose the problem. It sounds like an import issue.

 

Asset Store Madness!
It's that time again! The Unity Asset Store is having another madness sale. For this week you can pick up Alloy half off at just $62.50! If you've been hesitating due to price, now's the time to jump in and grab it! XD

Alloy Physical Shader Framework - Unity Asset Store

 

are these shaders useful for mobile applications without performance lag.

 

@akhil96
At this time, we aren't targeting current-gen mobile hardware. We're waiting for OpenGL ES 3.0-level hardware to become more prevalent so we don't have to decimate Alloy's feature set.

 

Ok, seems there was an issue with my asset store download link and I was getting an old version.
With help from n00body all is well again.
Thanks!

 

Is Alloy working totally seamless with Unity 5 ? I mean with GI activated or not and with any lights type in the scene ?
It is possible to specify some maximum lights used to calculate lightening per object on some shader ?

 

@zenGarden
Yup. We support all of Unity's lighting options (light probes, reflection probes, lightmaps, GI) and even enhance the existing light types by turning them into spherical area lights with physically accurate attenuation.

Check out our website for more details:
http://alloy.rustltd.com/

Also, you can take a look at our quickstart video to see for yourself:

 

Purchased as this is the way to go for real good PBR visuals and advanced shaders in Unity.
I use Substance Painter and 3D Coat, is the shaders producing a good result on PBR textures exported from 3D Coat ? (it has similar Metal/Roughness export)

 

Hi @zenGarden . I haven't tried 3dcoats new PBR painting functionality, but I know for Substance Painter (especially when using our custom shader), it's as close a match as is technically possible.

 

Hello,

I just purchased Alloy yesterday.
Actually, it was already in basket, I just had forgot to check out and when I came back, it was included in the madness sale and 50% off ... so.. I guess that's one up for procastination.

I'm not sure if this is the correct place to ask this,
but I'm really confused how to set up correct workflow for Alloy with Skyshop in Unity 5.

Is ambient intensity under scene lighting suppose to control realtime GI?
The diffuse intensity on the skyshop sky does not affect alloy shaders, however the other intensity sliders does,
but only updates after adjusting the ambient intensity slider under scene lighting. (not sure why this is).
And am I suppose to add light probes to the scene?

 

@Kemonono
Firstly, thank you for your purchase of Alloy, regardless of how it happened.

Secondly, we actually dropped Skyshop support with Alloy 3 and instead decided to use Unity's built-in tools for better integration. So basically anything that you would do for the Standard shader in terms of the lighting and GI menus should work the same with Alloy.

 

@n00body

But it still works.. in some sense, or parts of it? I mean the skyshop skybox can be used as the lighting skybox, that's also where it get the reflections from, right?

Also a second question, does the normal map slot follow the tiling for the color map slot, seeing as it doesn't have its own coordinate offset input?

 

@Kemonono
Yes, you can reuse skyshop cubemaps to create Unity reflection probes.

And yes, the normal map follows the BaseColor map UVs.