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

Thank you! It does help. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't overlooking something.

 

Hey guys,

New build uploaded to both our website and Unity Asset Store.

Here are the release notes:
Release Notes v1.7.7 rev 00:

• Fixes:
  • Fixed multiple connections on Wire node when Alt + dragging nodes from it
  • Fixed issue with normal map usage over URP PBR
• Improvements:
  • Added new previews:
    • Heightmap Texture Blend
    • Parallax Offset
    • Clip Planes
    • Fog and Ambient Colors
    • Fog Params
    • Instance ID
    • Object To Clip
    • Object To View

Happy shader creations!

 

Yo,

I'm looking into migrating to the Universal Render Pipeline, but I'd like to stick to classic Blinn-Phong lighting rather than using PBR. I notice that the main URP package offers a "Simple Lit" shader as well as the Standard one, which seems like it offers Blinn-Phong (or something like it), but I can only see a PBR template for URP in Amplify -- is there any chance that Amplify will get a URP template with Blinn-Phong lighting instead of PBR? (Failing that, I guess custom lighting will let me build it manually?)

 

In the custom toon shader, when I turn on tesselation and set it to phong, there is a gap with the outline
how do i fix that?



in fact it's not the outline because when i turn that off i get a bright ghosting... it's as if there is two shadings happening: one with and one without tesselation



also on another character, the same tesselation custom toon lighting shader creates black blotches, even with outline turned off.

 

I need some help with the X-ray shader that's included as a sample.

1. How exactly is the X-ray shader working? I don't see any multi-pass nodes which is the way I would have implemented it normally (i.e. have 1 pass that's "Always" ZTest that displays the x-ray colour and another pass that displays the regular texture. How do I edit the sample Xray shader to only display a solid colour instead of a fresnel outline?

2. Why does the X-ray material not show up when 2 objects with the same material are intersecting? The x-ray effect shows up occassionally at specific angles but mostly does not. What's wrong here?

 

What you can do on ASE is indeed use our Unlit template, but you do not need to do everything from scratch.
We provide the Blinn-Phong Light shader function that already calculates that lighting model. Its just a matter of placing it over your graph and use its output.

Regarding that bright ghosting I need to check the shader itself, is it possible to pack me a sample and send it to support@amplify.pt so I can take a look at it?
Now into those black blotches, the way we do Outline is to create an extra pre-pass where we render the extruded geometry back faces. What might be happening over there is that, because on how the vertices are set for that particular model, the extruded vertices are being positioned ( thus rendered ) in front of the original mesh.
This unfortunately is a drawback of this technique we use, its heavily dependent on the geometry.

1- We provide a node called Outline, which adds an extra pre-pass ( like I explained to laurentlavigne or this post ). The main purpose of this node is to create an outline geometry, but with time we extended the node for it to become more flexible and be used with other purposes.
The XRay sample does exactly that. It uses the Outline node to create the xray geometry when the regular one is being occluded by something.
So if you want to change how the XRay looks then you only need to change the graph connected to the Outline node.


2 - This is a side effect of having the xray geometry being rendered over the same shader as the regular one.
The main geometry's Render Queue is set to Geometry but as you can see over the previous shot, the Outline's Alpha Mode set to Transparent. What this means is that the XRay render queue is set to transparent.
Unfortunately Unity can only have a single render queue set for the entire shader, so although we have two set render queues, one of those is ignored and that one is Geometry.
So, both XRay and regular geometry are being rendered over the Transparent queue which means that they aren't writing over the depth buffer, which is needed for the XRay geometry to kick in and be rendered.
You can change this, and over the Alpha Mode set is value to None, but with that you'll lose the transparency effect over the xray.

 

Hi,
I have a mesh with multiple smoothing groups. Is there a way to get a Fresnel-like shading but without the smoothing group influencing the result ?
I'm trying to create something like a smooth inner glow effect.
Thanks

 

I sent you stewie
the black blotches appear also with outline off

i thinkthey're a shadow thing: shadow pass is computed BEFORE tesseletation so this could be shadow creep?

 

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. However changing the Alpha Mode to None did not solve the problem. Could you provide an example shader where X Rays can intersect and render properly?

After switching Alpha Mode to None, the exact same behaviour continued whereby at certain angles, the X-Ray would show up:



But at most angles it wouldn't:



This is the shader, the only thing I've changed is Alpha Mode to None:



I've tried several other things as well but nothing works.

 

Can you share perhaps a screenshot of your current ASE shader graph and how it behaves on the model so I can better help you out?

Thank you very much. Already saw the email and will tackle it as soon as I can.
Regarding your suspicions, they seem to make sense but let me take a look at what you sent.

This is far more tricky than I initially thought because how Unity handles the rendering order. Since both objects share the same material, their render queue is exactly the same and the order they are drawn is entirely up to Unity.
Since this effect depends on what is or isn't written over the depth buffer it won't work for two objects using it. (Or better, it sometimes work)
You can try to explore perhaps creating a mask over the stencil buffer and use it to draw the XRay. We do have a Stencil Example over ASE if you want to take a look at it.
I can try and create a new sample for you with this but unfortunately I'm unable to give you an ETA on when it will be available.

 

How do I add SH light probe and skydome in a custom lighting shader?
In other word, make a PBR toon shader

 

"a" is a simple fresnel on the mesh I use, "b" is what I'm trying to get, it's like a fresnel but with a smooth mesh. I want to get this shading but without actually changing the smoothing of the mesh.

 

Custom terrain shader, use draw instanced without new per-pixel normals effect， What can I do to achieve this effect?
Test environment：unity2019.3.0f6 URP Android ASE1.7.5

 

Hi @Amplify_RnD_Rick
I'm working in Built-in Render Pipeline but i noticed that ASE Standard Template doesn't have any option (like HD template) to activate Baked GI node ! and i hardly need that

I'm wondering if is there any technical issue with that not being a feature in standard template or its possible that you add it in future versions ?

 

You can check our Custom Outline toon sample. This samples uses custom lighting to create a toon shader. Over there you'll notice we are using the Indirect Diffuse Light node which fetches GI diffuse info from the surrounding light probes.
You can notice that we are also using the Indirect Specular Light which gets reflection info from surrounding reflection probes.

Over the shader itself, you only have access to the current geometry of the object so everything you do over the shader will be over those vertices.
That fresnel that you are using is being done with our Fresnel node? Is it possible for you to share your current graph so I can take a look at see how it can be improved?

Unfortunately we still don't fully support all the terrain features over URP. We do apologize for the inconvenient.

What Baked GI node does is it fetches data from surrounding light probes, which is similar to our Indirect Diffuse Light node so you can use it instead.

 

This problem can be solved for a long time, is there any plan?

 

Im working with a simple asset that has been made to take advantage of ASE HD template to work with Bakery -Lightmapper SH (spherical harmonics) Directional light baking mode. but when im using its function in Standard Template i get the error below :

this is the link of asset : https://github.com/BenWoodford/Bakery-ASE

 

Hello!

Me and my team have recently run into the problem of having too many keywords in shaders through-out the project (256). I was wondering if there's any tricks or alternatives with amplify that allows that same level of customization per shader without generating a new keyword.

side note: does a toggle switch create a keyword?

Thanks

 

Berry cool!
Now i want to use reflection probes as GI probes (diffuse reflection that don't move with the view) how do I do that?

 

I'm not really sure how I could use the stencil buffer? Since the same object would have to write and read the same value from the stencil buffer?

Would it be possible to get the effect via a multi-pass Surface shader? I actually know how to do this via purely code if I could use multiple passes and a vertex-fragment shader, but I don't know how how to do that using ASE (I'm using more complicated parts of ASE for other parts of the shader). Is there proper documentation on how to setup multipass shaders? because I'm struggling to find much.

 

Heys guys,

We do apologize for the delay on answering your questions. We've been doing some remodeling here at the office and only now were able to view your posts.

We do plan to add those missing features but I'm not able to give you an ETA to when we'll start tackling them.

The link you shared for the image is broken. Is it possible to share it again?

Beginning on 2019.1 you can set your keywords as local. You'll notice that an Is Local toggle will appear over the Static Switch node properties.


Toggling that on will transform the keywords generated by it to be local, thus will not count to Unity’s global keyword count.
Regarding the Toggle Switch node, it uses a ternary operator so no keywords are generated over there.

I do apologize for answering with a question but is there a specific reason for you to not use light probes for that?
Because resource wise they are lighter than reflection probes and give you access to indirect diffuse info.
Getting that info from a Reflection probe is not straightforward and I myself do also to check Unity's own builtin shaders to check how it can be done.

Yes your would need to draw the object twice, one to draw on the stencil buffer where the Z Test fails and the other one to only draw the XRay where the Stencil buffer was written.
When you use the Outline node you're already creating a shader with multiple surface subshaders ( one for the Outline and the other for the main shader).
The problem with multipass shaders is what I described earlier, all passes are bound to the same render queue so you'll always have ordering issues.
But maybe I'm missing something on my train of thought.
If you do have a solution using a multi-pass shader, can you please give quick a quick summary of it?

 

EDIT: Nevermind ignore this post!!! I need to think about it more...

First pass (which draws the x-ray effect, lets say just a white colour), checks if the stencil buffer has been written to, if yes it just draws itself (a white pixel), if not it discards itself. It does not check for Ztest (always pass).

Second pass (draws the actual model), checks the stencil buffer. If it has been written to, discard itself. Else, render as per normal and write to the stencil buffer. Regular ZTest for this pass.

Am I missing something?

 

light probes don't update in a dynamic environment where new buildings appear
a long time ago I managed to do that with surface shaders and it was quite simple since there is a shader command that takes a mip level and some way to inject that in the albedo, lost the project and the knowledge

 

hello again! Loving amplify.

I'm wondering, is there a node or a setup that allows the shader to get the nearest cube map and lets me use it in the shader for whatever I need it for. (I'd like to get the nearest cubemap for my water shader, allowing me to distort that reflection.) It has to be dynamic i.e not me setting the cube map myself.

Thank you, Keep up the great work!

 

Hi, I'd like to know what effect the order of the "Material Properties" has on the shader? I was trying to copy over the X-Ray nodes from the sample into my own surface shader and the X-ray wasn't working (showing black). It took me forever to figure out that I had to rearrange the Material Properties so that all X-Ray related properties were at the bottom of the list.

What effect does the order of Material Properties have on shaders? I'd like to know for future reference. I've tried googling and haven't found any info about it. I always assumed it only affected the order in which the properties show up in the inspector.

 

I can do some research on my end and see if I can find out something about this. If you do manage to remember how you did please let me know so I can see how I can set it up with ASE.

Thank you so much for such kind words. You are perhaps referring to Reflection Probes?
If so, you can use our Indirect Specular Light node which gives you access to specular reflections of your surrounding probes.

Material properties ordering do not matter (or should not matter ) for the shader itself.
What I do think that might have happened is that you stumbled into some kind of bug on ASE when copy/pasting the property nodes. And somehow reordering them on the new shader fixed it, as we do a bit of "house cleaning" when reordering the nodes.
Do you recall any type of errors/warnings on either the ASE or Unity consoles?
What are the steps I must take to be able to reproduce it on my end? Simply copy/pasting the xray nodes to another shader?

 

Hi,
I bought amplified shader ages ago, and I insist I only used it in the beginning and then had no need for it later.
Now I need a shader and digged out the tool again.
So, sorry, but I am a total shader noob ;-)

I need an shader that looks like this



and works with 3d objects with no or bad UV mapping.

Could anyone please push me into the right direction. How can I create this effect?

best regards
Mirko

 

Hey Mirko,

There's a couple of techniques you can use, perhaps this example can get you started.

 

This is exactly what I need! However, your built-in Blinn-Phong Light function doesn't include the SRP Addiitonal Light so it only renders the one main directional light. It looks like I can edit the function locally, so can you tell me how best to insert the additional light here? I don't really understanding how lighting works... hence why I use Amplify.

 

How do I turn a bunch of boxed into a SDF and feed that SDF to the HDRP volumetric fog?
And modulate that HDRP volumetric fog with a few octaves of juicy perlin noise?

 

I've combed through my projects and can't find it - mental note: name a dummy file with the description of everything that's in each project I work on
Here is what I remember:
Unity shader gets access to the local reflection probe blended already, it's a keyword that you call in the shader
That keyword returns a cubemap
You can do a lookup on that cubemap with a shader function, it might be standard GLSL or maybe it's another unity keyword, that lookup has MIP level as parameter and I think it also has a referencial as parameter I mean you can tell it to compute the lookup vector (to the cube) in camera space which will give you the diffuse color and you mix that color the usual way.
I hope my charabia makes some sense.

spamming this thread hard.
I found it, at least the pieces of it:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/reflection-probes-in-a-custom-surface-shader.378549/
relevant piece of code is

float4 val0 = UNITY_SAMPLE_TEXCUBE_LOD (unity_SpecCube0, input.reflCoord.xyz,0);

You can change input.reflCoord.xyz by something like .worldCoord.xyz and voila you have a diffuse lit by reflection map that looks like global illumination first bounce

 

Hi I have problem with custom terrain shader. On First Pass I use vertex normals to select slopes and draw rocks there, but Base Shader ignores that part of shading and draw only hand painted textures. I copied all settings from your Simple Terrain Shader.

First Pass/Add Pass


Base

 

I use ASE together with NGSS and ligthAtten node do not return frustum shadows (the regular are fine). I've contacted developer and he said:

"If ASE changes (provides it's own) UnityDeferredLibrary.cginc you have to sample the frustumshadows texture yourself (or copy the same frustumShadows cody inside NGSS UnityDeferredLibrary.cginc into ASE one)".

Does ASE changes shadows libraries? If so can you tell me - do i have to add frustumShadows code manually to your files or maybe adding some dependencies and then sampling frustum texture will be enough? (i have no idea how to do it tho, guide me please)

 

Oh sorry about that. Yes that shader function only outputs the result for the main directional light.
For all additional lights you can use the SRP Additional Light shader function and set its Lighting mode to Lambert.

Honestly my knowledge with SDF is a bit limited so I'm unable to help you with that.

Thank you for the additional info. In that thread you shared, they are discussing how to get specular reflections from reflections probes. We still need to check how to calculate ( or approximate ) the diffuse convolution over the reflection probe.
That line of code you shared is simply a fetch to the cubemap itself, it does not have any type of calculated irradiance info.

The Base shader won't automatically adapt itself to custom behaviors you do over the First Pass shader.
So, that texture selection according to the vertex normals must be also done over the base shader.
Please notice that over the base shader you don't have access to each one of the splats but to a lower resolution composite image ( with all the merged layers ).

No, ASE does not change Unity
libraries.
I'm not familiar with that plugin. Is is possible for you to pack and send a sample to us (support@amplify.pt) so we can take a look at it see if we can help you out?

 

You don't need that, you just do a LOD3 reflection lookup in world space, which gives you a blurry reflection that doesn't move with the camera, and you mix that to albedo or emission.
Try it on a simple scene with a green ground and a red cube and you'll see what I mean.

 

Hi there! Thanks so much for your products....I'm a big fan. I've done some searching and can't seem to find an answer....sorry if this is a question that has been done to death:

I'm working on a custom terrain shader and I would like to be able to pass my own floats along with each texture on the terrain. (So that I can do things like set two different UV scales for the same texture....one for close up, and another for far away.) My first pass works great and I can access everything straight from the shader. The problem comes up when I have additional passes. Is there something I should be doing to expose those floats in later passes? I'm modifying your simple terrain shader using four splats first pass terrain, and I'm noticing that smoothness variables aren't exposed for splats that would be on subsequent passes as well. Is this just a limitation I need to work around?

Thanks in advance.

 

You need to store normals information from a smooth version of a mesh to a texture or vertex colors. Then plug it into worldNormal input of a fresnel node.

 

Man, I go away for a while and you guys are still making this awesome tool even more awesome. Has anyone managed to create a proper hair shader? I am still working on my Kajiya-Kay and Marschner hair shader (I found out I could bake out a heightmap and use that as depth for the hair) but alpha depth is still a pain. I was able to create the hair similar to the type in RDR2 with FXAA to smooth it.

 

No problem at all. That custom behavior you've done over the First Pass shader is also replicated over the Add pass?
When you have more that four splats, it will be the Add Pass shader which will be responsible for combining the additional splats over the terrain, so if you want all splats to behave the same both these shaders must have a similar node graph.

Glad to have you back. Over our end we haven't been able to tackle it for quite some time.

 

Hello.

Do you guys have an ETA on when the Instanced Terrain normals will be supported on Custom Terrain Shaders? It's pretty hard to get them working right now and it never really works properly. The normals always seems off no matter what weird hack I do to correct them.

 

Hi,
Using the latest build of Amplify Shader Editor with the Universal Render Pipeline in Unity 2019.3.0f6, and I'm getting this weird issue where the Time node systematically returns the sine of the time multiplied by the scale factor. Scale(Sin(Time))
Unable to find a node that'll just give me the time anymore...

 

When using the Parallax Occlusion Mapping node with an array texture like this:



I get the following error:


I set the texture object locked to array


Am I doing something wrong?

Thx.

 

Not sure on that, let me check with one of our developers and get back to you.

We did find a possibly related issue a while back, but it has been corrected since. From our tests, it seems that it's working as expected.

Are you using ASE version 1.7.7r4?
What's your current URP version?

 

That would be shown when no Texture is used. Try setting the Texture Object Cast mode to Array along with the POM node.

Paste this link in your Canvas: http://paste.amplify.pt/view/raw/4724816a

We're going to run a few tests on our side just to be sure it's running as expected.

What's your current Unity version and Renderer used?

Thanks!

 

That would be unity 2019.3.0f6 with URP. Will test your solution tomorrow morning.
Thx for checking.

 

Hi,

The built in Unity Terrain grass shader seems to automatically react to terrain lightmaps perfectly. I imagine it samples the terrain light map or something along those lines?

Any idea how to achieve this?

 

Thanks for the details, it seems to not be working in URP; let me check with one of the devs, we had an active ticket on that.

Made a quick test using one of our samples and it seems to be working as the default Unity terrain. Please provide additional details regarding your current setup.

 

Hi, i'm creating my water shader, i started creating the screen depth, but it’s not working, I don’t know what happens, but I had done it before and it worked.

Node:


Problem:
v

 

How do I go about and make a shader for eyelashes and hair? Right now this is my setup and it looks awful. Is there a way to get aliased edges instead of using a cutout? Thanks!

 

Version 1.7.7 Revision 4 bug in the TemplatePostProcessor.cs class. If you build in a MAC, you will get the error
error CS0103: The name 'Process' does not exist in the current context

Adding the following on top of the class will solve the issue:
#if UNITY_EDITOR_OSX
using System.Diagnostics;
#endif

We are working in NET Standard 2.0, in case it is relevant.