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

This is awesome. However, that .rar file you posted leads me down a dark and encrypted road.

 

Hey there peeps i need advice, but i'm gonna ask for advice while offering something i KNOW people have been looking for.

Ever wanted anisotropic specular reflections for hair and metal and stuff? Here you go! it's based on Ward BRDF model found here.

Here is is in steps:

Half Vector (H)


Tangent and Bitangent (dotHT and dotHB)


dotHN and dotVN, i don't fully understand the need for this but it's part of the model. Also N here is "World Normal", V is "View Dir".


lambert shading model (dotNL, L is "World Light Direction")


Bringing all the data together to get the reflection


Adding adjustment settings.


From there it just needs to be added to the final shading stuff. Also this is all done in custom lighting.

Here's the result (besides some other shading stuff)


Now can anyone help me stretch the indirect specular reflection node like this?



I expect it can be a similar concept but surely someone has some ideas XD. I know of plenty of normal map methods but thats not what i need.

The only shader setup I know of requires access to the cube map data so i can have access UV...Or maybe adding some kind of texture sample to plugin to the normal port with the stretch done in the UV of the texture sample? I dunno -_-...

 

Do you have any specific errors in the shader's inspector that you could share?

Unfortunately, there's not much we can do at this time in order to assist with the templates, we'd have to examine the shader and try to replicate it ourselves, which is something that it's currently not possible due to our limited time and resources. We apologize for the inconvenience, please rest assured that we'll do our best to help debugging any possible issues.

Thank you for sharing this!

Is the sample and information provided in this post in line with what you are looking for?

 

Hmm, I'll check it out. oof 2016, is that even compatible? XD

It looks like it uses the normal map method, and I can't tell if it affects reflections (beyond the bumpiness of the normal). I'll pry into this properly when I wake up. Might at least provide an interesting node setup.

 

This is one of the errors I get when I try to compile the shader. I only have a few textures on this shader (Albedo, Alpha, Normal Mapping, and a texture that allows me to colour the individual strands.

 

Hello!

What do I need to add to my template to let the user specify BlendOp ?

Also, I dont think there is a 'none' BlendOp option. If I want to reveal the normal blend operations in the editor, but I dont want any blending by default, I add 'Blend One Zero' to my shader. Then the Blend section will appear in the shader editor. How would we achieve this with BlendOp's? I would want to make sure the default BlendOp in the shader editor is to not do a blend op, but I would like the user to be able to pick one if they want.

 

We had similar issues from other users and that was a bug on how the interpolators were being registered on one of its passes.
Can you please try the latest version and let us know if the issue persists?

For the current version, we can only do this through the /*ase_all_modules*/, but this tag registers all properties.
The tag itself takes into account all the values that are manually registered outside of it.
P.e.:

Code (CSharp):

1. SubShader
2. {
3.     Tags { "RenderType"="Opaque" }
4.     Cull Off
5.     /*ase_all_modules*/
6. }

When ase_all_modules is detected, it knows that Cull was already declared and will not register it with the default value but rather with the one which was set ( on this case Off )

This /*ase_all_modules*/ may be bit of an overkill for you but for now it is the only way to register a BlendOp without having to declare it over the template.

But rest assured that we can and will add a special tag to be able to add the BlendOp individually. This will be available soon.

In other news,
We uploaded a new build into our website.

Here are the release notes:

Release Notes v1.6.0 rev 00:

• Improvements:
  • Updated SRP templates to v4.2.0
• Fixes:
  • Fixed issue on GBuffer pass over HD PBR template
  • Fixed alpha clip issues on Legacy HD PBR template

We hope you guys have an awesome weekend and happy shader creations!

 

Will do.

 

I am still getting the same errors... I am using the Legacy HDSRP btw since I am still on 2012.2

 

When I try to make a srp shader as discribed in the video: Scriptable Render Pipeline support is here!
I get Shader Compilation errors:
Shader error in 'Hidden/Templates/LightWeightSRPPBR': failed to open source file: 'Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.lightweight/ShaderLibrary/Core.hlsl' at line 67 (on d3d11)

Help please!

 

Hey there, which Unity, SRP LW and ASE version are you using?

 

Got a bit bored today at work and with just a few texture modifications, I made the ASE canvas to look much cleaner . Not a game changer of anything, ASE is great, but I think that it would be a nice upgrade.



Have a nice weekend!

 

Hey, that's pretty cool, love the flat look!

It would be awesome if we could offer different styles in the future, it's something that we've actually discussed a while back; it's not a very known fact but users can customize almost everything.

Did I mentioned we are open to contributions?

 

Have you unpacked/imported the HDSRPTemplates (Legacy).unitypackage to update the templates on your end?
I'm asking this mostly because that issue you presented was being thrown by an incorrect interpolator registry over the template itself so only updating the main ASE package is not enough.
Nevertheless we'll try to replicate this issue and will upload a new build as soon as we figure out what might be happening.

So what might be happening is that you must be trying to use the latest SRP shaders on an older version.
From the error I presume that you are using Unity 2018.2.x and SRP v3.x.x . For these versions you will need to import the packages with the (Legacy) tag on its name.
We have added a Readme file over the SRP folder describing which packages must be imported over each versions.

 

Is it possible to send custom data from the vertex shader to the fragment shader via UV variables? It is not possible to do this in Unity Shader Graph, which is a dealbraking limitation for my project.

Edit: looking at the documentation, the Vertex To Fragment Node is designed for this, correct?

Also, Shader Graph uses Vector3 instead of Vector4 for the mesh tangents, which is another major limitation. Does Amplify Shader Editor impose the same limitations?

Edit: looking at the documentation, With Amplify Shader Editor, it is also not possible to retrieve the w component of the mesh tangent. May I suggest changing this to Vector4 instead? My shader does not use the mesh channels what they are designed for. I don't use color in the color channel, or tangent in the tangent channel. Instead, I store all sorts of custom data in the mesh channels, and I need to w component of the mesh tangent too.

 

Yes. What I'll do is a fresh install of ASE and see if the error goes away

 

I have created an animated grayscale procedural texture and I want to plug it into the normal input. I thought it was the Create Normal node but that is only for bitmaps it seems. What node do I need to convert this into a proper normal map?

 

Hey, I think I've found a bug in the latest unity bêta : the texture array creator is broken in unity 2018.3.0b11 for compressed formats.

Repro : blank project with b11, import amplify. Try to create a texture array in dtx5 with anything. Array will be blank et errors will show up in the console.

Do you have any idea how to fix that ?
I made the exact same repro but with 2018.2 and it's working. So I really think you have a bug with 2018.3. Meanwhile I will just use 2018.2 and save texture arrays inside my 2018.3 project. (tested, and it works, array created with .2 works well with .3)

Thanks for your time and amazing asset,

Jonathan.

PS :

Just want to add that it would be awesome to have this included in amplify

 

Decided to do an update on my Skin shader material to emulate Marmoset Toolbag with two maps that will allow me to paint deeper detail into my characters. The idea is the sum of the textures need to equal 1.

This first screenshot is with the Epidermis and Subdermis turned OFF. In reality, without the blood in your skin, you would look like a cadavre. Actually in most renderers, setting the weights on both of these would disable the colour on the skin.




This is with Epidermis Weight set to 1... I would love to see this set lower. In this layer, I want to get as close as possible to the original base texture...


This is the Subdermal Weight set to 1. In Substance Painter, this serves as the fleshier part of your character and where you paint things like tattoos and details under the skin like pot marks and veins to give the impression of blood under the skin. Notice the subtle vein on the forehead... I will be removing this.


And this is the final set up with the weights+ tint set appropriately... the end result is a sum of one on the weighting...


Subdermal mapping in Substance Painter. I will be adding some form of micro cavity map on this just as a debug. Kinda wish the Diffusion Profiles could be added to the shader itself for finer control.

 

Hello everyone.

I have a simple technical question :
From my researches I found that samplers (reading from a texture) are some of the most ressource hungry functions in a shader. So now I try to keep them as low as possible. However, I was wondering, if I store a small texture into a color global array, can't I basically have a 1d texture without using texture sampling?

Basically, what is the performance impact of using a global array in a shader compared to using a texture sampler? Would using a global color array to store a small texture be beneficial to the performances?

 

Hi there

I'm an artist and totally new to shaders (plus I'm not a very good programmer) so coding my own shaders is out of the question. I'm curious how useful ASE is for making 2D games. From memory, all of the examples I've seen have been in 3D so far!

Thanks for your time.

 

I actually love the flat look

 

Hi guys, i want to start learning about making shaders but i know almost nothing about it.
What is the best way to start ?

 

I'm glad that you like it!

I already know that . I actually have one skybox sample included. I sent over the modified images via email.

 

So I'm still a super newbie when it comes to this, and trying the low-poly water community shader for flat lighting yielded really strange results:



Instead, I used the setup that @BOXOPHOBIC pasted and that worked better, although apart from being forward only, I'm unsure of what consequences "custom lighting" will give me in the future (as I plan to do specular etc from texture input as well so I can have a similar easy setup in Blender without having to input any values):



But I just noticed that it's not 100% flat. I'm not sure, but it looks as if when you pass from lit to shadow, it's still a gradient:



(Also, I wonder if there's a better way to sample the lighting direction/intensity across the entire polygon, to avoid the weird mis-matches like that black triangle which made me discover all this. Perhaps even to try to maintain the quad look better. Probably way too advanced than what I can handle, though.)

 

Hello, the Vertex to Fragment node uses Unity's shader interpolators ( TEXCOORDs ), so you should be able to use them for your intended use.

Regarding your second question, we do offer the W of the Vertex Tangent, although it's pre-multiplied by the unity_WorldTransformParams.w, which you can get from the Vertex Tangent Sign Node.

If you need to use the pure W value, we can add the option to the Vertex Tangent node to expose this value as a toggle-able node parameter, just let us know!

Hello, do you mean an actual texture, or is it something you've generated within the shader? Can you provide an example?

The 'Normal Create' shader function generates a normal map from a greyscale image, as long as you sample that texture through a Texture Object.

Alternatively, if you're using a non-texture type, you could attempt to generate a normal map on the shader, although it would be a fairly expensive operation because it would require generating each vector component separately in order to calculate the approximate slope.

Hey, thank you for reporting this, we're going to investigate it and will get back to you as soon as we have any developments!

Thank you for sharing your progress, keep up the good work!

Hello, although its possible to do it, we're not entirely sure if it would perform better or worse, since in terms of generated volumes of data it ends up being similar. In the Texture you can also choose not to use mips, and they won't be generated.

You'd also still have to get the UVs, and determinate an index to know where to get the required data from the arrays, so it might not be worth the effort.

Hello, and thank you for your interest, we really appreciate it!

ASE supports 2D Sprites, Particles, UI and Image Effects through our Shader Templates, and even though we provide Default Templates for your convenience, you may build your own from scratch and to suit any specific needs or workflows!

For specific examples, be sure to check out Sons of the Void as they make extensive use of our editor for all types of effects. Some ASE powered games actually combine 3D and 2D assets, Party Hard 2 and The Last Night being the best references.

Please let us know if you have any further questions, thanks!

Hello! We'd recommend looking into Alan Zucconi's tutorials ( starting with the Gentle Introduction to Shaders ) and his much praised Shaders and Effects Cookbook. We also provide a Beginner Series set of videos that will help you get up to speed in the core concepts!

As you become more comfortable with shader development, you can always learn how to interpret shader code by opening ASE shaders in a text editor and comparing the code to the node setup and shader parameters set in the canvas.

Please let us know if this helps and if you have any further questions, thanks!

Unfortunately, I'm not entirely sure on what to suggest as I do not have much experience with that type of shaders.

Perhaps it would be best to examine similar shaders made with ASE.

 

Hi!

I have purchased you shader graph on satuday and I must say that your asset truly makes Unity best engine on the market!

But I must say that all of your assets are 50% off after just ~24h... So... I am buing all of them I think Do you think that I could get small discout?

 

Is there a way to take the parameters from the Diffusion Profile and put it into the SSS shader?

 

Hi guys,

Been a while since my last post. I'm currently trying to make a very simple shader I think, but the stuff I have read makes me unsure about what to do.

I am trying to replicate the Unity Standard Shader down to the exact look and exact same properties, but instead of the ambient occlusion being set to use UV Set 1, I want to set it to a different UV Set. I've set up a standard surface shader in Amplify and plugged in the same textures used in the standard shader and the look is different. Mostly affected by metallic / smoothness and maybe normals.

A bit of research tells me that the Unity Standard Shader does something to the maps it receives and that's why it won't produce the same look, and a lot of posts on here and on the Amplify community forum suggest looking at the code but I'm too much of a coding novice to be able to look at it and know if I'm looking at the correct thing, especially as the code seems to be spread over several different files.

It would be really awesome if somebody could point me towards the correct node structure for the default unity shader, either the makers or somebody in the community. Looking online, people seem to be pretty adverse to helping with the unity standard shader. Is it hard?

 

Hey there, thank you for your support and kind words!

Unfortunately there's no way we could issue any further discounts as everything is handled on Unity's side.

We're calling Unity's native functions for calculating the SSS, and for that we use the Diffusion Profile ID, meaning that we're not directly handling the internal data of the Diffusion Profile, however, all that data is accessible, so we'll just need to know which specific parameters you would like to access in order to further assist you.

Hey there, it's definitely not an easy task, especially without being able to interpret shader code, as Unity's Standard Shaders have several intricacies to them. Unfortunately, this is outside of the scope of ASE since we're bound to Unity's internal structure with our Standard Surface Shader, and our Standard Surface Light node, available in the Custom Lighting Light Model, so you'd have to create a custom shader specifically to try and mimic Unity's Standard shader.

 

Hey there,

Actually, while I'm sure there are intricacies, I've managed to work out the problem I had. I think it was caused by the default value of an empty texture node I had attached to the normal slot.

Hopefully, these questions are simpler:

1. Can anybody tell me how to create the smaller texture swatches? I'd like to have it so that when you click the material you get small texture slots like on the standard shader. See the included image

2. How can I have a colour node appear next to the texture slot under the material/shader viewing properties? See the included image

3. Additionally, how do you add separator text to the shader? Such as the "Secondary Maps" text in the included image.

4. I've used the detail albedo node already included and it works perfectly. Any idea what I need to do to do similar for the detail normal?

5. Maybe a harder question but can I confirm whether the unity default shader does its height map trickery by adjusting UV values and doesn't mess with tesselation? If so I think I found a way to do it. If it's tesselation that's also simple.

 

Thank you for understanding!

Regarding your questions, we might be able to help:

1 - In an ASE context, you can simply toggle the following parameter:



2 & 3 - You'll need to set up your own Custom Inspector in order to customize the inspector window.

4 - You'd likely have to use Blend Normals.

5 - I believe it's a simple parallax effect.

 

Hi, so I'm trying to blend two normals together with a slider. Originally I used a lerp, but it's not working anymore with 2018. If I change the slider it removes the second normal. Any thoughts or another way to do it? Thanks.

 

Hi, I'm confused why One Minus and Negate both don't seem to have the expected effect of inverting the Fresnel?

TY for any help!

 

Negate will inverse the sign of the input value, like passing 1 will output -1.
OneMinus will do 1 - the input, so passing 1 will output 0.

 

Is there a discord channel for this asset? feel like it needs somewhere to ask questions with whomever might be online to provide some guidance.. not to replace the this forum thread ofc

 

Hey have a dedicated forum, but not sure if they have a discord as well. Would be pretty useful indeed !

 

So with the diffusion profile, I want to add some of these parameters directly to my shader so I can have individual control (and I don't have to keep jumping back and forth to tweak stuff). I can also remove the static switch from the shader.

I want to add to my shader:

Scattering Distance
IOR
World Scale

Would love to control the texturing mode with a float so I can blend my diffuse details.

The transmission mode would be with a static switch and the colour would be there.

And the Min-Max thickness and remap. Pretty much all of it.

 

Hey do you have an example of SSS working with ASE? Can't find a way to make things working on my side...I've even posted a thread on the ASE support forum, no answer so far.

 

In the shader, on the master node, go to pass and set the reference to 1 in the GBuffer... you also have to author the necessary textures

SSS OFF



SSS ON



SSS OFF (NO EPIDERMAL OR SUBDERMAL)



SSS ON (NO EPIDERMAL OR SUBDERMAL)



SET GBUFFER TO 1

 

Awesome, will try it with my foliage, thanks !

 

For foliage, Translucency will be sufficient...

 

Thanks, OneMinus just doesn't seem to be inverting as I'd expect. I'm not a maths guy so your maths explanation doesn't help me much unfort!!

Here's a Photoshop inverted fresnel (bottom) for example. It isn't hugely different, but it seems to transition to the black outline better (yes partially just because of the contrast):



Seems no matter what I try (remapping, altering fresnel params), I can't get like a radial gradient with a white center and black outside.

Originally came from Shader Forge which does exactly as I'd expect:

 

Ok I understand what's going on here.
I've used also SF and the fresnel node was simplier than the one here on ASE. I've tried with 0 Bias, 1 Scale and 1 Power, nothing on View Dir nor World Normal and I have a quite precise inverse using one minus.
Maybe you shouldn't trust the output you see on the node itself, values above 1 or under 0 won't be displayed (for obvious reasons, a pixel can't be whiter than white, or darker than black), and doing "one minus" will only make 1 - "your input", it's not a magic invert node as you might expect.
When you want to truly invert a value, you need to know the max (which might be higher than 1 in your case), and it could be difficult to figure out. Maybe you can clamp first the result between 0 and 1, it might do the job for you, depending on what you want to do with the fresnel. I don't know if it makes sense to you haha

 

Still having trouble unfortunately. Very odd you're able to -1 it without issue. I tried clamping as you suggested but it had no effect. Can't figure it out :/ It looks this way in editor and in game, so it's not a node preview problem.

The other option would be creating a radial gradient and then (somehow?) mapping that in screen space onto my sphere object. Strangely enough though, I see the exact same behavior there too, when I go to invert, it looks wrong. Where's my nice pin-prick white center rapidly fading to black?

 

You can try to do after your fresnel "a public variable" minus the result of your fresnel (instead of one minus node), and try to play with it on runtime, to check if you can achieve what you want.

 

Hello, we ran a few tests and it seems to be working as expected, however, I did notice that your second Texture Sample doesn't have a Scale port in its Inputs, which means that the sampler is not unpacking it as a normal map, so you'll likely need to manually toggle this option:

Hello, we don't use Discord, support is currently only available via the Unity Forums, our own Forums or at support@amplify.pt.

Thank you for letting us know, I'll bring this up with the developer and will get back in touch with you as soon as possible!

Apologies for the delay in our response, we've replied to you over at the original thread posted in our forums!

Hey there! Unfortunately, the Node Previews are not always accurate nor clear, so they should only be used as a reference for the data being handled by the node holding the preview, rather than a guide for the final effect.

The only solution here is to tweak the values until you're happy with the results and, like cAyouMontreal kindly suggested, you could also set the variables being used to tweak the values to Property type in order to be able to instantly preview the results in the editor, without having to compile the shader.

 

Hey, I just have a quick question about lightweight render pipeline :

Are texture arrays compatible with it ? I get the pink shader when I try to build it. (So I guess it's not, but I think it's safer to ask)

Thanks in advance for your help,

Jonathan

 

Speaking of shaders, I'm still trying to add passes to my hair shader, and I'm kinda compelled to copy the base pass and paste the code to create additional passes. Just changing the cull and blending modes...

Just need to test it

 

You need to use the LWRP template from ASE. You can get it by importing the related package inside the Template folder (LWSRPTemplates.unitypackage). Then on you shader, change the template used, and everything should work !