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

Here's a textureless oval vignette, obviously though you have to adjust it yourself because the shader can't automatically read the masking you're doing at the final image

 

Hey!

Is there something like a "Note" node? Similar to the comment node, but will accept (wrapped) blocks of text? I like to leave little notes around my shaders and have been using comment notes...but it's always as one long line of text because of how the comment node formats the comment. I think it would be handy. Even if it was exactly like the comment node, but instead of the area where you place other nodes, it worked as a big large text box.

Think this could be something you could add in a future update? Doesn't seem too complex so I might poke around and see if I can make a custom node myself, but I would love you guys (even more) if you added something like this

 

I guess I was right about not being able to calculate only the masked portion in the shader itself. I'll have to do it externally and feed in some values. Thanks for the help mate.

 

Greetings,

We've decided to focus our resources exclusively on the official Unity forum! We're disabling our own hosted forums but the old posts will remain available for future reference.

Due to popular demand, we’ve also created an official Discord Channel. Here you’ll be able to interact with other Amplify Users, discuss our products, share feedback and your work. This is a new experience for us so we ask that you be patient and provide feedback on what you think we could improve.

Official Discord channel - Join us today!

 

Hi,
I'm trying to create a shader, but I have no clue where to start.
Would it be possible to create something similar to this:

(source with shader: https://mispy.me/unity-alpha-blending-overlap/)

A shader that doesn't blend with other transparent particles with the same material.

 

I have a black texture. There is a white rectangle in this texture. I can generate 5x5 rectangles using Tiling parameter. I can move these rectangles using Offset parameter. I want to rotate those rectangles using their centers. How can I do that?

 

Hello, yesterday I asked a question regarding Using Shadowmap pass + Lightmap Intensity in a Shader? and got an answer from Amplify_Borba. Here's a copy of the original thread for everyone who's interested, I'll continue my questions below.
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Using Shadowmap pass + Lightmap Intensity in a Shader?
by PxoGeorgSochurek » Wed Apr 10, 2019 9:38 am

Hello there,
In Unity I'm trying to create a underwater Caustics shader to use in a Projector (or should I rather do this in a Post Process Mat? Will this be problematic with other Post effects like Depth of File?), that's additive on top of all the existing materials in the scene.

Because a projector can't cast shadows, I would have to manually multiply my Caustics textures by the realtime shadowmap pass and the pre-baked Lightmaps pass, to darken the texture where shadows are supposed to be.
How can I grab those two passes (of course it's also okay if they are already combined!) and use them in my shader?

Thanks a lot in advance!
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Top
Re: Using Shadowmap pass + Lightmap Intensity in a Shader?[/paste:font]
by Amplify_Borba » Wed Apr 10, 2019 1:12 pm

Hello, thank you for getting in touch and for your support!

There are several ways to create caustics effects, we would need more context to know which would be the most viable to you.

Regarding what you've stated, you are correct, projectors are not lights so they won't "cast shadows" onto surfaces.
We do, however, have a Light Attentuation node that does provide shadow information for that object but that only works properly for opaque objects that write to depth.

That node uses a built-in function that samples the shadowmap, but I'm not sure if that node will solve your problems, if the object does not write to depth you should be able to pick the shadow information of what's behind it. If that works you could try to use it as your shadowmap to mask out the caustics but, since projectors have their own requirements, I'm not entirely sure if will break it.

You should be careful when considering the use of projectors though, they create too many draw calls because they are called at least once for every object their frustum touches.
______________________________________________

Thanks for the fast reply, and thanks for the warning regarding the use of Projectors!

I guess it would be best to use a Postprocess Material instead?

I tried the Light Attenuation node like suggested, but it didn't seem to contain any black and white data where Shadowmaps or their absence are (which I would have expected from it's description). I'm currently on 2018.3 using HDRP, could HDRP be the problem?
I don't have much technical knowledge of shaders, so sorry if I misunderstood something.

What I'm trying to do is grab shadowmap information in Screenspace (from the GBuffer?) and from other sources (Realtime AO, Prebaked Lightmap Intensity or Shadowmask), composite those dark parts, and multiply that with a pass that contains only my Caustics texture projected (Triplanar projection style). This result would then be added on top of all the existing Shading in the scene. Is this possible?

See attached image for clarification.
Thanks a lot!

 

Hi, I am trying to create a water sphere which would respond to a click (during the click it would make ripples or shake faster or whatever). right now the whole sphere moves and somewhat interactive (when I click on it it just shakes more and toward the Z coordinate for 1 couple of seconds). I guess the "water texture" would work just fine because the background will be black. The question would be about mesh deformation. How one would be able to do it? The project is in LWRP but will convert it to HDRP. Thanks!

 

Hi, can we use Tesselation in HDRP Lit template? Can't find such an option/node while it's available in PBR.

 

Hey! I have an issue while creating a simple post processing stack shader. It seems to be when any node is connected that uses time parameters I get the error:
Attempting to write data into inexistant tag /*ase_pragma*/. Please review the template Hidden/Templates/PostProcessStack body and consider adding the missing tag.



If I remove the connection to the panner, it compiles without the error. (it doesn't behave how I expect it to, but thats another issue, probably me not understanding how post processing shaders work)

 

Hey I'm getting very different results viewing a material through scene view, game view and on a mobile device. I've tried playing around with a few things but I'm pretty new to this so I'm not sure what could be causing this inconsistency.

This is what it looks like in scene view. Which is what I want it to look like.



This is what it looks like in the game view, still using my pc. As you can see the quad is visible even if I set the tint color's alpha to 0 in the inspector and just looks off compared to the first image.


And this is what happens on my mobile device (iphone 6) which I really don't understand
EDIT: I just updated to the latest version of amplify shader that I just seen was released and it fixed the "black out" issue. Now it looks like the previous image of the game view. Which is still better but not what I expect it to be.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-WoTQhApcB0Lt4b-clPIt6S8_34-Q5P6

Finally this is the graph I'm using to create this effect. Any help would be really appreciated I'm lost trying to figure this out.

 

Hey, thanks for the suggestion, I'll be sure to register it for the developer to consider!

Hello, you'll have to enable and tweak the Stencil settings on your shader, and its also great for the learning process to open the shader in your text editor of choice to see how each setting changes the code:





The author also suggests the discarding any pixels with 0 alpha, this is achievable through our If node.

Hello, our Rotate About Axis and Rotator nodes should help you achieving that.

Hey there, I'll let the developer get back to you on this one as he might be able to provide you with a more in-depth answer.

Hello, you could deform the mesh through vertex manipulation, we have a few examples that might be helpful to examine, such as the Extrusion, ReflectRefractSoapBubble and Smear.

Hi, at this time the Tessellation that ASE offers is only for the Standard Surface shaders, we have no ETA regarding adding tessellation nodes / parameters to the SRP templates, but it's definitely in our plans!

For now, you'll have to set it up manually, at least until we are able to tackle it.

Hey! This should be corrected in the latest build that was uploaded today to our website, please let us know if you come across any further ones, thanks!

Hello, could you share a simple sample project with the issue present through support@amplify.pt, so that we can run some tests using the exact same data as you? Thank you!

 

So the left is how it should look and the right is what i get, what am i getting wrong here XD




Also is it possible for the texture node to receive unity's reflection probe blending like the indirect specular light node?

 

I hacked together this. It has alignment issues but it's something.

EDIT: Better alignment. Updated the code.

 

Oh that would be very useful for tutorials

 

Hi has something changed, I upgraded to 2018.3.. and updated Amplify Shader.. I don't see any editor under the window tab. I cant see to find it. I checked your docs.. it says it should be there as it was before..unless it was not updated...

So any idea? Thanks

 

Hey, I'm having some trouble with getting tessellation and custom lighting to mix nicely. The issue is this:

I'm getting strange gaps in the mesh when I enable tesselation. These don't line up with any polygons and flicker all over the place when I move the camera. Within the shader itself, it seems like having any of the Indirect Diffuse Light, World Space Light Direction, View Direction and World Normal nodes connected causes this glitching. There's no transparency in these gaps, it just renders the skybox on top.

Also, if I turn off postprocessing and scene lighting in the scene view, the issue disappears there. If I try the same in the game view and remove my postprocessing object and all directional lights however the issue persists.

Pretty mystified by this, anyone got any ideas? There's 2 directional lights in the scene that I thought might be causing this, but even removing one doesn't change anything. The shader is a bit too big for screenshots but I can email it through to someone

EDIT: Switching to forward rendering fixes things. Is tessellation supported on deferred rendering?

 

So i got anisotrophic cueb map reflections working thanks to the "Custom Expression" node which let me grab unity's cube map much like the "Indirect Specular Node" allows. But now i can handle the reflection the way i want to.

Thanks to @BOXOPHOBIC for this post back in 2017 which gave me the idea, my use is much different and smaller though. I checked some tutorials on how to pull the cube map and merely copied the code (I could maybe change this a bit but i'm in a rush XD)

I turned it into a function attached below...




This is how the normal reflection is set up to get the stretched reflection.



And the result...

On top of this i needed to reseolve the reflection fresnel for backfacing faces which looked like this normally.


I noticed this was not a problem with the standard shader node, so i knew there had to be a solution. This was a pretty nasty problem but eventually i worked out the solution is to invert the power of the fresnel for the back faces.

also turned this into a function since i use fresnel a lot. Download is below...



Fresnel only Result


This is a much better solutiion than masking the back face and looks a lot bettter. Personally it would be cool if this was added to the fresnel node.

I couldn't attach these cause of the images so here's a dropbox link.

Double sided Fresnel Node

Unity Reflection Probe Node

 

Is there something wrong with the Triplanar Sampler? Using 2018.3.7f1



Created the first triplanar node, which seems to only show Top Index input.
Duplicated it for the Normal map, now somehow this node shows Top, Middle, Bottom index inputs.

Also think your documentation on this node might be out of date as it didn't match mine.

 

Thank you for sharing!

Hi, did you have any errors present in your project?

I would suggest that you first delete the ASE folder and reopen Unity, then check if there are any errors present in the project, as these might interfere with the package importer.
Then, after resolving any errors present, download the latest ASE version from our website and extract it into your project.

Hey, the issue here is that Custom Lighting is Forward only, so we don't recommend using it for Deferred shading.
If you're comfortable with shader programming, I recommend looking into implementing your own Deferred Custom Lighting type using our flexible Template System.

Also, the tessellation technique used in ASE is the same as Unity's and it works in both forward and deferred.

Nice one, thank you for letting us know you managed to figure this one out, I'll register your feedback for the developer to consider regarding the Fresnel node!

Hello, the node has been updated ever since its wiki page was written so it's a bit out of date, apologies for that and thank you for the heads up.

Regarding the behavior you've reported, I was able to replicate it on my end and have confirmed with the developer that it's an issue, we'll be sure to tackle it as soon as possible!

 

I'm making a Post Processing FX that uses Screen Depth. Since all my objects in my scene are Unlit, I found that I need to use a fallback in order to be able to use the Depth Buffer (I'm using a Diffuse shader as a fallback).

The problem is I'm changing the vertex offset in all my shaders, but that displacement is not affecting the depth buffer, so my Post Processing FX is wrong:


Any sugestion? I'm a bit lost

 

you also need to apply the vertex displacement to your fallback shader

 

Hi

Could one possibly replicate that using this asset?

Thanks!

 

Hi Guys!

Just updated to unity 2019.1 and got this problem, in all my shaders using LWRP just FYI


And everything looks like this:


Also, a couple of month ago i reported that shader made in amplify are bot being displayed in the Scene window in the option of "Baked Lightmap", is there a fix for that?

Thanks and best!!

 

Thanks a lot for the help, @Reanimate_L
I did, but I have a problem; I made some vertex displacements with a texture (that ugly green terrain), and althought I copied all the vertex code related to the fallback shader, I don't know how to copy the texture I'm using on my original shader to the fallback.
Others variables (floats) from the material seems to affect the fallback correctly, but not the image.

 

ya I did this like 4 -5 times, nothing. so I had to make a new project and move our game over, happens once in awhile as the file gets bigger, pretty annoying Unity issues happen... but with a new project it works. as expected.( not your guys fault) i just wanted to be sure. nothing was new, but after I made a new project I see it worked as it did before.

 

Hello, you should be able to achieve a similar effect using mesh deformation on ASE through vertex manipulation and noise maps, with additional variation based on the object's world position, although it would likely be best to use a geometry shader for this sort of effect, which is not currently supported.

Additionally, this video shows you one way to create a volumetric cloud shader and, although it's a different effect and technique, it can give you a good example of the workflow of our tool.

Hey there, we're still working on supporting 2019 and the updated LW and HD SRP, no ETA as of yet but it's currently being prioritized.

Regarding the baked lightmap issue, it was registered back in March and I've just confirmed that it's still in our support queue, we'll do our best to tackle it as soon as possible!

Hello, could you share a sample privately through support@amplify.pt, so that we can look into it and make sure you didn't come across any sort of issue?

Unfortunately, it does seem to be an Unity related issue as the behavior can't be replicated in a new project, in any case thank you for reporting back to us!

 

Can someone please explain what the W output is in in Screen_Position node output "Returns only the W component of the Screen Position"

http://wiki.amplify.pt/index.php?title=Unity_Products:Amplify_Shader_Editor/Screen_Position

Thanks

 

Hi guys, I was preparing a sample for you when I found the error (it was something related with my project), so now works perfect (as expected, is not an ASE bug).

As far as I know, it returns the 4th component of the vector in homogeneous space, wich is used to be 1 when it represents a point in space.
Is basically used for matrix transforms and perspective things, and if I'm not wrong, w in the screen position node will always return 1.

 

Got it , thanks for the reply Suzuka91

 

Thanks. Unfortunately, I'm not looking for a "decorative" cloud solution, but a shader that makes a given mesh look like a cloud. Just like in my example. I have very specific cloud shapes and structures that need to be rendered like in the video. My system is a full-scale weather simulation capable of reproducing real-life weather events, We got the mesh covered, storms will form with the right and accurate structure. What we don't have is a shader that simulates convective behaviour and make it look better than a low poly smoothed mesh.

 

Hi,
I have encountered a very weird problem about the ObjectToWorld Node. It seem the node is only working on single actvated renderer(gameobject) otherwise on multiple objects it will just turn black.
My purpose of using the ObjectToWorld node is intending to fetch a flat constant instead of using the World Position Node that might produce a smooth gradient which I don't want.

You can see on the the NodeGraph image, all 3 methods of ObjectToWorld have the same problem which don't work with multiple objects.

I also have uploaded the scene package.
(I am currently on unity2018.3.11f1, using default LWRP, ASE 1.6.4)


========= Problem Solved !============================

Just find out that turning on Enable GPU Instancing on material will get things right!

================================================================

 

Is there a node to provides the unscaled time in Amplify Shader?
When I set the Time.timeScale to 0 my shaders in stop updating.

 

So i made a toon shader but i cant make an outline. I dont know what the problem is since im fairly new to ASE. I feel like it could be that i have the scale and offset node but idk http://prntscr.com/ners4i http://prntscr.com/nerswn

 

Is there a UV Coord Node thats like the UV Coord in Shader forge?

 

There is not ( https://forum.unity.com/threads/bes...der-creation-tool.430959/page-90#post-4280251 ).
You need to add something like a global variable and feed the value via script.

It's called "Texture Coordinates" (You can press "U"+Left Click for adding one)

 

@Amplify_Paulo @brisingre
A while ago (page 56 in this thread) the topic of loops came up. Was there any progress on that since then?

I currently want to make a shader that can put "dents" into a model.

The very simple version that supports one dent already works. It just takes a vector3 position, float radius and vector3 direction. In the shader I just check if the vertex is under the influence of this "dent" and if so, I move it into the given direction. Super easy!

But now I want to allow multiple dents.
Giving a shader an array of values should be no problem, right? ( https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Material.SetVectorArray.html )
But then how would I loop over those in ASE, and sum up all the influences?

Right now I can fake it well enough by simply making my "compute dent influence" thing into a ASE-Function and duplicating that a bunch of times. But it's not pretty and doesn't scale at all.

Is there a better way to do what I'm currently doing?

 

Typically I think you would keep a "dents" UV map (a different texture for each individual car) and draw onto it with every crash, just like a splat map is updated with paint splatters.

 

Hey guys,


We've uploaded a new build into both our website and Unity Asset Store.
Here are the release notes:

Release Notes v1.6.6 rev 00:

• Improvements:
  • Added support for both Lightweight and HD SRP v5.13.0 on Unity 2019
    • Templates for SRP v4.x.x on Unity 2018.3 are still accessible through packages
      • HDSRPTemplates 4xx (Legacy)
      • LWSRPTemplates 4xx (Legacy)
  • Updated 'Triplanar Sample' node to include a new position port
    • Also updated TriplanarProjection sample to include this node usage
• Fixes:
  • Fixed issue with using vertex tangent data over SRP templates

We'll reply to all pending questions as soon as possible.

Happy shader creations!

 

It's great to know the new version is available! For me, ASE is still the better choise than Shader Graph. Please keep up the great work!

And I have 2 Questions here:
1- I wonder is there still a plan to add some new Noise types such as Voronoi?

2- On LWRP PBR template, is it possible to get any Template Parameters about scene lighting data? such as Ambient color and Environment Reflection? I am current making a custom lighting over LWRP Unlit template, and I cannot find a way in shader to get the global environment reflection which I used a custom cubemap. I don't want to use a script to assign the cubemap during scene initial.

 

+1 for this, voroni noise would be great!

 

A question, what would be the "opacity mask" output for the HDLit template ?

 

From just the video itself I can't quite tell how they achieved the effect but, as I've mentioned in my previous reply, it should be achievable through our editor by vertex manipulation and noise maps. The example I've shared was just to illustrate our tool's workflow.

Hey there, our time nodes make use of Unity's internal elapsed time, so a viable solution would be for you to implement your own timer through a script and feed its data into the shader as a property.

Hello, I recommend examining our CustomOutlineToon sample located within the AmplifyShaderEditor\Examples\Official\CustomOutlineToon folder, as it shows exactly how you can achieve that sort of effect.

Hello, the array approach is perfectly valid and you should be able to iterate through them by using a Custom Expression node as in this example. You can also find some further information in this post.

Thanks! We have had a few requests for additional noise types, it's currently registered for further consideration by the developer.

Regarding the second question, unfortunately it won't be possible to add this type of data as a Template Parameter, you'll have to use the Indirect Specular Light node to access the necessary data.

Hello, you'll have to enable the Alpha Cutoff parameter in the output node, which will create an Alpha Clip Threshold port:

 

Hello everyone!

I just started to try to use the CustomRenderTextures.
I unpacked the package, and was able to find the "CRT init" and "CRT update" shader types from ASE.

However, I am not exactly sure about how I am supposed to porceed in order to create a shader that will iterate based on the CustomRenderTexture. Am I supposed to access the CRT itself through a node?

Do you think it would be possible to create a small example sample for CRT, just to have an example of a Custom RT init and Custom RT update shader?

 

Hey there, thanks for supporting 2019 this quick! Have anyone tried to use diffusion profiles in HDRP on 2019.1? I can't seem to change the diffusion profile using the index through an int (I use a diffusion profile override in my volume). Thank you

 

We do already have a sample using custom render textures. After unpacking the CustomRTTemplates.unitypackage you can go to AmplifyShaderEditor > Examples > Official > CustomRTRain and unpack the Custom RT Samples.unitypackage.

On 2019.1 its a bit different, the Id that you need to place now is the diffusion profile hash code.
This is a value which is not easily found out ( only through scripting ) so we will add a node that will do that for you. Expect this node soon on our next build.

 

All right! Thanks

 

We do already have a sample using custom render textures. After unpacking the CustomRTTemplates.unitypackage you can go to AmplifyShaderEditor > Examples > Official > CustomRTRain and unpack the Custom RT Samples.unitypackage.

Indeed, my bad, I'll check it out thanks!

 

Well, yes, this works but it makes things unnecessarily complicated. Ideally it would be something like I don't know, a for loop node that takes a shader function as input which would be called in each loop while passing in a value. Or something like a shader function now, a single node that you can open up with a fixed enter and exit points and do whatever you want in it for n times. Or at least if shader functions would generate a method which we could call from a for loop in a custom expression.
I also made a deformation shader and basically I had to manually write everything - I mean, the point of a tool like ASE is to not do that. Writing it once is one thing, but maintaining it is another, you have to take Unity and ASE changes into account, and since a node based tool is always aimed for artists instead of programmers this is a pretty unrealistic expectation IMHO.

 

Good evening, i'm having some troube trying to make a character skin shader(See attachment for the afforementioned shader) that better suit my game.
The thing is that my game features a character creation scene where things like makeup and tattoos can be selected by the player. so far i have had success adding those by just "channel blending" the necessary texture channels, but i also need the shader to calculate new normals and specular maps using the final texture blending combination but the "normalcreate" node dont seem to recognize any of my textures and the resulting normal is blank. Can anyone help me with this? Also any optimization tips will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance