Search Unity

  1. Megacity Metro Demo now available. Download now.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Unity support for visionOS is now available. Learn more in our blog post.
    Dismiss Notice

Feature Request Blackboard with more ways to organize the properties

Discussion in 'Shader Graph' started by Horus_Sungod42, Apr 18, 2019.

  1. Horus_Sungod42

    Horus_Sungod42

    Joined:
    Oct 30, 2014
    Posts:
    99
    A feature that'd be nice once all functionalities of the shader graph are finished would be to have dropdowns, separators and other such organizational tools in the blackboard.

    Custom editors are great for creating artist-friendly shaders/materials for a larger project, but such editor require *gasp* actual coding. A material with a clean interface can help prevent artists coming in a project from messing things up!

    An internal shadergraph tool to organize the properties of a shader need not be as cool as what can be reached with custom editors, but it could help.

    I'm mostly thinking of:
    More important:
    - Vector 2 and Vector 3 each have 4 numbers in the inspector, which always seemed pretty silly to me. The extra numbers can be confusing to artists in a production pipeline.
    - The size of the texture thumbnails is huge by default. It'd be nice to be able to make them the size that they are in the Unity-made standard shader.

    Less important:
    - Removing the checkboxes at the bottom (Enable GPU instanciating, Motion Vector, etc). They're not too bad, but not very clean.
    - Not as useful, but perhaps the 2-value sliders (defining a minimum and a maximum) found in the standard shader for Occlusion and Smoothness remapping.


    I feel this feature would enable a large portion of shaders, even in commercial projects, to always remain in artist's hands, without needing a prog to clean its interface up.

    Thank you.
     
  2. alexandral_unity

    alexandral_unity

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Jun 18, 2018
    Posts:
    163
    These are things we're aware of and want to add eventually, but it will likely not be a short-term implementation. :)
     
  3. Horus_Sungod42

    Horus_Sungod42

    Joined:
    Oct 30, 2014
    Posts:
    99
    Thank you Alexandral for the reply, yeah it's the finishing touches of the system, compared to making it actually work!

    Glad to know these issues are known, I can't ask for more.
     
  4. Arycama

    Arycama

    Joined:
    May 25, 2014
    Posts:
    183
    Being able to "Group" properties in the Blackboard would also be useful, so that when editing your Shader Graph, you can hide/show several properties. This would be very useful for certain shaders (Eg terrain) that may have a dozen properties or more.
     
    Xform and SKoptev like this.
  5. floraffray

    floraffray

    Joined:
    Jan 12, 2014
    Posts:
    5
    Seconding this. Also being able to collapse all the properties in the blackboard at once would be fantastic. In Maya and Unreal there are some features similar to this that involve holding shift and clicking. In Maya's outliner it's a little plus sign instead of an arrow, but if you shift click it, it unfolds all nested objects. In unreal there is a similar behaviour with folders in the outliner, if you shift click close the top level folder it collapses all folders at once. Something similar to those would be super helpful.
     
    Xform likes this.