Cannot access exposed Visual Effect tansform property in code

Good morning,

I'm working on an interactive effect using VFX Graph which is based on the position of an exposed transform property.

Spoiler: Screenshots

As you can see in the images above, I'm able to change the transform values in the inspector (and when I do this everything works great), but I can't find a way to access this property from code. The VisualEffect class has methods like SetFloat, SetVector3, etc. but hasn't "SetTransform".

My current workaround is to use a bunch Vector3 in the graph and then set them via SetVector3 in Update instead of just using a transform, but sincerely I don't like this solution.

Has anyone succeded accessing a VisualEffect transform property from code?




Thanks in advance,
Francesco

 

Hello!
Currently, the exposed properties of more complex types (such as transform) can only be accessed using separate components of lower-level type. Which means that you can set separately its position, angles and scale.

for your example you will be able to access these 3 properties using SetVector(). The nomenclatured names for all three sub-property names is the following:

TRANSFORM_position
TRANSFORM_angles
TRANSFORM_scale

If you need more information about performing these efficiently, I invite you to take a look at the code we used in our Transform Property Binder :
https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...yBinding/Implementation/VFXTransformBinder.cs

The code makes use of ExposedProperty : an utility class that caches the optimized integer value that you often compute using (Shader.PropertyToID()) to set the properties.

 

Thank you for this answer!

The VFXPropertyBinder class is a great solution for the moment as it allows us to not write custom companion scripts for every effect.
I'd expect complex properties to be exposed in the VisualEffect property inspector in the future, but it's fine for now.

 

Please put this information on the documentation. I was struggling to access those properties in my project and could only find this information here.

 

Link is not working.

 

This seems to be the current location: https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...yBinding/Implementation/VFXTransformBinder.cs

Still can't figure out how to get the Property Binder to properly work with Transform though. I realize that's not quite what this thread is about, but I'm searching for why my Property Binder says

There needs to be more substance to this error to let me know what the issue is; seems like a very simple use case, but I've been trying as many secret "_suffix" magic words I can find and it's unable to bind the transform.

 

@VladVNeykov The dropdown you show next to the 'Property' field wouldn't even pop up. I tried a lot of rename and reassigning. In the end, it was removing the entire Mono component and re-adding it that worked; the dropdown you show now has my property in it. I'm not sure what caused the issue; I've been unable to reproduce it.

 

I'm trying to do the exact same thing as in your GIF but leaving the Target empty so that it can be assigned through script, but I can't find any documentation on how to do this. The help would be much appreciated!

 

@VladVNeykov
Thanks, these examples help a lot!
At first I was looking for a way to convert a Vector3 into a transform position inside the graph, but it doesn't seem possible? Even though the greyed out position fields show the values up to the final set position block in the system, the particles don't spawn at that position in the scene view. This was really confusing to me. There is no indication why it wouldn't work - on the contrary, the values showing up in the fields make me expect that it should be working. Or is it a bug?

 

This is my setup:



I want to move the position of this torus in world space. Doing it like this does nothing when I change the y-value for example, even though it shows up on the right. However, and I just found now that it works like this for some reason:



Now, when I change y, it moves the effect in the scene view accordingly.
There must be some difference how the Vector3 as exposed property is funneled to the block compared to the other Vector3, which is really odd and unexpected. Especially since it shows the value on the torus block in both cases.

 

Yes, that's it! Thank you very much!
So you have to be really careful when editing the effect in the graph and looking for the result in the scene view when you have it attached on some object. In hindsight, it's a pretty obvious mistake. I guess, you have to get used to the concept a bit.

 

Sorry about the delay, we are dealing with some other shader issues, but this worked perfectly, thank you very much!

 

Hi, I created a VFX Graph for SkinnedMeshRenderer effects and need to assign character roots to the VFXPropertyBinder at runtime, since I spawn characters and pooled vfx graphs on the fly. Can someone explain how to do that?

 

the link for the github repository is 404! Is there a new link somewhere?

 

Appears that this doesn't work for a Sphere property's sub properties. Have tried your suggestion and also upper case Scale. Any help is much appreciated.

 

Thank you so much! This is super helpful.

 

@VladVNeykov hey, we are getting a bunch of "Value of name 'VARIABLE' was not found". I know this error can occur when the variable name is not the correct one or we are using the incorrect "SetX" (for instance using SetFloat instead of SetBool). That's not the case in our situation. We found that when you click on "Compile" all the errors are fixed and you can keep playing normally. Of course this in the editor, but on build there is no "compile" and thus all the errors keep popping up.

How can we precompile all the VFX Graphs? Thanks!

 

I think this solved it! We did updated Unity a couple of days ago so that could have been it. Weird that this is needed, it was quite time consuming.

Thanks!

 

Good to know! That saves a lot of time. Is there an equivalent for "Open and Compile All"? Because what we found is that you need to manually compile the effects in other to see them locally, and sometimes in build you just don't see them because the PC that made the build hasn't compiled said effect. Maybe it's a setting in Build Settings that we are missing.

 

How does this work if I want to expose bools and Vector3 materials? For me, Only my "float" options can be set in the VFX Property Bonder, but any varibbles of other types (Vector3 and bools) are seen as options

 

Hi everyone.
I searched lots of discussions but could not find a solution. I am creating vfx particle systems and setting some exposed properties from mono behavior. Everything works fine, but when you try to download this from CDN, or copy it to another project it gives an error which says could not find the exposed parameter(s). When you open the vfx and close it without making any change everything returns to normal again.

Is there anyone who experienced this issue before or have solution on this.

Thanks in advance.