Feedback Wanted: Shader Graph

Very nice tool!

One question, is tesselation supported ?

Thanks

 

Thanks for the update, another question :
vertex animation? for making water waves for example.
using textures to offset vertices?

 

Can the UI widgets in the graph view be exposed so they can be used for other purposes? We have a combinatorial system for generating terrain maps on the fly (heightmaps, splats, scenery placement) - basically a very similar problem, and this front end would be absolutely perfect.

 

I'm kinda new to shaders, and haven't worked with Geometry shaders (Only simple vertex offset ones, aside from Fragment and Surface ones, of course).
As such, I'd like to ask, will we have some kind of Geometry shader support in the near future? I'm planning on learning to write them, but I keep hearing about how difficult it is.

 

This is great to see. Obviously it's not a complete replacement for writing shaders in code right now (see features like tessellation and vertex animation that you already mentioned), are you able to say if the intention is that this will be a full featured replacement for tools like Amplify/Shaderforge and writing shaders by hand?

 

Haven't touched it yet but I'm really looking forward to it tonight.
Off the bat, I see xyz instead of rgb. Either way works but it may confuse some people.
Also, I see the material starts as what seems to be a flat grey at .5 .5 .5 but then the number is cranked above 1 to make a red. Assuming the max value is 2.55, why wouldn't it start at 1.28?

 

How is extended support in the area of image effects going to look like?

 

Sounds good ! Can't wait to see more !
Any idea about supporting UI shaders? Neither ShaderForge or Amplify Shader Editor support UI shaders.

 

Hi,
Internally the shader graph has an abstraction it uses to compile shaders to multiple render loops. In theory, if I write a custom SRP that needs different inputs to the lighting equations, different pass semantics, etc, then I can modify this abstraction layer such that shaders produced in the graph tool are compiled with whatever passes and inputs I need.

It would be great if you could break this abstraction layer out of the shader graph tool and make it something hand written shaders can use as well. This could be a replacement for Surface Shaders, as they don't work under SRP but the need of such an abstraction is still very great. Being able to write one shader, and have it just work across multiple SRPs, and have it not break every time Unity changes the UNITY_SHADOW_COORD macro or whatever, would be very useful. Preferably the graph could output this code instead of going directly to the assembly as it does now, which is not very useful.

I don't want to be forced to use a graph to have such an abstraction. While graphs are fine for smaller shaders, they are ill-suited to complex shaders and shader frameworks like the ones I write. It is unlikely Unity's graph will ever reach the point in which it would be possible to do many of the things I do, let alone do it in a way which isn't a complete nightmare to work with. Supporting vertex/fragment shaders across multiple Unity versions and all the different lighting pathways is a nightmare, and almost every Unity release will break one of these. Having a common abstraction for these issues has and always will be the right thing to provide.

 

My current water requires tessellated vertex animation, so please consider the use case, thank you (for HD).

Also bonus for any kind of adaptive solution... : >

Spoiler

 

We will look forward to that! Thanks for the response.

 

Since the ShaderGraph seems to be required to be pipeline-agnostic,

1. is the pipeline-agnosticism an actual technical limitation, or just a Unity policy?
2. Will users be able to relatively easily add new pipeline-specific "master node types" to the shader graph? Let's say I want to make my custom PBR master node specifically for HD pipeline with tesselation, vertex offset, etc... Can I do it? What about a new master node that has custom lighting, such as a toon shader?
3. For even more advanced cases where the shader graph isn't the best tool for the job, how will shader programming work in the SRPs? Is there any info on "C# shaders" somewhere?

 

I'm trying to access the z property of the Screen Position or Position nodes, how do I go about this?

 

The shaders for the LD pipeline are available on the BitBucket, but they don't seem to compile under the 2018.1 beta- perhaps there's a particular branch that works, but I have not found it.

Currently, from what I gather, if you don't want to use the graph, and you want to support multiple render pipelines and put an asset on the asset store, you will have to:

1. Write your shader once for each pipeline (like traditional vertex/frag shaders)
2. Duplicate all materials, prefabs, scenes and objects which point to those shaders and make versions for each pipeline
3. Ship to asset store
4. Get 1 star'd by users because 2/3rds of the assets won't compile in whatever SRP the user has installed. (Ie: I have LD, so surface shaders and HD won't compile)
5. Get 1 star'd by users because 2/3rds of the assets will look broken
6. Test new Unity release where some low level shader macro has been changed in one of the pipelines and fix breakage.
7. Make fixes, duplicate fix into 3 pipelines, test in multiple unity versions under multiple SRPs, go back to #3
8. Leave the asset store forever because this is insane to expect for less than minimum wage

 

Tried playing with the combine shader on a normal map and got this error:

https://www.screencast.com/t/pDVBrVVeYD

Now all my textures aren't showing up. It turns out if I have a multiply node with a near zero value ie. 0.00001 as one of the inputs and the other output being a normal map, the renderer chokes. Is it because of a divide by 0 problem somewhere? Setting to 0 exact however doesn't causes errors.

 

Graph currently looks like this:
https://www.screencast.com/t/0kEbuncPX

If normal intensity is 0 it's fine, but if a low value is used (ie. 0.00001) it glitches.

PS. Being able to rearrange property order is quite important.

 

Having two Final Shader Preview seems redundant, how about removing the node preview in the master node?

 

Thanks for the tip about normal strength.

As similar to shader forge, for general floats is it possible to set clamp values to prevent users from going beyond intended values? Maybe sliders is asking for too much but at least have potential min max value settings on inputs.

On a side note, I'm not sure if this is normal or not:
https://www.screencast.com/t/qNKqf9S9BNjY

The right wall is not showing any textures. The normals of the calibration model should all be pointing inward but two walls in the calibration scene are not being drawn properly.

 

Also perhaps add a open shader graph button inside the Material component area if the shader being used is from a shader graph. Looking for the actual shader file when you already have the material open can be quite tedious.

 

So how does this work in an asset store context?

Am I expected to ship multiple copies of my asset, one for each SRP that's available, since there is no way to write a shader that works across both? Currently when the LD pipeline is active, the surface shaders my tool outputs throw compile errors (works fine if not using an SRP), which is a violation of asset store package policy and will cause my asset to be rejected.

What about the demo scenes which I am required to include, 2/3rds of which will be entirely pink because I will now need one copy of every asset for each render pipeline?

Will unity automatically remove all the 1star reviews this is going to get since I have to ship 2/3rds of my asset in a broken state?

Will unity manage the mountain of support requests I am going to have in my inbox from users who don't understand why 2/3rds of my examples are required to be broken?

Is unity only going to allow assets which use shaders made in their shader graph into the store to prevent this issue?

 

That's great for small artist written shaders, but not really practical for large shader frameworks that want to conditionally compile out code, do dynamic shader code generation, etc. I've yet to see a graph that exposes the level of control you get from hand written code in any engine, anywhere.

But basically what your saying is that if we want a way for our shaders to work in multiple SRPs (and potentially ones users write and ship), we are being forced to use a graph interface for all shaders.

Is it possible to do this across Surface shaders and SRP shaders? I have not been able to get this to work, but since there are no examples of hand written LD shaders that I can find maybe I'm missing something. (The ones in the SRP branch on BitBucket don't seem to compile when dropped into an SRP project in 2018).

Yes, I submitted a bug on it already, but basically it complains when I initialize a structure with UNITY_INITIALIZE_OUTPUT that the structure isn't fully initialized. It also complains about some tex2D variant not working, but I haven't looked into this one yet.

 

Hey! I've been trying to port this to my project, to no avail. What are the files I'm supposed to copy?

GraphicsSettings doesn't let me drag the LightweightAsset file into the Render Pipeline field.

 

If you're working on a fresh project, be sure to go one folder back from the Assets folder and navigate to the UnityPackageManager folder and open up manifest.json. Copy the contents from the sample projects in there and return to your project. It will start importing a bunch of things that will allow you to use SRPs.

 

I submitted the bug this morning along with the shader. You can also repro it by simply installing the Shader Graph project into 2018.1 and downloading MicroSplat- the included shaders in the example folder will throw the same error.

Is there a working example of an LD shader which is not graph based somewhere? I tried copying the ones from the master LD SRP branch on BitBucket into the project but they do not compile.

 

I downloaded the beta and imported the sample project but unity doesn't recognise the .shadergraph files and there isn't an menu item to create them or open a window to edit them. Any ideas?

 

This looks like a really cool thing, and we're really happy it's showing up!

Just one little thing: Could you please put Shader Graphs under Create/Shader instead of directly in Create? The Create menu is getting pretty crowded, and that's just by default. We've got quite a few custom assets under there as well, so scanning the menu for things is getting really hard. Finding them under Shader/ seems natural.

 

You just need to double-click the file and a window will pop up.

 

How would I grab a float3 and float4 texcoord for custom data? The UV node output is a float2.

 

Any chance we can use this for Sprites and/or UGUI Images sometime? We do a lot of 2D work, and it would be great if we could have our artists create the effects they need using this!

 

So, um, how do I navigate the graph? Holding the right mouse button does nothing.

 

There is no "Texture2D" node. There is only "Sample Texture2D", but when i save the shader and create the material, it doesn't let me change the texture via the inspector. I can only do that from the Shader Editor.. Is this a bug or something??

 

plug in a property with a texture exposed. I went through the same thing until I figured it out.

 

Still wondering if it's possible to get a float3/vector3 or 4 from a UV channel.