Feedback Wanted: Shader Graph

This is not working with vector arrays. I have groups of "trees" in different tiles, each tree can have a different wind coefficient. I'm passing a vector array in a materialpropertyblock and with the legacy engine, I wrote a custom shader that accessed this array for each instance id (like explained in the documentation). With Shader Graph, this is currently not possible.

 

@bitinn @darkydoodle Exactly. DrawMeshInstanced requires an array of instanced properties, and this doesn't work at all right now. Setting "simple" properties seems to not work though, which makes all but the most basic procedural instancing code impossible to implement...

 

Are there any 3d noise functions? I want to make a displacement vertex shader, but the 2d UV based noise functions are problematic because the noise value for adjacent might be wildly different if they cross a UV seam (for instance with a sphere mesh). I would prefer to have a noise function that takes a float3 (along with some parameters like scale, octaves, etc) and returns a float that I can use to displace a vertex.

 

I found a shader over at Shader Toy that looks like it might do what I want: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtBGDG
I created a CodeFunctionNode, but I am not sure how to make nodes that are more that one liners in the HLSL. This code (neverminding that its GLSL) defines and uses multiple functions.

Can you give me any pointers on converting this example to a CodeFunctionNode?

 

From looking at the functions in that, you would not make the entire function (lets use "simplex3d" as a example) into a single node. You would instead remake it within the graph. Most of what it is doing is multiplying or adding etc values and you already have nodes for that. You also have nodes for noise generation btw

 

From the sound of it you just want a repeating/tileable 2d noise? You might find this example worth looking at:

https://github.com/keijiro/NoiseTools
https://github.com/keijiro/NoiseShader

I wouldn't recommend generate 3d noise on the fly, it's quite slow if you want any large dimensions. It would be better to generate them offline into a 3d texture and mutate them with 2d noise.

(Depends on what you are doing I guess, for real-time volumetric effects, I haven't seen AAA games generate 3d texture on the fly.)

 

@GameDevCouple_I "You also have nodes for noise generation btw" which nodes are you talking about? I have only found Noise Sine Wave, Gradient Noise, and Simple noise, none of which appear to make continuous noise through a 3d space, which I need to prevent tearing in the displaced model.

@bitinn I don't want it for volumetric effects, I want it for mesh displacement where I would only be displacing something like two thousands vertices. Still the 3d texture approach you mentioned sounds interesting. Can you elaborate on the notion? How can I generate a 3d texture in c# and make it available to the shader graph?

 

If you just want to displace vertices on a sphere that blend across uv seems, there are many examples out there.

Look at my posted examples about generating tileable noise and figure out how to displace 2 flat planes without showing seams between them, then move onto your sphere.

TIP: sphere also map to a surface when you uv it, you don't need 3d noise (and you want normal vectors.)



EDIT: by the way, for specifics about how to displace a sphere mesh, this thread isn't the best place to ask. the Shader forum have people that can help you better.

 

Thanks for your help @bitinn, but I am not looking for 2d solutions, that involve UV's even if the texture is tileable. I only mentioned the sphere as an example. I am looking for a general purpose solution that works in arbitrary 3d space and with Shader Graph. Near as I can tell that requires a node that actually calculates in true 3 dimensions. Precalculating it as @GameDevCouple_I suggested seems like a reasonable solution, if a method can be found to make it work with Shader Graph. However, I would prefer a solution that is as self contained as possible so that its easy to work with.

 

I ask before, but I might need to ask again... Anybody know what's going on with Premultiply? It's acting more like alpha blend than it should.

 

Hi,
Using wacom pen which obviously doesnt have scroll wheel is there a way to zoom in/out except the "F" key?

Thank you!
Kustaa

 

You could always make that graph, then save it as a subgraph so you effectively end up with a single node

 

It would be super nice to have a way to insert shader stripping keyword, so we can simulate those boolean toggles from built-in shaders, my custom graph now has quite a few branches which are always ran (unecessarily).

(ASE also have this though I am not saying SG need to match its feature 1-to-1)

 

That is a good idea, I tried it. The sub graph thing is pretty cool. I wish we could use sub graphs inside of sub graphs so that we could have the equivalent of utility functions.

Unfortunately, while building up the full function in the graph, Unity operations progressively got slower. It now takes most operations like adding or connecting a node around 30 seconds to complete, even in the shader that uses the sub graph, but doesnt actually display it. Generally speaking it is unusable.

While building it I did really wish I had the ability to group things into boxes, and leave comments, similar to what you can do in the Vfx graph

It would also be nifty to take big chunks of HLSL shaders like the 3d noise stuff here and wrap them in a node instead of having to recreate them to line by line, which I can now say is rather time consuming. This is especially appealing given the huge number of existing shaders that are available online.

 

You can create nodes - though they belong in the package manager folder with the other nodes.

 

I looked at the nodes in the package manager and all the ones I came across were CodeFunctioNode's. Is there a way to define functions in the shader with them? Near as I can tell everything must be wrapped in a { ... } closure and sub functions aren't allowed.

 

Depends on your SG version, for 4.6.0, yes; for 5.x I believe they are changing the API so it's currently not working.

Here is a custom node example:

https://gist.github.com/bitinn/72922a0a69f6d723d94e94f2fc21230e

Here is a document on it:

https://bitinn.github.io/ScriptableRenderPipeline/ShaderGraph/Custom-Nodes-With-CodeFunctionNode/

 

I think a custom expression node akin to the one in amplify shader editor would be convenient. That and a way to include custom cginc files (whose functions you'd be able to call from the custom expression node).

 

Will this be something like functions? If not, what would be the difference between node groups and sub-graphs?

 

One thing might be interesting: allow users to include an external hlsl script globally, so they can reuse any helper functions in it with CodeFunctionNode. This could greatly reduce the lines of code in custom code and perhaps make serialization faster?

 

4.6.0 preview
1. Problem


My expectations:



2. Also I have problems here:

If I change X in Divide 10, 50, 500, 1000 and save it has unpredictable behaviour. 10 can be equal 1000 or 500 on the same image.

3. Please add the drag hand to Shader Graph window, because draging screen on a laptop touchpad with zooming is awful.

 

4. Set Cube in Shader Preview window and rotate, it render sphere also.

 

A strange question: I am seeing some of my more complex shader graph shaders aren't being included in the actual build. They work fine in Editor, and are referenced by static game object's static material in the scene, so it seems unlikely they are stripped. And Simpler shader graph shader appear to work fine.

I even tried exporting the shader graph to a plain shader, and it still got ignored by build, without causing any warning.

The editor vs result:



Anyone faced this before?

 

I manage to reproduce this bug even with a simple unlit shader. Not sure intended or not, but if you name your shader with a string containing "Debug", like "Test-Debug", somehow Unity straight up ignore the shader from the build.

Yeah, crazy (white cube is built-in unlit, blue cube is unlit master node; in build, they either fallback or simply doesn't render):



Not sure if this is limited to macOS 10.14 and Unity 2018.3.0f2, but I opened a case (1112983)

 

Hello i was wondering if someone could help me with the graph editor. I'm trying to texture my large terrain using rgb to display each terrain texture. I've tried what i could but i can't seen to get textures to display properly. it looks like the alignment is off and the textures are too stretched out. i would like to be able to control how the texture is tiled and make sure the textures are aligned properly or scaled properly. i am using lwrp

 

all my unlit (hdrp)graphs fail to compile. they do work in the editor tho

 

see this post: https://forum.unity.com/threads/fee...on-render-pipeline.560653/page-5#post-3991903
It's broken on 4.6 atm, fix is already in the master / will be included in 4.7

 

tnx, didnt know that

 

It appears that the Object Space Position value that you get in Shader Graph when having instancing enabled is incorrect. Is there a way to get the correct value? It seems the value you get is actually the position of whichever object Unity picks as the "first" object among all the instances. Is it possible to get the "actual" position? Like, the position you would get if instancing was turned off?

 

AFAIK, this could be a bug? (reported previously)

But I am not able to reproduce on macOS with Metal API. See my example:

Code (CSharp):

1.             SurfaceDescription PopulateSurfaceData(SurfaceDescriptionInputs IN)
2.             {
3.                 SurfaceDescription surface = (SurfaceDescription)0;
4.                 float3 _Remap_AA4CA392_Out;
5.                 Unity_Remap_float3(IN.WorldSpacePosition, float2 (-10,10), float2 (0,1), _Remap_AA4CA392_Out);
6.                 float _Split_D81C45E6_R = _Remap_AA4CA392_Out[0];
7.                 float _Split_D81C45E6_G = _Remap_AA4CA392_Out[1];
8.                 float _Split_D81C45E6_B = _Remap_AA4CA392_Out[2];
9.                 float _Split_D81C45E6_A = 0;
10.                 float3 _Vector3_E82E8830_Out = float3(_Split_D81C45E6_R,_Split_D81C45E6_G,_Split_D81C45E6_B);
11.                 surface.Color = _Vector3_E82E8830_Out;
12.                 surface.Alpha = 1;
13.                 surface.AlphaClipThreshold = 0;
14.                 return surface;
15.             }

Also note that WorldSpacePosition is from vertex shader, not an instanced property.

Code (CSharp):

1.             CBUFFER_START(UnityPerMaterial)
2.             CBUFFER_END

Code (CSharp):

1.                 // Vertex transformations performed by graph
2.                 float3 WorldSpacePosition = mul(UNITY_MATRIX_M,v.vertex).xyz;

 

In my case I'm doing things inside a custom node using Binding.ObjectSpacePosition but as far as I can tell that also ultimately points to IN.ObjectSpacePosition, so there shouldn't be a difference I would think...

Oh and thanks for the link. I didn't notice that post before. Not sure how I missed it, I have another post shortly after it.

I'll do some more testing to see if I still have the issue with a reduced case.

 

Ok, so even modifying my custom node code to directly output the object space position (and not modifying it or doing anything else) and then plugging that into the base color on my master node shows the issue. So, it has to be an issue with the position that the custom node is given.

Also, one thing I noticed in your example is that you were using world space position. In my code I'm using object space position. Perhaps that is why you were not seeing the issue? Also, you have to move the objects around to really see the issue in my case.

 

They were not exactly the same. bitinn used a Lit Master node , and dgoyette used a PBR master node. Other than that the graphs look the same but give different results. I think the problem is with the PBR master node. Which seems to be fixed by subtracting the camera position as you suggested. Can't wait to try this out myself.

 

Hi dan-kostin. I did get it to look like what you were expecting, but only when x on the multiply is close to 2.68.




As for #4 I've seen it reported by a few others here. And I also get it as well. I don't know if a ticket is opened on it, but I hope so. And even better if there is a fix.

 

according to my using experience :1,4 seems that does not support, and 6 maybe can achieve by customer node. others i haven't known. so do you have answers now?

 

Anyone knows how to get polybrush to work with shader graph?
Because for me, if I use shader graph, polybrush material are pink-bugged, so I can't use them
And if I try use render-pipeline materials in polybrush I can't paint with them

 

Thank you, it works with 3.14 like in UE4 with 0.5(1.57). It is Sine certainly, Cosine works the same way and is different.

 

@wyatttt I'm using HDRP. I don't see any option for that in the HDRP asset. Maybe I'm just missing it though? I also tried changing the option in the Graphics Settings and that didn't seem to make any difference.

 

One thing I would really like to see happen:

Support template shader like Shader Forge and Amplify Shader Editor.

I have tried multiple times to come up with a custom master node by duplicating unlit master code, but are unable to get pass the tightly coupled structure (using 4.6.0), the farthest I got is to create a shader graph file with my custom master node, but I couldn't open it due to the graph still want to call default LightWeightUnlitSubShader when OnOpenAsset is invoked (instead of my custom LightWeightUnlitSubShader).

To be honest I much prefer Shader Graph just offer me some templating language that allow me a write dumb template shader instead of understanding elegant C# code.

I know Unity team is working on major rewrite for 5.x (which matches Unity 2019+), but for 4.x and Unity 2018 users, is it possible to get any solution for master node? template language? CodeFunctionNode?

My shader graphs are mostly based on unlit master node, which is different from LWRP Unlit shader:

- Unlit Graph has these passes: StandardUnlit, ShadowCaster, DepthOnly
- LWRP Unlit has these passes: Unlit, DepthOnly, Meta

So besides exporting to plain shader and rewrite it myself, I can either get shadow or lightmap baking, but never both.

This is the only reason I goes back to ASE to some of my shaders, because I can create a custom template shader and change this once and for all...

I know there are many goals Shader Graph team want to meet, but I think not having a custom master node is a real blocker for me.

Thx and Regards.

 

@wyatttt I made a minimal test project here. I'm not sure if it shows the issue exactly, but I think it does. With the instancing checkbox enabled on the material, if you move the cubes around one at a time you can see the colors on the other cubes change as well. If you then disable the instancing checkbox and move cubes again you can see that the other cubes don't change. This behavior (with instancing disabled) is what I would expect even with instancing enabled. I would think the object-space position should be correct per-object either way. Or am I assuming incorrectly?

 

Now, 3 days away from it being a year since original post, I must admit that I have postponed diving into ShaderGraph because when I looked at it during Unite Berlin '18 the preview was still lacking a lot of basic features. Now I am revisiting the topic and do I understand it correctly that there is still no lighting nodes or graph-way to implement any lighting?

The ShaderGraph material preview is showing a lit sphere of my material, but in my scene the directional light has no effect. I saw a previous post in this thread that someone mentioned using a Vector3 input as direction light, and another one mentioned copying code from the included lit shaders as a workaround until a node exists - I suppose this is still the case?

I also tried to search for ShaderGraph roadmap, it would be useful to know when preview features aim to go from preview to general availability.

 

I am also finding the lack of a master node is making it difficult to test this for most things. Not everything can be made with the default master node, and its annoying that you cannot create a custom shader easily via coding currently.

 

Not to put more pressure on Shader Graph team, but I recently did some performance test with Shader Graph and Amplify Shader Editor on Metal API with macOS, and found these stats.

Setup: rendering to 2560x1600 but with render scale 0.5, so effectively 720p



The cakes are textured using the same set of 4 textures (Albedo, Normal, Emission and a packed map with Metallic/Smoothness/Occlusion), and each pair of cakes use the same material with GPU instancing enabled.

Results are following (collected via Xcode and Intel GPA):

Shader Name: No. of Instructions (vertex and fragment), Time Elapsed on GPU

- LWRP Lit Shader: vertex 138, fragment 316, 128μs
- ASE PBR (default template): vertex 136, fragment 337, 122μs
- ASE PBR (custom template): vertex 153, fragment 319, 127μs
- SG Lit Master: vertex 169, fragment 342, 260μs

At first I thought the difference in performance will eventually normalized when the shader become more complex, but it didn't. SG shader are consistently 100+μs slower, and since they appear to take the same resources in Xcode (same textures etc.), the only reason I could come up with is that SG always use up to TEXCOORD8 (and do it for ShadowCaster and DepthOnly pass too, where they aren't needed), while any other solution use up to TEXCOORD7 (due to packing view direction into other TEXCOORD's w channel, and use much less in other passes).

I think the argument for a custom shader template is strong, if we want to gain a comparable performance to LWRP Lit shader and other existing solutions.

 

Topic: Vector3 or Vector4 uv data

Here is my use case:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/shader-graph-choosing-texture2darray-index-by-uv-z.609244/