Feedback Wanted: Visual Effect Graph

We've been playing with the graph for weeks now and we're really impressed!

Except for these things:

• Lit Output don't work; nothing happens on screen and shader errors are thrown in the console
• Some naming could be better or more searchable, like Tex Index. Why not use texture which would make both "Tex" and "Texture" work in search?
• Lack of tooltips make it quite a trial and error process to create VFXs

The first one is our biggest blocker. Lit particles are essential to realistic looking games and animations.

 

thx guys but nothing, this is the error complete

Shader error in 'Hidden/VFX/ParticleQuads': 'EvaluateAtmosphericScattering': no matching 1 parameter function at /Unity/ScriptableRenderPipeline-release-2018.3/com.unity.visualeffectgraph/Shaders/RenderPipeline/HDRP/VFXCommon.cginc(80) (on d3d11)

Compiling Vertex program
Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_USE_DITHER_MASK_FOR_ALPHABLENDED_SHADOWS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_ENABLE_DETAIL_NORMALMAP SHADER_API_DESKTOP UNITY_LIGHT_PROBE_PROXY_VOLUME UNITY_LIGHTMAP_FULL_HDR

 

Is it possible to get duplicate copies of an effect to batch? Instancing?

 

Hey gang, a quick question on particle shaders -- you have to use the HDRP for VEG to work, correct? If so, what is the cheapest possible lit shader available? I see there is "Simple Lit", is that the fastest to compute that also handles lighting? Is it possible to make a simpler and faster lit shader in the shader graph? I am looking for something like the old FX/Mobile shaders… my target platform is a RTX 2080 Ti but I want to push the particle count as high as possible by making the shading of the particles as fast as possible (but still lit).

Any advice is great!

(PS We are currently using DX11 backend, but are open to changing that if it would help)

 

Of course, it's a simple animation with rotation of the transform and playing with some turbulence values. Really simple graph.

 

VFX toolbox is now available on Github - https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/VFXToolbox


Link to the tweet

Question
Will this be a sub package/dependency for the Visual Effect Graph Package when they are added to the package manager? So many people would miss this if you had to get it separately in the package manager as they would expect it to be a part of the Visual Effects Graph Package.

 

I love the functionality but dear God, has it reminded me how appalling node based interfaces are to work with. :-(

Has nobody figured out a better interface for this kind of stuff in the last couple of decades?

 

Sounds like you havent used substance before? This sort of workflow is common in VFX industry etc, where the graphs can be extremely complex in both behaviour and setup. It takes some getting used to but after a while you will find your skill at reading a graph quickly will translate from one nodegraph software to another


EDIT: is this available via package manager yet?

 

Because of the lacking support and info regarding the generation of vectorfields/signed distance fields for VEG i started to try to generate a Texture3D myself and plug it into VEG just to see how it behaves.

I had this questions which im still trying to understand:

1. Which values in the 3D Texture have which effect? Is a value of (0,1,0) a up force? And if so, how is it possible that some vectorfields "attract" the particles, which would be a negative force (negative values are not allowed when setting the texture pixels as far as i know).

2. Which dimensions do i use? In this example i used 32x32x32, but thats just a random power of 2 value i tried.

3. Conform to signed distance field seems to attract all particles (though in this example i set all my texture pixels to (0,1,0). Why is that so? How does it work?

4. The "vector field force" node seems to add a force depending on the pixel value BUT only if i isolate the Y value through setting the transform scale X and Z values to 0 because it drifts in those directions as well if the transform scale is (1,1,1), which is weird because i was assuming that a pixel value of (0,1,0) adds a up force only... well because all other values are 0.

Here is a video when im using the Conform to Signed Distance Field module:

And here it is using the vectorfield force module (but the transform of the vectorfield has a scale of (0,1,0) because of the drifting it applies otherwise:

 

Great news on the VF generator for Houdini, but I have a stupid question: How do import a VF file so that the particle system can read it?

 

I am without Unity at this present moment as I am waiting for a new mac mini to arrive today, but I will try to give some partial answers to your questions that might help a bit, but you will need to fill in the gaps and please excuse any small mistakes I may make in these explanations.

Whatever you like to get the results you need.

Play with the 'data encoding' option in the vector field force node, and consider concepts such as with one of these data encoding modes, values less than 0.5 being treated as negative, and meaning that force is in the opposite direction. To be specific, in the actual compute shader code that the VFX system generates, if data encoding is set to Unsigned, then the values read from the texture have the following maths applied to them before they are used: * 2.0f - 1.0f

Unclear whether you are aware of what signed distance fields are. Basically the distance that a particular point is from the surface of an object. Best to do some general research on the subject of signed distance fields to start with, rather than get straight into specifics of this Unity implementation. Also consider that unlike the vector fields, the sdf teture may only be using one channel (eg R).

 

When looking at example files, it seemed very much that the VFX system comes with its own 'automatic VF translator'. Because of that code, it looks like you can just drop VF files into your Unity assets folder and they will be treated as though they are already Unity 3D textures, ready to use with VFX graph & parameters. I havent been able to test this myself though because I havent made my own VF files yet and am not a Houdini user.

 

Thank you very much for your answer! Especially the part explaining that values less than 0.5 are treated as negative due to the "*2.0f - 1.0f" fact which is often used in shaders as well.
Regarding the SDF fact, i researched it a bit before and understand that each pixel contains information about how far it is from any given point on the "inside". Negative is inside and positive is outside.
But i didnt know which vector parameter is used to get this information and because is set all pixels to (0,1,0) that was a bit confusing. But if it really uses the R channel that would explain its behavior (sticking together like a cube) because the value says that is exactly on the surface.
Thanks!

 

Hi, I'm having trouble setting up visual effect graph without errors, maybe I'm doing something wrong?

On Windows 10, I've installed Unity 2019.1.0a8 and pulled the latest version of https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline (branch release/2018.3). I then create a new 3D project (I've also tried HDRP but has errors straight after opening new project) and installed the following packages:
1. render-pipelines core 4.2.0 (from github repo)
2. shader graph 4.2.0 (from github repo)
3. high definition 4.2.0 (from github repo)
4. visual effect graph 4.2.0 (from github repo)

The first two errors appear after installing shader graph, 103 from installing high definition and no further errors from installing vfx graph.

Edit: I've just switched my Unity version to 2018.3.0b8 which removes most errors. But I still have the following error:

D:\Projects\ScriptableRenderPipeline\com.unity.visualeffectgraph\Editor\GraphView\VFXViewPreference.cs(74,67): error CS0103: The name 'SettingsScope' does not exist in the current context

 

I've used similar interfaces in the past - dabbling with Houdini, various digital audio apps. My point was simply that it's a fairly poor paradigm that quickly becomes difficult to manage and forces you to spend half your time moving things around so that the relationships are visually clear. I understand that it's a fairly straightforward representation of the underlying data flow but I can't help but feel there's a better UI possible for this kind of thing.

Maybe it's just a case of having node placement automated (in an IDE I just click autoformat and my code magically becomes more readable - it would be nice to have something similar for node editors)

 

This would be solved by having a node system like substance, where any collection of nodes can be collected as a node themselves with inputs and outputs.

As an example, after I make a complex graph that makes a leaf, I wrap it up as a leaf node so I never have to do that again and also can "collapse" my graph from 1000s of nodes into a 10 node graph.

So I am not disagreeing that it is not the best usability right now, but I disagree its the node systems fault. This just needs to learn from more advanced node systems in terms of layout and then nodes become a godsend.

 

Dear all,
During the installation process, when I finally install the "Visual Effects Graph" package, the system retrieves me this error everytime -> Console Panel : " Shader error in 'Temp_compute_b_update_Runtime.compute': failed to open source file: 'Packages/com.unity.visualeffectgraph/Shaders/Common/VFXCommonCompute.cginc' at kernel CSMain at System.vfx(9) (on d3d11)". The package versione is the 4.2.0.
The results are:
- No "Visual Effects Graph" menu in the Unity "Create" menu
- No possibility to edit Visual Effect Graphs template: if I click two times on a file of this program, nothing happens.

I hope that you can help me because I'm REALY interested to test and use this tool.

Many thanks in advance to all for your support.

Have a good day!

 

*edit* got the point cache working, it all makes sense using 'set position from map' etc

 

could be typo in the code, missing an 's', it the file needs to be edited at line 72 to be SettingsScopes.User instead of
SettingsScope.User

 

Is it possible to set a parameter in shader, then get that parameter's values in C#? For example, I am setting my color by speed:

and I want to get the current color set by this module and send it to a point light. I understand that this module is likely per-particle (it's in an update function, don't know if that makes a difference), but I would like to just get the latest color set, if possible. Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

will this be supported on iOS?

 

That worked! Thanks so much

 

Hello,
I have everything installed correctly in my 2018.3 b9 HDRP template project (see package manager screenshot)
Yet I still get this error in the console:

"Desktop\ScriptableRenderPipeline-master\com.unity.visualeffectgraph\Editor\Inspector\VisualEffectEditor.cs(708,17): error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'RenderPipelineAsset' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)"

Any idea how to fix this? Really excited to get going on this.

 

You could try updating your ScriptableRenderPipeline folder from github. The packages I'm using are all on version 4.2.0 (I noticed your visual effect graph package is only v0.1.0).

 

Hi thanks for the reply. I tried updating from the latest SRP on github. (see new screenshot)
Which puts me @ 5.1.0 for Core RP, HDRP, Graphics Tests Framework and Shader Graph.
But Visual Effects Graph and VFX Toolbox are @ 0.1.0 Are you mistaken about your versions Gary?

Also now that I've updated to the latest I have a different error:
"Desktop/ScriptableRenderPipeline-master/com.unity.testframework.graphics/Runtime/ImageAssert.cs(29,49): error CS1644: Feature `nameof operator' cannot be used because it is not part of the C# 4.0 language specification"

Anyone have a clue here?

 

Hi Brookes,

I've just checked the github repo and I noticed that the master branch is using v0.1.0 while "release/2018.3" (the one I'm using) is using v4.2.0. Try switching to release/2018.3 using "git checkout release/2018.3".

Hope this helps.

 

I would like to request that when new stuff relating to the visual effect graph is made available, it is mentioned here on this forum, not just on twitter. I am not on twitter that often so it was mostly luck that I heard about these things at all...

For example, see these tweets from last week where it was mentioned that a set of sample vector fields was aded to the VFX toolbox GitHub repo, and that a Houdini 17 exporter is available for point cache and sdf/vector fields.

https://twitter.com/peeweekVFX/status/1060574384371482625

https://twitter.com/peeweekVFX/status/1060119945432969217

Cheers.

 

If someone have some tips about creating such turbulence types. I would love to hear from you !

 

Doh, yep you just drag VF into Assets folder. Thanks! Seems to work pretty well, gonna try higher res SDFs now. MegaFlow was crashing when generating anything over 256x256x256...

 

Just a quickie to say that this info is now out of date, VectorrayGen was updated to version 2.02 on November 7th and they added the 'generate 3D textures' bit to the system then. I haven't tried it myself yet, but they specifically mention the Visual Effect Graph in the description now, so this should be another working fga->visual effect graph option.

 

I hope this is a VEG question and not a basic Unity workflow question, but I am finding that when I export packages including Visual Effect Graphs I am no longer able to edit them. The "Open" button in the asset view is not there nor is the "Edit" button in the hierarchy view. Is this just how packages work? Or is there some secret setting I am missing? I would like people who I share my particle systems with to be able to tweak them.

EDIT: Could it be because I downloaded latest easy setup project from GitHub but I am still using beta 7 instead of beta 9?

EDIT2: It seems like this behavior is occurring across all my beta installs, even when I am not using packages. I am at a loss! Maybe the easy setup project on GitHub is busted? Anybody else in the same situation?

 

I can't get the visual effects graph working.


I just downloaded Unity 2018.3.0b9 via Unity Hub, and the release 2018.3 version of the Scriptable Render Pipeline via github, and I received the same errors as Protozeus (missing Create -> Visual Effect menu, and many error messages about "failed to open source file: 'Packages/com.unity.visualeffectgraph/Shaders/Common/VFXCommonCompute.cginc).

When I double-click a .vfx file, Unity doesn't open the visual effects editor. In fact, I can't figure out a way to open the visual effects editor at all. I can create a visual effects component on an empty game object, but it doesn't do anything.

I also see this compile error: "D:\Unity\Packages\ScriptableRenderPipeline-release-2018.3\com.unity.visualeffectgraph\Editor\GraphView\VFXViewPreference.cs(74,67): error CS0103: The name 'SettingsScope' does not exist in the current context.

Curious, why does the package folder name in the project view NOT match the folder name on disk (e.g. editor shows "Visual Effects Graph", but folder is "com.unity.visualeffectgraph")? This is the only place I've see that exception, and I suspect it has something to do with why my compute shaders aren't compiling. This will be very confusing when I need to write #include lines in my shaders and the names mismatch the project.

Also, Visual Studio is not able to find any of the package-specific .csproj files when I try to open source code. I assume it may have something to do with this error message:
NotSupportedException: Visual Studio Tools: Project file has no matching compilation unit for <AssemblyName xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">Unity.RenderPipelines.HighDefinition.Runtime</AssemblyName>
SyntaxTree.VisualStudio.Unity.Bridge.ProjectFilePostprocessor.OnGeneratedCSProject (System.String path, System.String content) (at <baccc7e73250494dbca3e5b1f2d4a763>:0)

Future note to developers, the package .zip file extraction nearly failed on Windows due to file/path names exceeding 256 characters. I needed to extract at the root folder directory d:\ in order to keep filenames shorter. When I was working from c:\Users\<username>\Downloads it was failing to extract every file due to the filename length (i.e. lengths are just a handful of characters shy of the 256 character limit).

 

If you change that line in VFXViewPreference.cs to say SettingsScopes instead of SettingsScope then you will probably have more luck.

Someone mentioned this in the thread earlier. The manual for 2018.3 and 2019,1 seems to refer to SettingsScope, not SettingsScopes, and so I've been wondering if its changed in a future beta that we haven't got yet, and that's why it was also changed in the Visual Effects Graph code on github and hasn't been changed back since someone mentioned it.

 

Anyone know how to reference the forward vector of a specific particle? There's "direction" and "pivot" and "axisZ" but none of them seem to do the right thing.

For some feedback:
-It'd be nice if I could type v3 in the block search and vector 3 comes up (I'm sure this sort of thing is on your list)
-Also a debug block that displays values in the graph would be good too
-It seems like vector magnitude was renamed to vector length. I couldn't find it for a while.
-When you create a variable in the blackboard it'd be nice if you were automatically inputting the name instead of having to scroll down and click it.
-Please help out with vector field creation, maybe explain how unity interprets 3d images as fields or by providing a tool to make them.

edit: also it'd be cool if someone could give a couple sentence explanation of how to make tracing lines / paths.

 

Has anybody played with the mixture of VEG particle system and Timeline? It seems like there is something called a "Visual Effect Activation Track" but I can't figure out how to use it. I have successfully animated exposed parameters like SDF forces and shader colors, but in those cases I just drag a normal Game Object that has a VEG particle system on it and choose an "Animation Track".

Also, would it be possible to document the Houdini VF-making tools? They work really well with creating custom SDFs and it is nice that it also works with the free version of Houdini (Apprentice) but I'd like to have some documentation to point people to on the wiki.

 

I've not tried to use it myself yet but I'm pretty sure I was staring at a test scene that used it yesterday. I can't check right now but it was probably https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...llTests/VFXTests/GraphicsTests/Timeline.unity

 

Hey there,
Is it possible to pass a different random texture from a flipbook. Let's say I want to have 4 different particle shapes in a flipbook. How do I do that in vfx graph.

 

great ,thanks for all the info! The graph tools are really great as they are, well done and keep up the great work!

 

Did someone use the houdini volume export tool to export a SDF?
Im not a houdine user or artist myself so im not sure if this is the correct setup, but i tried to convert a torus into a SDF using this:



But using the conform to SDF node in VEG it looks like the particles are attracted to the bounding box as well. How do get rid of this (ignore the grey sphere there, i just forgot it :X)?

 

Will there be a Curl Noise block/node add with the other noise blocks in the Graph or we will have to create our own like the ones provided in the VFXToolbox?

 

Question !
I know that compute shader, gpu particles are super fast.
But you are working hard on the new ECS / Job system.
So why not make the VEG actually uses ecs/jobs ?
You don't think you can get the same performances as compute shaders ?

I was just thinking that it might be more easily modable if we can directly create new blocks in C# and use the physics system

 

FEEDBACK:

Would be great to visualize the shape of the SDF or the arrows of the VF in the scene view. Otherwise, it is kind of flying blind in regards to positioning. Maybe an eyedrop visualizer checkbox, in the vein of the new visualizers in Houdini 17?

 

Also, is it just me or does dropping down a force block with {0, 0, 0} actually affect the particle system? I would think adding a null force wouldn't do anything but toggling between "absolute" and "relative" on a force block with {0, 0, 0} seems to change the output of my particle system.

 

Anyone managed to get the binding to work ?

from the documentation :

Binding Parameters to Scene elements
The Visual Effects Editor comes with a set of VFX Binder utilities that you can use to bind parameters to various elements in scene (Transforms, Colliders), or to bind values to even more complex behaviors such as RayCast results, etc. See the Utilities section for more information.

But nothing more to be found, or maybe I just didn't find this "utilities" sections.

 

I got it working with both position and velocity (which is nice, because even though my GameObjects aren't physics bodies they calculate the velocity for me). Just add a script component VFXTransformBinder then drag and drop a GameObject onto the TARGET slot in the inspector. Make sure your particle system exposes a parameter of type Transform. That way your parameter will appear in the dropdown on the PARAMETER slot in the inspector.

 

How do I create a GPUEvent node just like the sample?
In the right-click Create Node panel, there's only a different node called Event


And, how do I create a Trigger Event On Die block?
In the block creation panel, there's no option about "trigger" or "event" entirely. [right click in a Update Node, choose "Create Block", then search ... cannot screenshot that]



Update: Scrolling thru source codes, found it in experimental feature.