Bug SamplerState is broken and borderline useless

Hi,

1. can't define SamplerState in material editor blackboard. Doesn't show up
2. SamplerState is years out of date and doesn't expose any of Unity's new goodies
3. Can't reason about texture import settings
4. SamplerState doesn't work on all platforms

...

I cannot make a shader using a custom function node without relying on SamplerState, so the woeful state of that thing is a showstopper for custom function nodes, and I need to use code due to missing regular nodes and even because it's sane to use code...

Please can you fix up shader graph a bit more aggressively, it's been out for a long long time and I held off using it for years anticipating you'd have enough time to iron out the basics you know?

I think really, most people aren't trying to use it for much, are my expectations too high?

 

More specifically and frustratingly, there's no way to access the existing explicit sampler state a Texture property from within Shader Graph without some heinous hacks (usually involving manually editing generated code). This means you can't enable anisotropic filtering, or generally control the filtering quality via texture importer settings, for any texture not sampled via a built in SampleTexture node. This wouldn't be as horrible if there were existing Sample Texture #D LOD, Bias, and Grad nodes for all texture types, or maybe optional inputs on the base node to override.

The current implementation is also missing options for per-axis wrap settings, something which the inline sampler state does support.

 

@Tim-C please save us

 

Is Strumpy Shader Editor coming back?

 

Thank you for your reply, I've added a suggestion for this feature to be come more workable in the roadmap. I'm aware of the new SG in progress and am in a slack room for that somewhere but I didn't have any idea how far along you are with it, guessing it will be about 1-2 years?

Grateful for the support, thanks

 

Yep. In the conversation that lead to this post I mentioned that option to @hippocoder.

I was having some issues with explicit samplers in a version of the URP. Some passes were failing to compile, but testing again in 7.1.7 doesn't reproduce it. I don't remember which version I was using when I had the issue and I already deleted the test project I saw the issue in and migrated those assets to a different test project due to some other issues.
(Upgrading an existing sample project to new versions of SRPs almost always breaks something requiring nuking a project and rebuilding it from scratch.)

 

So, on windows, if you do not use the texture the implicitly declared sampler state is created with, the compiler will strip the sampler. On Metal, it won't get stripped. So often what happens is you have some texture and sampler declaration (lets say _Diffuse, and sampler_Diffuse), and you reuse sampler_Diffuse all over the place. Then, in your shadow pass, the _Diffuse texture does not get sampled, and the compiler strips sampler_Diffuse from the code and reports that it cannot fine "sampler_diffuse" (without capitalization).

The fix is to do something like:

finalColor *= saturate(UNITY_SAMPLE_TEX2DARRAY_LOD(_Diffuse, float2(0,0), 11).r + 2);

such that every pass ends up using the diffuse texture. Ugly, but with pipelining and it sampling the lowest LOD, about the best you can do.

It would be nice if sampler states were no longer so "DX9" assuming that a texture and sampler are always paired, and can be stripped as one thing.