Shader Forge - A visual, node-based shader editor

You are making me want to upgrade to Unity 4 just to use tessellation

 

Confirmed already. I made a node that allows varying areas of reflectivity on one UV, and pushed it to my Android Jellybean device. It was all black. I went back and told Shader Forge to "target OpenGL ES 2.0" and it was all happy.

 

awesome

 

This is amazing, is it too late to sign up for the beta? I'd actually love to play around with this.

 

What are masked shadows?

 

I was thinking the same, a quick google search did not give any direct information.

 

Shadows that take alpha into consideration. In this case the leaves that aren't actual geometry but textures that are casting shadows.

 

Yep, masked shadows is just shadows that properly take care of the alpha in your texture

Anyhow, I've been looking into deferred rendering now! It's tricky, but I know how to pull it off at least. Might take a while though.

Thanks!
You're not too late, signup instructions are here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=123439

 

Thanks! Hope to get my hands on it hehe... :

 

Alpha 0.13 is now out! New things:

 

Hello everyone, I was surfing the web when I came across this help UDK material editor stuff that help me out a lot for using Shader Forge.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MaterialsCompendium.html

I also found some mesh offset examples which is cool as well and might be helpful for you Acegikmo.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/InteractiveFoliageActor.html
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/WorldPositionOffset.html

 

Thanks for the links! I've been looking at the material editor quite a lot already

Also, two of the new features coming in 0.14:

 

This is probably the only unity extension i have ever wanted.
Is it going to be a 1 to 1 replication of UDK or similar enough that we can use udk tutorials to learn?

colour-coded material masks?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7WNcUotwSQ

 

You should be able to use most UDK material tutorials for SF, yes, but it's not a 1:1 replica
The video you linked has material blending within a single material, which is quite a complex thing on its own. I would like to implement something like it though, further down the line, if SF actually gets a lot of users

 

I've started working on documenting all the nodes on what will become the Shader Forge website! It's very basic at the moment, but all the nodes are there, and the search box should work properly

http://acegikmo.com/shaderforge/nodes/

 

Looking forward to the big release, Acegikmo.

I think you mentioned you were planning a Fresnel node? I'm not sure what your idea there is, but I could really use a simple incident angle node, where the output goes from 0 for a direct hit, to 1 for a tangent hit regardless of UV angle. I think Fresnel would then just be adjustments of that curve so you could mask out contribution of reflection/specular stuff when looking at something head on.

Oh, I'm an idiot, I missed the 0.13 release! Off to check it out.

 

Could you put the ability to create vertex curvature shaders in there? Maybe even a curvature shader with lighting? If I knew you could pull off that functionality, I would buy your plugin in a heartbeat.

 

Noticed your todo list is getting nearly complete. Any kind of roadmap as to when this will be ready to start selling? Frankly I'm ready to throw money at you, lol.

 

Not sure what you mean. You can do vertex transformation, and DX11 tessellation. What did you have in mind?

Beta testing will begin soon, during which there will be mostly bugfixing/polish and writing up all the documentation
I would guess perhaps one week until beta hits, and then two weeks to a month until release?

 

Oh hey that's cool, but why not giving ability to create a shortcut from another node to minimize node connection? it could be usefull if we got a big shader with a lot of node so we can prevent a node connection from across the screen

 

Sounds great! Keep up the awesome work!

 

I just see your work and I can they one thing this is really amazing. Keep up like this I'm so impatient to test it

 

Can't wait to test this. By far the most exciting (and desperately needed) plugin for Unity I've seen.

 

Thanks you for your job!
Just sent you an email to test this amazing asset.

May the Force be with you !

 

Awesome!

 

Just signed up for the beta. This looks absolutely brilliant. Something Unity has been sorely lacking for far too long!

 

Thanks for all the nice comments!
Alpha 0.14 is soon ready - I'll add the next batch of testers as soon as it's out
There are quite a bunch of usability and new features in 0.14, a changelog will be up soon.
The beta is getting closer and closer!

 

Excellent news Joachim! Looking forward to 0.14.

 

Ah node based material editor, with straightforward use...finally.

 

I am definitely looking forward to using this... I am guess Subsurface Scattering and Skyshop integration will come later (you could make Skyshop an option)

 

Shader Forge Alpha 0.14 is now out!
Here are some .gifs and a changelog image, as usual

 

Very awesome update Ace! This energy conversation stuff is looking great.

 

Oh my god, it seems perfect.

I really need some light shaders.
I even started programing it by hand, but it is difficult, since I don't have much opportunities to test my shader abilities as programming other stuffs.

Strumpy is very good, but I want to make some DX11 shaders and it is too heavy for some mobiles.

Can I participate in the alpha test?

Why dont you create the Asset Store with this as a test, I will probably buy to support it!

Thank you very much

 

What is energy conservation?

 

Energy conservation means that reflected light is never stronger than the light that goes into it, it also means that as you increase glossiness, the reflected blob of light is more concentrated, which means it's also brighter. When the glossiness is decreased, the reflected light spot is spread out, and also weaker (Larger area but still the same amount of light that goes out). The animated gif above shows how it looks

 

PBR is DEFINITELY a must... and you have to rethink your lighting and texturing a bit. ... keep this going!

 

Oh i see it now, thanks Acegikmo.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=89GSVzgEHew#t=39

Just that.

 

This looks amazing.

Is there going to be a translucency property? Not sure if transmission is translucency. Would love to try making nature shaders with this.

Also thank you very much for implementing realtime mesh preview in Unity free.

 

Really like this. Is it possible to specify precision in some way, so that there's more chances to keep the speed up on mobiles or even consoles. No sense in wasting performance

Another thing that would be fairly outstanding (but hard of course) would be to figure out some sort of benchmark for it, so you can experiment with different approaches and come to something that takes a few ms less.

 

I'm not sure if it was fixed yet or not but diffuse textures seem to come out darker using this.

 

Apparently, Unity's lighting model in all their shaders is falsely 2.0x bright for diffuse color. If you want to match it, there's not much you can do but play along, and multiply all your diffuse output by two. I found other pages that explained this; Unity's staff said they could change now it but it would break a lot of existing games that have been tuned to look good this way.

 

Unity's default shaders multiply all their incoming light by two. SF doesn't do this by default, but as of 0.14, there is now a checkbox for doubling the incoming light

Bottom left of this changelog:

 

Thanks!
Transmission is translucency, yes

Specifying precision is something that is planned, but will have to wait for post-release. I've got a ton of things to do at the moment, the schedule is rather tight, and I need to release soon.
Benchmarking - Haven't thought of that, but it might be possible, yeah. Currently the best indicator is either your game or the instruction count.
Post-release too though, if it will happen

 

Is there something to activate reactions from the shader with the Light Probes?

Because the light probes ignores the normal maps from the built-in shaders.

Maybe some options for reactions with normal-maps, speculars, etc...

 

Do you have a rough timescale when this will be available, I have work waiting on this

 

Light probes are sampled and interpolated and rendered on a per-vertex basis, by default, where there's no normal map to read.
I'll look into them later and see if I can do something more with them, but that might just be in post-release.

I'm guessing beta in about three/four weeks, release in about two months, perhaps? Very hard to guess at this point, I'm quite busy with freelancing and lecturing at the moment

 

It's will be a nice Christmas gift.

 

Congratulations! This one looks great and promising! Keep it up. Subscribed..

 

I have one question (havent yet read the whole thread so please bear with me in case this question has allready benn answered)
The goal: i want to be able to use a 3d objects both uv channels (uv channel 0=Main detail uvmapping, contains diffuse,normalmap,specular, etc,etc) uv channel1=Secondary mapping, more used for overlaying tiled cracks,dirt,worneffects, contains diffuse, normalmaps, specular, etc, etc)

So in general, is it possible to blend two materials and apply them to different uvchannels by creating such a shader?