Shader Forge - A visual, node-based shader editor

Fantastic. I'll be buying this the absolute minute it hits the asset store then. This is definitely going to fill a huge void in the node based shader environment on the asset store. I get the feeling this is going to make you a pretty decent amount of money.

 

Hmm.. The thing is right now I've got the sides of the cube sharing UV space. Where only two sides are mapped and the rest are using these UV coords. So straight UV offset won't work. But as you are saying world coords, is it possible to sample the mesh in world space and tell that coordinate to use a specific texture?

 

Hey I have a feature request, I'm not sure if it's possible to implement but it'd be a great feature if you could.

I'd like the ability to turn off different maps and features of a shader per material, for example if I had a diffuse with normal map. I'd like the ability per material to disable the normal map pass completely to gain the extra performance. I've seen this shown off 'somewhere' in Unity but I can't remember where.

 

It's not clear, has this been release or is it available in beta? I hear some people talking about support issues, others about when it will be released? If there is a beta available, how can I get it, thanks.

 

Some people got into the alpha over on Polycount, but there'll be a paid beta coming out in a couple weeks apparently.

 

You can use the world position node and extract the Y and Z coords (Or others) as UVs for a panning mask, and pass in the panning direction as a Vector3 (On connection) and pass in a float value that updates over time (While it should animate)

It's not really possible to do that per-material, as it will compile different shaders regardless. It's not to gain extra performance, it's a time saver in terms of work needed. It's usually used for shaders that you want to be very similar, but want to remove/add just a single feature.
It might come in a post-release update, but there are no plans for it at the moment!

 

So, I suppose this is the first official set of videos of Shader Forge in action
I was at a Unity event yesterday and gave an improvised talk on Shader Forge, and showcased a bit how it worked, which you guys might find interesting!

 

Thanks for the additional explanation! I'll get my hands dirty now and hopefully we'll solve it.

Funny coincidence that your youtube demo touches upon what I'm trying to achieve!

 

HI Acegikmo,

Apologies if this has been asked in the thread before, but how optimal will the shaders be once constructed? Strumpy was a capable editor but produced some unoptimized stuff, especially when run on mobile devices.

 

It depends on how you create your shaders and how advanced they are, but it should be fine in general as long as they're unlit or use a very simple lighting model
The biggest drawback is not being able to control what is done per-vertex and what is done per-fragment, but I'm hoping to do a post-release update addressing that.

 

The no-light demo scene sold me. Really really great stuff.

 

Is RAMP with a texture possible? Do you have an example`? Cheers, great project!

 

How close in relationship is SF to UDK's editor? Could tutorials and principles in UDK be easily transferred to use in SF?

 

I can't speak from experience, but it seems to have (roughly) the same nodes and same node behaviour as UDK's material editor does, including important things like light direction.

 

It should behave similarly, but with some minor differences. For instance, Vectors in UDK are all in Tangent space I believe, whereas in SF they are all in world space, unless used in the Normal input, in which case it's in tangent space.

I've planned to make a video on the differences between the UDK mat ed and Shader Forge later

 

Would it be possible to use object space normal maps with Shader Forge?

 

Currently there's no way of selecting which normal type to use. It is possible to do it using the custom lighting, but that's a bit of a hassle
If you're on the alpha/beta, you can add a request on UserEcho

 

How do you get in on the alpha/beta?

 

Signups have sadly been closed simply because it's going to release in a few weeks
I'll add your request to UserEcho, you can later vote on it once it goes public!

 

Would it be possible to create a radiel fog shader ANd image effect shaders using Shader Forge?

 

SF doesn't have many options available for reading from the depth buffer, which is quite limiting when it comes to radial volume fog.

However, it is a planned feature, and so is post-FX shader creation in SF

 

For those who missed it on the previous page:

 

This will be really awesome, especially being able to make post-FX shaders later down the road.

 

I don't see the custom lighting entry on the master node, did you remove it? the light nodes are still there. I was trying to make a custom baked ambient occlusion shader, turn the ambient light off and use the ambient occlusion map as a sort of "light" map, and the light being controlled by the ambient light node. I made the shader but now I'm wondering where custom lighting has been hidden/moved to

 

If you set the shader to unlit, emissive will act somewhat like a custom light node, but I will have to change that in the future, because it's a bit unintuitive. Perhaps change labels

 

Ah see I would have done that and that would normally work, however I also want to be able to light up dark areas with a flashlight and dynamic light sources. For that we need a Custom Lighting thing. you had it in earlier versions of Shader Forge but it seems to have been removed

 

That would still work. There is a custom light shader in the example package, one of the first two material examples in the row of spheres

 

edit: fixed first issue. I've managed to have the shader lit, and it's all working as it should but my normal maps don't work and make the lighting all glitchy. Is this a known bug?

edit: it looks like Shader Forge has issues with normal maps on meshes that utilise the second UV channel. This is a bug


Here is the shader in question

 

If you could keep "Emission" separate from "Custom Lighting" it would be great.
It would make editing more intuitive to control them both separately I think.
Putting more thoughts into this while I am typing I think when you do an Unlit shader the Diffuse slot should more or less equal the "Custom Lighting" node.
If you plug pure colors in there - well you get an Unlit shader.
If you however create your own lighting calculations and plug them into the Diffuse - well you get custom lighting.
Plus Emission on top if needed.

 

Your "Normal" Texture 2D node is probably not marked as a normal map texture internally. You need to assign a normal map texture to it in the shader to flag it

(This behaviour has been improved in 0.15 by the way, as of 0.15 there's a checkbox to select if it should be a normal map or not)

 

when u release this tool?

 

The beta will go live on the asset store as a pre-release in about two weeks / a month!

 

Hello! I've been using Shader Forge for a while now, absolutely love it and will totally be purchasing a copy once it goes public!

I'm not really certain where to ask questions about just making shaders, so I guess I'll put it here.

I found someone's shader code online that moves an objects vertices downwards depending on screen depth to emulate being on a cylindrical world like Animal Crossing.

How could I emulate something like this in Shader Forge?
I found the Transform node that uses MVP, but not positive how to set vertex positions like is done here.

Code I want to emulate:

Code (csharp):

1. Output vert(Input v)
2. {
3.     Output result;
4.     result.vertex = mul(UNITY_MATRIX_MVP, v.vertex);
5.     result.vertex.y -= result.vertex.z * result.vertex.z *_Offset;
6.     result.texCoord = v.texCoord;
7.     return result;
8. }

 

I followed along with the Rock/Moss shader example at the end of the presentation in those videos. Very useful info in there. But it stopped before explaining the normal map part.

I've got normal maps on there blending, but I'd like it to use the rock normal map to break up the straight line transition from one texture to another. The same way a normal map effects the look of Fresnel. Is this possible?

I made a mockup in 3ds max of what I was hoping for.

 

Here's an example for a planet-like surface!
If you want a cylindrical one, you can simply use the X or Z outputs from the View Pos and World Pos nodes, instead of XYZ

Check the box that says "Perturbed" in the normal direction node

 

Awesome, thanks. I did try that earlier but it broke the shader. So I turned it off again and didn't look back. Didn't realize that's what perturbed meant.

I back tracked and figured out it wasn't working because I was blending two normal maps using the same normal direction process. It works if I add a second set of Normal Direction/Comp Mask/Clamp 0-1/Round nodes with Perturbed switched off.

I've attached the end result, I'm really happy with Shader Forge

 

Looks great!
Also, Beta 0.15 should release in a few hours

 

Very cool grass effect there on top of stone.

 

Does that mean i can get my hands on it already or is this for people who applied to a beta program already and i didn't notice? I am looking forward to purchase it when i t comes out... I am asking because i need to test a few things and need a custom shader for it and the shader guru on the team is to busy to bother with my idea. Also i don't want to mess with old versions of unity and Strumpys shader editor.

I'm pretty sure Shaderforge will be a big success on the assetstore, i can already see you on the Bahamas drinking cocktails

 

It means that those who have already signed up for alpha/beta will get it.
However, it will be the last private test version before the first public pre-release on the asset store

Glad you're excited about it!

Also, "on the Bahamas drinking cocktails"?
Pft, I'd rather stay indoors working on an indie game, Shader Forge, or my next Unity extension full-time

 

Beta 0.15 is now finally out for all the testers! This is the last private test version before going live on the asset store with the pre-release

It is now time to focus 100% on bugfixing and polish, before it goes live, to make sure it's as tight as possible!

Massive changelog:

• You can now connect to Outline Width and Outline Color to make a simple toon shader (Does not work with convex hard edges)
• The transform node is now much more intuitive. The new version has two dropdowns, From and To, where you can select World, Local, Tangent or View. Note that your old shaders using the transform node will either break or be reset.
• New hotkeys to use with selected nodes:
• - Ctrl+D (Duplicate)
• - Ctrl+C (Copy)
• - Ctrl+V (Paste) (Also works cross-shader, so you can open a new shader and paste in there)
• - Ctrl+X (Cut)
• You can now comment on nodes by right-clicking on them and selecting "Edit Comment"
• You can now right-click on nodes both in the node area and the browser, to go directly to their online documentation
• Added node: Scene Color (Can be used to get the background color or for manual refraction)
• Shader Forge will now use the tiling and offset specified in the material
• The material inspector now has buttons to open the shader in SF, open the CG shader, and open the compiled shader
• A scrollbar is now added to the shader settings / property window when it overextends
• The component mask node should now be foolproof (As in, if you connect a Vector2 you shouldn't be able to select the B and A channels etc)
• You can now specify per-shader fog overrides for Fog Mode, Fog Color, Fog Density and Fog Near/Far range
• A preset for Screen blending has been added (This will break your old shaders using Multiplicative or Custom blending)
• The camera can now be moved with middle mouse button in addition to the regular camera movement system
• Texture nodes will now be drawn with transparency only when they are marked as using the alpha channel for transparency
• The Time node now has an icon
• Texture2D nodes now have a dropdown to select one of the built-in default colors, when no texture is assiged: White, Gray, Black or Bump (Flat normal, for normal maps)
• Texture2D nodes now have a checkbox to select whether or not it's a normal map. This will be assigned automatically when assigning textures, otherwise it needs to be checked manually
• Added a frame limiter (At roughly 40 fps) to prevent Shader Forge from eating all the CPU power it can get
• You can now do arithmetic between nodes of different component counts (For example, multiplying a Vector2 with a Vector4)
• You can no longer delete nodes with backspace, this is now done with ctrl/command+backspace, or the delete key
• Shader Forge will now tell you to update if opened in a Unity version older than 4.2
• There is now a checkbox for remapping gloss from linear [0-1] to base-2 exponential [1-2048]. This used to be enabled only for PBL previously, it is now on by default for all shaders
• Fixed a bug where additional light sources ignored fog
• Fixed a bug where the default values for Value properties didn't save
• Fixed a bug where fog was displayed incorrectly when using multiple lights
• Fixed a bug where you couldn't use colors as specularity when using the PBL lighting mode
• Fixed a bug where arithmetic nodes were outputting the incorrect vector type when linking pending outputs (before the input nodes were assigned an output type)
• Fixed a bug where the Desaturate node looked as if it was outputting a Vector3 rather than a Vector1/Value

 

Loving some of those changes, I'd still like to see a Custom Lighting master node though. Otherwise great work!

 

i keep throwing my credit card at the screen.. nothing is happening.

 

Hahah. Agreed.

 

hi Acegikmo !

MAN - Is it possible to setup a REALTIME REFLECTION Shader with SHADERFORGE ?

... I was almost able to do it with the Refraction Node ... Inverting the Refraction dir ... with cam pos...

MAN ! Now that we have the Scene Color Node and SCreen Blending ...

Is it somehow Possible to make the REALTIME REflection Trick ?

If you can do it / can you please post The screenshot of the nodes setup ?


THANKS MILLIONS !


SOULS

 

The cut, copy, paste, duplicate doesn't work for me in the new 0.15 version. Also, was it intentional to stop the delete key from deleting connections? I discovered backspace does it now (might have all along). This is on PC.

 

This is a bug in Windows! Reported already here:
http://shaderforge.userecho.com/topic/350278-hotkeys-arent-working-015-w7k-x64-unity-431-f1/

 

I've found a shadow related bug

There seems to be a dark fringe on edges of shadowed areas, it only appears where the light would 'leak around' in the earlier versions of Shader Forge, here is the bug and my shader that can be used to reproduce the steps

 

I'm guessing you need to set your dot( N, L ) to Positive instead of Standard.
(Although I'm a bit confused as for why you're using the PBL lighting as if it was custom lighting)

 

Aha that fixed it, easy thing to miss. I've had to use PBL because otherwise the light appears really blown out and doesn't darken properly and just looks generally really messed up