Shader Forge - A visual, node-based shader editor

Thanks for the quick answer.
That completly answers the strange behaviour. Then I have to wait till past 1.0 to get this done what I want. Worth the wait. In the meantime I can start to get deeper into SF.

The thing with the license is strange, but maybe people will follow a little wish, to not sell SF shaders on the assets store page

 

You could sell SF on your own - with a little price drop and the promise to deliver new releases a few days faster than the Asset Store does.
This way you might attract those who want "the latest S***" but bound to your own EULA. On the other hand this might just be more work on your end (managing two payment methods, two shops and two types of customers essentially) that won't benefit at all. And you might make some guys unhappy that already bought SF.
Nevermind. Just my 2 Cents.

 

First off, I'd like to say that Shader Forger looks amazing, and I can't wait to get my hands on it to try it. Thank you for taking the time to develop such an amazing system.

I have been reading through the last few pages, where you've been discussing people selling shader packs generated with Shader Forge, and had a related, though slightly different question.

I am working on a visualization system for the company I work for, and am hoping to eventually be able to sell it in the asset store. In order for the system to be at least mostly self-contained and as easy to use as possible, I need to have several shaders for different types of materials ready to go. Would you have an issue with me including shaders generated in Shader Forge as part of the overall system? I wasn't sure if there was a large enough distinction between that and just releasing a shader pack for sale, as the shaders are going to be just one small part of the overall system, rather than the main feature; and almost none of them will take advantage of the more robust features you've incorporated.

 

Actually, selling assets on your own at a reduced price is not allowed - they must be the same price or higher compared to the Asset Store.

 

That's no problem at all, go ahead
And thanks a bunch! Glad you like SF!

0.21 is releasing soon, in other news. Mostly bugfixing this time

 

Awesome! Thank you so much, you just saved me from a major headache learning shaders.

 

Shader Forge Beta 0.21 now released:
• There's now a button available in the top left corner of the shader preview, to take a screenshot of the whole node tree
• Fixed a bug where some setups leading to the UV channel of texture nodes would break
• Fixed a bug where normal maps didn’t respect the normal quality
• Fixed a bug where transparent objects caused depth issues
• Fixed a bug where Unlit shaders had to have a Light Color node in order to use Light Attenuation
• There’s now a script included for enabling depth rendering on cameras
• Updated readme.txt

Click to see all changelogs

(Don't forget to delete the old Shader Forge before updating to this one!)

 

Haha, I just updated and wondered why I needed to update again! Thanks for this.

Still hoping for deferred lighting support one day

 

Did you get the update notification in the main menu?

 

Yeah it was flashing blue at me!

 

Thanks for the constant coming updates, its very nice to see SF grow and constantly getting better!

 

There's an issue with 0.21, I accidentally forgot to fix the code hierarchy, sorry about that

0.22 is on its way up, should be live soon

Edit: 0.22 is now up, fixing a critical code hierarchy/bundling issue. Delete any previous installation to make sure you get a fresh install

 

I had a feeling that this might be an issue. Thx for the insight.

 

Hey Acegikmo, I am having a little trouble with what I expect is a much simpler task than most others are engaging in.

I had the grand idea to use one of the other vertex channel colours for ambient occlusion. However, I have found that if a model only has one channel that has been painted in, this set up doesn't work. I don't really want to paint every model top to bottom in one of the other colours to get it to work.

I am, wondering if I have a misconception about vertex colours, or if blender exports them weirdly like it does with everything else, but in image B2, the red and green channels show the painting, and the blue channel shows nothing.

A:
B: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1487524/Unity/Shader Forge/sf_sf_dns_vertexao_1292014b.png
B2: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1487524/Unity/Shader Forge/sf_sf_dns_vertexao_1292014b2.png
C: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1487524/Unity/Shader Forge/sf_sf_dns_vertexao_1292014c.png
D: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1487524/Unity/Shader Forge/sf_sf_dns_vertexao_1292014d.png

Am I approaching this fundamentally wrong?

 

Acegikmo,

I got an idea for you:

You said that SF can help those who are not familiar with programming (correct me if i'm wrong), right?
Something that would be really nice, if you make a tutorial series teaching how to translate Shader Codes to SF.

So far your Tutorials and your Node Documentation is helping me so much, but when I look into a shader code that I want to understand.... is the same as a paradox. I don't know... looking at This shader sounds like simple, although looks difficult to learn shader coding. (i'm trying to translate most of variables of the shaders to SF reading this tutorial)

Is clear what I said? Please let me know if you understand what I mean. Otherwise, I try to use other words, maybe examples to explain it better.

 

Would you be able to help me with some really complex maths, I'm trying to map a skysphere texture to the inside of a semi sphere... this sphere is squashed and has different UV's on both channel 1 and 2. There are other reasons as well

I'd like to have this sky semi-sphere mapped to the inside of this distorted sphere but I'd like the map to look as if its mapped onto a normal sphere. I know there are alternative methods to doing it but I'd like to do it this way specifically and was wondering if someone could help me with the maths

The texture is a full starmap (full sphere), the object I want it to appear on is only a hemisphere. I'd also like to rotate the texture around a custom axes (in this case the north star)

Cheers

 

The new screenshot feature for node trees is awesome. Seems great for sharing shaders. Are you still planning on creating a site for sharing Shader Forge node trees? Honestly that would be your best defense against republished shaders, an open library of node trees as long as users have Shader Forge.

 

I suggested this before and continue to support the idea! I'd love to.

 

Agreed. It's certainly the potential edge that shader forge has available to it, and it should exploit it as much as it can.

 

ShaderForge seems quite unstable at times, I've had it freeze on at least 40 occasions while using it intensively throughout today.

I can't get this spherical map UV thing working at all [see previous page]

Here is where I've been stuck for the last 7 and a half hours


What I'm trying to achieve is having a spherical map (a sky-sphere with stars on it in this case) independent of the objects UV map. Any ideas on this one? I have the spherical 'shape' but the map just comes out like it's tiling and mirroring on each side of the sphere and just doesn't look right. I haven't managed to get it working yet. I've gotten a whole sky system written up in just shader forge and it's pretty impressive, but I can't for the life of me this last biut figured out.

Also pressing backspace (to break a link) between the subtract and object position node causes Unity to seaze up

 

After using Shader Forge a bit more today, I'm really happy with it! The deferred lighting isn't much of a problem as long as I remember not to use alpha, and I was able to make some shaders today that I couldn't write myself. Really awesome tool!

 

I still plan on making it, but there are other issues with priority at the moment!
The danger of adding new features is that each feature adds a bunch of new requests from people on expanding that feature, especially for a whole new thing such as a node tree sharing center.

It's hard to tell what you're trying to do without knowing which part or how the mesh looks that you want to map it on, and without knowing how the texture looks. If the texture itself is a sphere with stars in, that's squished near the edges, you'll most likely want something like this:

Star texture[UV] <- Remap (Simple) (from -1,1 to 0,1) <- Component mask (RG) <- Normal dir


Also, the instability sounds worrying. When does it get stuck? What happens, and what triggers it? Can I reproduce it somehow?

 

I can't see any issues really. Your B channel seems fully white, and if you use a one minus node after that, you'll get pure black

 

So, how'd you get this?

This is basically what I'm looking for. I know it's not totally transparent, but the spec highlights are much brighter than what I'm currently able to achieve.

*edit
My image isn't uploading, but it's the icon you use for the refraction node on the shader forge website.

 

Like I said in the post; set the alpha to something very low, and the specular to something very high

For instance, if you set the alpha to 0.01, and the specularity to 100, the specular strength will be 100*0.01 = 1

 

Hey there, I picked up SF last night, and have been occupying my time playing around with it.

I had the idea to generate a simple texture that would act like a wireframe for triggers, so I could easily see where they were without having to select them. The idea behind this is that the edges will glow using the custom light option, and an outline image with the center set to transparent. The problem I'm running into is that I can't SF to treat the transparent portions of the image as transparent on the shader. It changes it to black and renders it that way.

I also tried various combinations of outlines and emission, all of which wound up with roughly the same output.

Here's what I have, any help would be appreciated.




On an unrelated note, is there any chance you could add a glass tutorial to your tutorials list?

 

Ok, I didn't have my specular amount that high. Strange though, only the secondary light (orange one) in the preview is working correctly. Maybe because I don't have Unity Pro.

 

Powdered_sugar, you're actually very close to getting it. You need to use the texture for the alpha as right now you're telling it to be either fully opaque or fully transparent using the value slider. Remember that white = 1 and black =0 and your texture should give you just that.

So what I do is plug the alpha of the texture into the alpha slot of the main node or alternatively have said alpha multiplied by a value slider so you can fade it in and out.

 

That worked perfectly, thank you very much!

 

Custom lighting is the input that is read per-light source, so I don't think this is what you want, as the red border only needs to be rendered once, not for every light affecting it.
I see several issues:

1. Your alpha is uniform, meaning, you have the same transparency all over the mesh. What you want is for it to be transparent in the center, and opaque at the borders. Connect the alpha channel of your texture instead of the slider
2. You're using alpha instead of alpha clipping. Alpha clipping is much better for dealing with sorting and whatnot, but it cannot do partial transparency. In this case, you'll not need partial transparency though, so you can use Alpha Clip instead
3. You're connecting your color to custom lighting, but I think you want it on Emission instead, as Emission is run once per object, rather than once per light source
4. Since you're only sampling the texture once, you can delete the texture asset and just use the Texture 2D node.
5. Since you're not modifying the UV coordinates, you can delete the UV coordinate node, as it's the same as the default
6. Since the emission is masked by the transparency, you don't need to multiply the red color by the alpha, you can simply put a red color directly into emission

Unnecessarily long explanation for a simple fix, but I hope it's useful

Possibly yeah!

 

Thank you for the critique, I got the same output with half the nodes XD I'm very new to shaders in general, so I have quite a bit to learn about the logic behind them. SF if certainly making it easier to visualize what everything does though.

 

Hehe, no probs
You might want to check out the tutorials, they should help you get started a bit: http://acegikmo.com/shaderforge/tutorials/

 

Is it possible to use a video clip with shader forge or is that something the user has to do manually?

 

If your video clip is streamed to a render texture, then yes

 

Hey, Do Outline Width and Vertex Offset support View Dir. and Normal Dir. nodes ?
I tried to connect these nodes without success. Unity Editor raises some exceptions.

 

Yeah, that is the issue, it is the same model, with the vertex node RGB plugged in it shows blue, but the blue channel is totally white. Is that a normal vertex colour behaviour?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1487524/Unity/Shader Forge/sf_sf_dns_vertexao_1292014.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1487524/Unity/Shader Forge/sf_sf_dns_vertexao_1292014b2.png


The One Minus is functional when the rest of the model is Vertex painted, perhaps it is just an artifact of the odd behaviour of my blue channel, can be ignored.

 

I think you are missing alot more ... if you want my opinion. If you were just forçed to do that because of the missed Eula. Let me help you with some more lights why you should not put External Custom Limiting licences into a product, in this case yours. The first is because :

ALLOWING CUSTOMERS TO SELL THEIR SHADERS EFFORTS IS A WAY TO SUPPORT YOUR CUSTOMERS Revenue. It will Get your program More Popular. And get supported back with more people buying your tool to make business out of it.

Have you asked yourself seriously: What will make people to buy your asset instead of just piracing it ?
I have a answer for you: The needs for constant updates within their business with your tool. Will make them buy it.

Simple because of that: you should not remove the possibility of their business out of their tool. Otherwise people will just not need to buy it for updates.

You Are supporting Your customers that payed ( With alot efforts ) for your tool, Allowing them to make money with their assets with shaderforge shaders. That will make all those that want to make business out of your tool to have to buy your Extension to have all latest bugs free versions . Wich will make out of Shaderforge editor a business Investment, Ratter than making it just another tool. You are making it a Sales platform .

Do you want to have more sales ?
- Well "Put always a bug in the current version / and resolve it in next"
As the sole need of constant updates is what make it sell...

Therefore In same way Allowing people to SELL Their Builded Shaders will basically bring more customers to your yard, if you Make of Shaderforge a tool wich they can make some money out of it.

BEside in Assets store, there is not place for Everyone To Sell whatever / Assets are usually Refused often for all minimum things.So im sure there will not be Saturation of Shaderforge Shader packs / As you mention as simple Assets Store will not permit it.

So its Wise to Remove the whatsoever imposed license limitations and allow people to sell their SHaderforge Constructed shaders. As it also will make the SHaderforge Editor something more popular.

If you Are Agile And astute enouph you can even make your own / Customers selling Their own Shaders at your Site Platform.

In all the rest Im Sure many people will Buy SHaderforge just to be able to have latests updates and sell their shaderpacks without bugs / As well im sure many customers / After buying a pack of shaderforge shaders, Will buy shaderforge Just to see how the nodes were build, and learn by looking on how to make their own shaders With SHaderforge based on the examples buyed. That is all common.

___
WHat is not common and hurts "Your own customers" is Expecting that all efforts of buying the tool, and of many hours pipelining shaders and testing and putting them somewhow functional at a selling professional level / Forcedly all that work not be able to be finacially rewarded and enforcing people with watsoever licence that will force your customers TO only share "FOR FREE" shaderforge shaders / because they have a licence wich states they canot sell ( thier efforts results ). I find that of trying to make all every customers to be forced to only share shader shaders in their creations "for free" ratter insulting. For me Is just dumb and senseless as is just purely just hurting "your customers" that invested money for shaderforge and in the end not be able to make some in return. And im not even telling on Selling Shaders alone, as obviously the same not selling restrictions go over to any models selled or scenes that have shaderforge shaders, otherwise that custom licence doesnt make any sense, if some can sell shaders in models and other canot sell shaders alone ...
In all ways Custom Enforçed Invented licences is futile and will only drag many people to hate and unsuport leeching towards a development.

I kinda fell ofended with the idea, of after spending precious money on a tool be forced to not be able to make money "Out of my own efforts" in hundreds of creative hours in using it. And be forced to Share my creations Only for free ? In one word or two: Its not a better way or good whatsoever for your customers business or yours also.
Just for the Laughts Imagine AUtodesk Doing this in any their "tools" or even Unity going same line of tought ? And well we would not even have a Assets store Or unity Subproducts as yours would be able to be builded that way do we ?

I would avoid hurting your customers with whatsoever custom limited licenses enforcing whatsoever in the future, if i was you. Not even unity Technologies itself Does that. Its actually not the Unity Communitarian Democratization way.
You are making money today, because of that Democracy in Development.

Iv told you this once privately. But i would like to reinforce it. Support the community if you want to be supported.
Dont go too greedy, ENforcing whatsoever or else you will loose your customers support. And therefore your sales also.

Its just my personal opinion, in wich everyone is entitled to. But especially as a paying customer i must say it.

I bought ShaderForge to make models and scenes using Shaderforge shaders wich i want to make revenuew of my efforts.
And if you would keep with that limiting shaders selling licence, Not allowing to make money out of my efforts in my scenes and models and builded shaders. As nothing of that limiting usage restrintions was mentioned in the release or sales description... Believe-me i would sure would ask my 80$ as refound back.

SO im very glad you took it off. As you should be also glad of having such great community of users already builded here supporting your decisions for a better way of living not just for you but for us all.

Best Regards.


TRIAX.

 

So, are you using two objects there, or one object with two materials? Also, why not just use the outline Node?

 

does all shaders that are made with this asset able to render in Directx 11? Or do we need to do some sorta check box or something in the way to insuring that it will work with Directx 11?

 

It should work in DX11 without any specific settings. Just make sure DX11 is enabled in the shader settings

 

Thank you for a fast reply

 

Triax - thanks for your view on the license thing too. .. I did not realize about the EULA.. actually now you mention it I had some of my assets refused in the past due to trying to put my own license terms on it and had to remove it. I forgot about that. Anyway.. I'm happy make sure any `shader packs` I make with SF are done with respect and will view the `SF support` as a FEATURE, and something to be elaborated on, as a selling point for the pack itself but also to help support existing SF community and encourage its expansion. Happy to put a link on any SF packs to help to that end.

 

One object, two materials. I think you'd still need to use a second material for the object as the object's main material if you wanted to enable/disable the outline easily.

Remember, I'm still new to this so I can't tell you exactly what's wrong with using the Outline Node instead of a Vertex Offset.
Fiddling around with each option, the Outline Node outlines every contour of the object where if I were to use Vertex Offset and sit it behind a second material, it would create a much cleaner outline.

I'm also not sure why this is the case, but I can't get the actual outline with the Outline Node to show through other objects, just the diffuse.

So with Vertex Offset, the outline itself and the base color show through an object and it seems to be much cleaner.
- I feel like I'm babbling and have no idea what I'm doing, so here's a picture.

 

That looks awesome!

Do you think you'd be able to share a screenshot of how you make that effect? I'm trying to do a coloured outline for my own shader, but the outline node doesn't look as good as you noted - it's choppy and has some broken looking edges on my models.

 

@Pseurai how are you making it choose which material to use?

 

You're going to get broken edges with Outline Node or Vertex Offset if the normals have any hard edges.

 

I can't reproduce it from a blank shader, and I can't give out the current shader (I wish I could) because it's super complex and contains an entire sky system and I'm not allowed to give stuff like that out.

Back to the first issue anyway, Thank you it is 'almost' there, I replaced the normal dir node with a view dir as i want the map to be 'independent' of the skysphere. Yes the texture is stretched at the top and bottom edges as it's meant to be mapped onto the inside of a sphere.

So adding in view view node has almost exactly what I want, the texture is correctly stretched in the right places vertically, however horizontally it is mostly correct except it's mirroring on the X axes and stretches funny. Here is a screenshot


(the lines and dots are intentional and part of the texture)

edit: even with using normal dir instead of view dir the texture is stretched along it's X axes. I'm assuming it's not possible with view dir node so I've tried an alternative solution where it only uses view dir nodes to calculate the spherical warp and this so far is working. I was then going to scroll the texture around when the view moves. However I have gotten stuck on how to make the texture scroll using view dir, I can do it with a simple slider but using view dir just gives me really strange warp effects.

 

I have not yet purchased your product but I really like the speed of updates and support. This is the right direction. Good job!!!

 

Hello,

Since upgrading from v0.20 to 0.22 my ShaderForge copy has broken. I deleted the whole folder and trying downloading a few times but ShaderForge's window won't open anymore. Is there any known bug?

When trying to apply my project's window layout I receive 2 different error messages:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
ShaderForge.SF_Evaluator.Evaluate ()
ShaderForge.SF_Editor.OnDisable ()
UnityEditor.WindowLayout:LoadWindowLayout(String, Boolean)

Failed to destroy editor windows: #1
SF_Editor
UnityEditor.WindowLayout:LoadWindowLayout(String, Boolean)

Thanks!

Edit: well forget it, this is embarrasing. I actually had a problem with my current saved layout. Deleting and re-doing it fixed the problem.

 

For having no clue what you're doing, it looks great. I can't wait to see how it comes out after you've messed around with it more ^^