Shader Painter Beta

Great to hear!

Regards,
Carlos

 

I'm new to texturing so please pardon me for asking this newbie question: Will this work with blocky models made in MagicaVoxel (.vox file)? I use Voxel Importer to directly import .vox files in Unity and it adds any Transparent Shaders automatically. Then I modify and correct the other Emission Shaders settings in Unity because they don't carry over. Planning to then add more details to the models using Shader Painter if it is possible. Can this use both non-skinned an skinned meshes or rather can it also improve textures of organic living objects like plants, animals, etc.?

 

Hi,
Thank you for your question.

Sorry, i never used MagicaVoxel but if the models created have overlapping uv’s you will not be able to use Shader Painter to paint details until we add the triplanar feature (This feature will be available after the beta phases).

Shader Painter works with both non-skinned and skinned objects but will probably not work as you expect for the plants. Since the tool use our shaders on the model you're painting we need to create a custom vegetation shader (this is also planned).

We are currently working on the maps exporter/combiner which will be available for the next update (v1.5.0). With this feature you will be able to add details on your plants in Shader Painter, save the maps and use them with any other shader you want.

Let us know if you have any further questions.

 

Alright, I will just watch for the upcoming features. Thanks!

 

Hi, I'm on the fence to buy shader painter, but had one question regarding seamless / tiled UV-Mapping. I'm working on an isometric game which has a lot of objects which use seamless textures that are then tiled across the object. For example the warehouse in the attachments has the same repeating seamless "stripes" of the texture wrapped around it for the walls and on the roof as well.
On the right side you can see the UV Mapping for one of the roof parts:
Since the roof stripe in the texture is seamless I can map over the borders of the texture and it will simply repeat on the model.

When I paint some dirt / rust / details on the roof, will the details I paint on repeat in similar fashion like the texture, or will I be able to paint on details independently to break up the repetition?

 

Hi @OneManBandGames,
Thank you for your question.
The tiling of a texture is independent of the painting. With Shader Painter you don't paint the texture but the place where the texture is. You can then paint differently each iteration of the tiled texture and break up the repetition.

 

Thanks for the quick reply, I'm on my way to the asset store...

 

Hey.
Could you please please please make ShaderPainter compatibel with
the StackLit Shader of the HD RP.
SRP on Github. Branch StackLit2

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/tree/StackLit2?files=1

It s the one who s used in Book of the Death Asset.
Then a dream, think not only for me, would come reality.

 

This asset looks awesome! It’s in my bag right now but I have two questions:

1) does it detect pressure sensitivity if you are using a tablet? (Surface Pro 4 - or even an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil connected to a MacBook Pro via Astropad)

2) Can it be made to work at runtime in an iPad Pro app?

Many thanks in advance

Why?: It would be amazing to have the ability to Mod the look and feel of an objects textures (or the world) in AR using an iPad Pro and Pencil!

 

Would this work on mobile? efficiently?

Regards,
Carlos

 

We are experiencing some problems right know with LWRP. But once the issue is resolved we will work on the HDRP integration.

Currently Shader Painter don’t detect pressure sensitivity. We will see if we can add this functionality at some point.

SP don’t work at runtime for now but this features has been already added to the to do list.

Using Shader painter in Augmented reality will be truly awesome ! We are not there yet but this is definitely a good idea. Thank you for the suggestion.

We have not yet worked on mobile compatibilities but theoretically the standard shader and the Cutout shaders should work without any problem. The water and the wind should work too but will have probably more impact on the FPS.

Particular attention will be made for mobile compatibility in the last steps of the beta phases.

 

Hi, looks cool !!
Are there any known problems for using it in VR-Projects ?

Thanks,
Ulf
MESHED space Team

 

Hi,
No problems relating to Virtual Reality have been reported. All should work as expected.
If you are having problems using Shader Painter with VR don’t hesitate to detail the issue here or by contacting us by email.

 

Can this work with Alloy lighting? Also, are we able to grab the splat map generated by the tool and use it in our own custom shader (ASE)? That would be pretty amazing.

 

Hi,
Shader Painter use our own custom shaders in order to work. You can’t use other shaders like the Alloy shaders.

But in few weeks the Merge and Export features will be added to the tool. From then, you will be able to save and export your painting and use the new combined maps with Alloy or any other shaders.

All the maps will be saved, Albedo, Height, Metallic, Rough, Normal, Ao, Emissive, and the mask or the splatmap if you are using the multi layers shader.


Here is a quick video overview i made for the occasion. The feature is still in work in progress so i am only showing you the result with the Albedo map.
With the Merge and Export you will have the possibility to paint over and over on any models in your project.

 

Looks great !!! Have been excited to see this export set up

 

Wow, that will be awesome. If I can paint directly on my models in here and either (A) export the final maps to use in whatever shader I want or (B) have access to the splatmap to use in any splatmap shader I create, that will be incredibly useful. Definitely sold me with that.

 

Just noting my personal opinion: I am not interested in this for the "shaders". I have enough shader libraries as is, especially with ASE. All I want is the ability to paint these and have a VERY easy workflow to getting them to look right when I put them in my game.

What would be really useful would be to give us access to the splatmap even when painting (even if it requires a component that lets us specify our shader's splatmap property name or something), so we can paint using whatever our final shader will be. That way, we make sure it looks "right" as we're painting, and not just when we click "export". I would even be happy with a simple API that lets me grab the splatmap texture, so I can write my own component as needed. I would probably focus on getting it working with ASE, since ASE works with the Alloy lighting anyway, and gives me the most flexibility.

The only reason I haven't purchased this yet is I dont want to have to be locked into a specific set of shaders. If you focus on making this a flexible painting tool thats easy to use with whatever shaders fit our game's needs (and obviously, has no issues with ProBuilder), this becomes a no-brainer.

At least from my point of view.

 

Purchased you guys. Wow, awesome work ! I _cant_ wait for the above stuff ... this is a pleasure to use with ProBuilder.

 

Hello,
I have a couple of suggestions that will make work with Shader Painter more pleasant.

• Togglable outline for the brush, painting with low opacity is a pain.
• Ability to change width of the Shader Painter editor window, having a constant size is annoying.
  
• Ability to switch between Painting Resolutions without quality loss for current changes. Simply repainting what has been done using higher/lower resolution texture.

Everyone is waiting for export feature with will change this asset into a proper tool. I think you should focus on this more than on Render Pipelines, after all you can always bake material in basic project and use it witch pipelines. If creating albedo is stable you may want to publish it in update, other maps may come with the time.

Cheers

 

Is custom shader painting coming...and also can you make a feature were u can apply material based on colormap?

 

Also with the export will you be able to carry over things like painted wetness into other shaders with property sliders to procedurally change the wetness for example?

 

Just giving a bump for runtime feature, would be really amazing. Love the product though. amazing work.

 

You mean lile bump or alpha stamps like in Substance? Because yeah that would be supercool

 

needs hdrp support

 

I am not sure but I think once this out puts maps to use any shader, they do not need to worry about
hdrp support .. and when it changes in different unity versions ...

just my thinking and this would be much easier on the dev, to be able to make other upgrades to the painting system..

 

I'm really hoping they view this as a full-fledged shader painter, and not as a shader suite which happens to have a painter. My use case needs to use a custom shader ... I love where this is going, but being tied to their shaders is too inflexible for my project (even though its a great starting point), and exporting maps is going to be a hassle for my use-case ... I can just use Substance Painter for that, especially since I won't be able to view what it will look like with the final shader anyway. What I really want is to use a nice layered/splatmap shader, which supports POM, packing the textures into RGBA (to support more than just albedo/normal on multi layer) and whatever other niceities I decide I need, and just use this tool to create my splatmap properly.

Right now we can select different shader types, and it selects the shader on the material through the editor. All I need is the ability to select custom and know that it is passing the splatmap through to property X of my shader (whatever I set on the material as normal), and then I can do the rest.

I would love to know if that's something that is planned on being supported. If not, I'll probably just figure out how to modify the editor to support that, as the painter is absolutely amazing and exactly what I need. Its just a bit crippled by the fact that I have no built in way of using the painter with the shaders my project actually needs, as opposed to the (great-ease-of-use) shaders that are built in.

I love this, and really hope they work on it, get it super polished, and Unity purchases it, as it really feels like the type of tool that should be built in, and should have been around for years already. I just dont feel like modifying the code-base to make this flexible enough for _all_ projects.

 

Hello everyone!

Sorry for the late reply but wee are a bit busy during the summer.Thank you very much for all your feedback we really appreciate it. I will just reply to one specific question that several users have asked (which is more in my area of expertise and require a special treatment), then @CiconiaStudio will answer to all the other questions.

I am going to talk about the usage of custom shaders. This feature has be recently requested by a lot of you.

For instance @DGordon :

or @Aaron2348 :

And many others.

First of all, I want to say that it is a really nice feature that we would like to have in Shader Painter but that is not as easy as it sounds and I am going to explain why.

1) One of the perks of Shader Painter is the UI. It is easy to change every parameter of the shader because we have worked a lot on the arrangement of every features. With a custom shaders, it is going to be harder to modify the properties of the shader. Will it be ok for you to use unity inspector while using Shader Painter?

2) In order to make our shaders work in Shader Painter we have to add in them some special code. You can do this test: change one of our shader in the shader folder with one of your shader. Nothing will work. Why? because of two thing we have added in our shaders:
- The splat map (or mask): Painting in Shader Painter is in fact painting a mask and the shader blend the layers using that mask. A custom shader doesn't have this by default
- The brush: When we show the brush on the model to make a preview of what is going to be paint there is actually some computing done at the shader level.
If we make Shader Painter work with custom shaders, it would work perfectly only with those two proprieties of the custom shader. We thought that it was then an advanced feature and thus not a priority for the first release (please keep in mind that Shader Painter is still in the beta phase) But since numerous users have ask to include it we will try to integrated it if you are OK with some limitations.

Here is the solution we are planing to implement:
When selecting the shader you will have an option to select a custom shader. You have to select a shader that use a splat map.
Then the shader is put on the model like usual but there will have nothing more on the Shader window
The painting will be like other shader except if the custom shader doesn't have the brush system then you will then won't see the preview on the model (we can add a plain circle to show where you are painting if you want)

Is this solution usable for you? Is it good enough? We would like to know what you think.

I want to thank you again for all the messages. We want the make Shader Painter the best tool possible and your feedback are helping a lot. I just want to mention that if you want Shader Painter to evolve to something big we invite you to talk about it to your friends, to comment and to give 5 stars on the store. We are working every day on this project but we have to take some time to work on other things to pay the rent. The more sales there are the more time we can allocate to Shader Painter.

Thank you again and I am looking forward to your comments!

 

Firstly, its great just to have this dialog. Thank you for even entertaining this. I suspect getting this single feature working is the difference between using this in _some_ projects, and having this become a standard import for every project right off the bat (for me, at least).

I think the solution with a circle (definitely need something) would be great. I definitely hear the tradeoff. I wonder if there is any way to someday just show the bounding box of the brush, that way we get a better idea of the placement, even if not the shape/texture. All the same, I think even a circle would be amazing if we could paint while seeing our results with a custom shader.

Thanks so much!

 

Regarding the splatmap using shader.
This would exclude the unity standard shader and derivatives (like UBER)?
Just out of interest: which other popular shaders can use a splatmap (out of the box without me touching the shader code) e.g toony colors shader?

Is it not an option to export the painted mats ?


thx for the update

 

That's noted, thank you for your feedback! And yes the plain circle would be a somewhat a bounding box of the brush. It was like that in Shader Painter in the very early versions (before it was even on the store)

Yes this exclude the unity standard shader but that's why we have our own standard shader in Shader Painter.
For other shaders you can use the merge function presented few posts ago. It will automatically create a standard unity shader with the merged maps and you can modify it as you will. Moreover, you will have access to the maps and you can use them in other shaders, even without splat map, mask or brush texture (that is going to work with "normal" shaders)

For the export you can look at the video we have posted that present the functionality that is in current development.

 

Hello,

Thank you for the suggestions

• An outline for the brush is planned, we will add this as soon as we can.
  
  
• We will try to make the UI more responsive, but i can’t tell you when we will be able to work on this.
  
  
• The Painting Resolution has been improved. In the next update of Shader Painter switching the Painting Resolution during the painting won’t be a problem anymore.

Yes, we will release a first version of the Merge and Export feature as soon as possible but we want to include at least all the maps in the first step. All the sliders, Saturation Brightness, Metallic, Opacity ...etc, will come in the 2nd step.

A feature for painting on custom shaders is in talk right now. We are at the moment just discussing how we can implement this.
But we will find the best way… hopefully

Import a colormap (+ custom mask) in Shader Painter to use it as a starting point has been added to the to do list.
Thanks for the idea.

Nop, that won't be possible.

Thank you !
It's still planned but after the beta phase.

We are working in priority on the Merge and Export feature. Then we will probably focus in the custom shaders support. With this feature you will have the ability to use your own hdrp shaders.
We will work on implementing a hdrp version for our shaders after that.

 

Okay but. With export you can carry over wetness right just not with sliders?

 

I don't understand the layered lit HDRP shader yet, but is that something which can use the splatmap from you guys? I switched over to HD (so worth it ... and thats without the awesome details from you guys!), and just want to make sure there's some workflow that's being thought out that can also work with the default HD layered shader (there's a lot of built in stuff, between POM and all the different material types) I still want to be able to use, which so far is TBD how on earth it will be done someday with a custom HD shader, if at all. I need to use layered, since I need the textures to tile to keep them crisp without having 10 million seperate hi-res textures.

If the splatmap works with that, I would be perfectly happy to have the circle brush solution talked about before. I'm hoping that will end up covering all of these use-cases .

 

Sorry to jump in - I'm on the fence at the moment.

Looking to use this with HDRP and the new shaders that they've released with it. I assume this won't be compatible?

Cheers,

 

Shader Painter is not compatible with HDRP at the moment.

 

Hey,
any news about the incoming update?

 

Hey guys,

Did you do a work on the shaders to make them compatible with mobile?

Regards,
Carlos

 

If you open up the Shader Painter window you can barely read the text with the Unity Pro editor skin in preferences > general settings. It's been like this for quite a while. Please fix this.

Love Shader Painter otherwise.

 

I think map export is next on the list... I got this for that reason.

 

This tool has great potential.
I hope that @CiconiaStudio will continue the develop.

my wishes:
- a bit of UI optimization (more compact and more user friendly)
- include a tool to combine albedo to height map (now required ) or use an independent slot for heightmap.

+1 to fix the bug reported by @BV123 about Editor dark pro skin ui incompatibility.

 

Add export and you have an instant sale from me.

 

Any news on this asset?
As the last visit on the forums was nerly a month ago

 

Yesterday the new v1.4.3 appeared silently in the store!

 

I Did a package to adapt the SP tab UI colors to the Unity black theme editor!
Simply install the package.

 

Hi,
We are working on the exporter. We are really close to finish it but we encounter some issues where it works on one version of Unity and not on another…it's really annoying.

Anyway, we will add a first version of the exporter at the end of this month.

Hello,
Sorry Carlos but not yet. We will work on this and see if we can integrate a mobile versions.

Yes, sorry for that. We will add the fix in the next update at the end of October. Thank you for your patience.

There is no longer much time to wait

We will not work on the UI for now sorry but for the 2nd request is totally planned. We will add a heightmap slot in each layers and an option to add this map to the albedo alpha.

Hi Arganth,
Don’t worry we are still working on Shader Painter
Next update is coming this month

That’s really cool thank you for sharing !
We are currently working on this and the feature will be fully integrated in the next update.

 

Thank you for all the hard work you are doing... Unity versions can be really frustrating!!
I do not know how to code, but I am told and see others same idea... Unity version to version who can tell

The only thing I would suggest for sure.. People ask about like... why does this not work in Version X beta ..
the answer most dev's are giving is we do not code for any beta'a to much can change.

I don't think you guys are doing it for beta's either .. I would suggest the Unity 2017.4 LTS version ..
Once shader-painter can export .. its possible to just say .. use this version of Unity if your goal
is to do exports. There is another painter type app on the store and the dev suggests you just
Use Unity for that one app and then import the work into other projects.

I know I am OC for sure so I can imagine how frustrated you can get with different versions of Unity.

No real rush for me I am just hobby guy. Please do not stress about the export. I am sure you guy's
will get it done.

 

Really liking 'Shader Painter' from what I've seen so far.

Features I'd like... (you might want to sit down).

1. To be able to paint complex materials onto terrains
2. Unlimited material layering of different types
3. Painting of Substance materials - oh yes please.
4. Being able to paint different material types (e.g. substance and unity materials) together
5. HDRP workflow
6. The 'control' layers (controlling where painting happens) to be separate to any other layers to not interfere with other alphas/emissive outputs etc
7. The ability to flatten MANY materials with accompanying maps (normal/etc).
8. Painting over object and over various objects at the same time as prefabs (or groups layers for painting somehow)?
9. 1-5 done yesterday and then onto v2 today

OK I got greedy - I'm really interested in being about to use this for painting both on terrrain's and objects.
Keep up the great development!
Really looking forward to how this progresses.

 

@CiconiaStudio Is it possible for this to work on Legacy Diffuse Bumped shader?

 

Hi magique,

Sorry but it’s not possible. The only thing you can do is to use Shader Painter to paint the model, export the maps and add manually the maps to the Unity legacy shader.