Strumpy Shader Editor [Now Open Source]

Hi!

I have been a bit bored after work for the past few weeks and my Unity3 beta arrived so I decided to make a shader editor.

I approached the task initially to see just how extensible the Editor API's were and to see if it could be done (fully featured and at a commercial standard). And after an evening or two I was knee deep in the unity3 codebase!

There were a few things I wanted to do when making this editor:
*High quality standard
*Rich feedback to the user
*Realtime previews of the current shader
*Loading / saving of graphs
*Shader export
*Complete support for the unity3 materials system (That aras and co have done an amazing job of!)
*Fits into the unity design principles. Easy to use / simple / 'just works' - this was very important to me!

A simple shader (Updated for Beta 4.0)


Tutorial Videos:
Beta 4 - http://vimeo.com/20994055
Beta 1 (Still helpful!) - http://www.vimeo.com/13825713

FAQ Post:
Some questions, answered with demo's: http://bit.ly/hnXhNu
------------
Contributers
Stramit
Texel

Releases
5 August 2010 - Beta 1.0 - here
6 August 2010 - Beta 1.1 - here
1 September 2010 - Beta 2.0 - here
6 September 2010 - Beta 2.2 - here
11 November 2010 - Beta 3.0 - here
27 November 2010 - Beta 3.1 - here
9 January 2011 - Beta 3.2 - here
10 January 2011 - Beta 3.2a - here
19 January 2011 - Beta 3.2b - here
11 February 2011 - Beta 3.3a - here
12 February 2011 - Beta 3.3b - here
14 March 2011 - Beta 4.0a - here
24 December 2011 - Beta 4.0b (Unity 3.5) - here

Documentation
User Documentation - By Texel can be found here.

Some Images users have created with SSE materials:

Procedural Lightening Created using Vertex Shaders in SSE by BoxMan


A scene made by warby, where the shaders were made in SSE


A snow shader (amount of snow changes based on normal) by Svyatoslav


A planet by Clamps, you can follow his tutorials to make this

Open Source Link
Here is the link to the GIT hub project. Have fun
https://github.com/stramit/SSE.git

 

Thanks for all the kind words everyone. It's great to hear that you think you will find this useful!

Thanks. For the most part I've found working with the unity API's to be great, although I did encounter a few API limitations and idiosyncrasies while I was working.

The node API is really easy to expand if you know how to program in c#. There are a few 'functions' built in that are non standard (like the UV pan, swizzle, and splat). And I intend to add more / do some tutorials on how to add custom nodes.

Very simple to add new node types. I designed it specifically to be easily extensible. You just have to inherit off 'Node' or 'InputNode' ect and implement the interface. There is some field markup required for serialization / getting the node in the nodes lists. But it's quite trivial.

Currently is uses the basic unity3 lighitng with a slightly modified lighting shader. I plan to add support for custom lighting shaders ect, that will probably be in beta 3 though.

They make the creation of shaders a content / art task instead of a programming task. This isn't always so (ie some specific hand crafted shaders for post processing ect). But in general I think it's a fair statement. I have seen some amazing shaders generated in graph editors. But I have also seen some abominations. It's all dependent on the skill of the artist.

I want to use bezier handles for the lines, it's something I still have to add in though.

I currently don't have plans to display the default texture / color on the node. This could be added pretty easily but I think it's a bit confusing. Unlike unreal in unity shader textures / inputs are frequently overridden (via a material or the preview node in this case). I think it adds a level of complexity that I was trying to avoid. I could be convinced otherwise though.

It think the reason that unreal's shaders look so good isn't because of the material editor per se, but by the number of people using it / it's use in AAA games.

The code for the beta is done, unless I come across any crazy show stoppers. I haven't released it yet because there is no documentation. I don't think I will write too much, but a simple tutorial and some other simple stuff would be nice!

 

That's a good approach to it if I was to implement a preview for input types. The problem I have is that I consider the generated shaders to not be 'game specific' so if you set a default texture to be 'my customtexture' what happens if you then share this shader with another developer or the resource is deleted. There is no way for the unity shader system to know about this (it will default to black) but this isn't desirable I do not want the shaders that are generated to be dependent on content.

There has to be a comfortable mid ground on this issue and I'm still mentally trying to reconcile a few other things to support in this area as well. I do think something needs to be done, I just want to do the right thing from a usability perspective.

 

Thats really cool. What I think a better idea is then me just going and creating a node for it is that when I release this you have a go with the given API's to create the node. It will give me some valuable feedback in that area so that I can improve it! (Currently there is no matrix input node / type support, I have that planned for Beta2).

 

I have the beta release packaged and ready to go right now!! I just need to do some testing on a Windows PC then I will let it out of the box (I only have a mac).

The release will be within the next 12 hours!

 

There appears to be a few (minor I believe) issues on windows with regards to the generated shaders.

I'm going to pick up a copy of windows 7 at lunch today and install bootcamp tonight. Sorry for delaying the launch. I just want to be sure that it works properly on all platforms before i release.

 

Hi everyone. I have just put the finishing polish on beta 1.

3 demo graphs are included (I will add more as time goes on). You should have a look at these to see how everything hooks up. There is currently:
-A rim lighting shader
-A normal map shader
-A UV pan shader



This will only work with unity3, and there are a few known issues, which I will list in a minute.

Installation
1)Download the unity package attached to this post
2)Open a fresh unity3 project (it should work in a non frosh project as well, but back it up first!)
3)Import the package into unity. Ensure you import ALL the assets (assets->import package)
4) In the windows menu there will be a new entry: 'Shader Editor'. Click this to launch the editor
5)I strongly recommend that you run the shader editor in docked mode with the window maximized. This gets around 1 or 2 small issues with the unity windowing system focusing the wrong window after selecting a value from a texture / color / other popup.

What I would like from you is any bugs / feedback / feature requests. If you update / generate a shader and it turns out to be invalid (the preview will turn purple). Please save the shader graph and post it here, or PM it to me. I do not know of any cases outside of the known issues where this can currently happen.

Before you lodge a feature request / bug please check the list of known issues and the roadmap for the editor.

Roadmap
Beta 2
-Bug fixes / Missing nodes
-UI updates / rework (Add right click to add node, remove right side bar / rework preview panel)
-Matrix / rotation support.

Beta 3
-Custom lighting support

Beta 4
-Custom vertex shader support

Known issues
If you set the preview mesh to be none, the editor will throw an exception
Workaround: Do not set the preview mesh to null. If you do; close the shader editor window and reopen it this will restore the default preview.

If I dock / undock / maximize / minimize the editor window the preview goes back to it's defaults
Unity windowing is a tricksy beast. Sometimes the editor window decides it needs to recreate it self (demaximizing the window is an example). This means that the preview node is lost and needs to be recreated. I am working on manually serializing the preview node on window destruction so that it can be restored and not lose state. This is scheduled as part of the beta 2 work.

If I name a node _LightColor0 / LightColor0 / _SpecColor / SpecColor the shader will not compile / update
Unity has internally predefined these names in it's lighing CG file. You can not use these names for an input property of a shader or it will fail to compile. Validation has been added to error the shader graph if you do this; but it did not make the beta1 release

I'm sure there are lots of questions. Please watch my preview video (http://www.vimeo.com/13825713) to get an idea of how to use the shader editor. Sometime in the next week I will release some short API documentation and user documentation which will detail how to add new nodes / extend existing nodes.

 

Well as unity 3 isn't out yet I have only tested it with the beta (i.e pro version). This graph editing should work with the non pro version when it is released but the preview may need some severe wrangling as it utilizes drawmesh and rendertextures. I might lodge some support tickets to get some preview functionality exposed into the non pro API's so that I can do this without doing anything too hacky... but I'm not sure if anything will come of it.

 

The amazing Texel has put together some documentation on using the Shader Editor.

You can find the documentation here. The documentation covers adding nodes and lots of other great stuff as well as a few simple shader tutorials / best practices!