UBER - Standard Shader Ultra

I don't have the time now to search for the script if it'S even in the scene, but it's as simple as setting the material cutout value through Material.SetFloat Best use time.deltaTime and lerp, too

 

Ahh ok thanks. Not a programmer... ill try to learn it soon I guess.

Does anyone have code they would be willing to share for this? I dont have access to a programmer for a few weeks... I use playmaker usually so tried all the animate float actions with no luck. I can get a switch from on/off but not animated.
Could UBER shaders be keyframed?

 

Yes, you can keyframe them, but name of a parameter might look a bit different comparing to what you see in UBER material inspector. They are, however, informative enough to figure out the meaning. For _Cutoff parameter it should be straightforward.

Tom

 

No luck..I see the _Cutoff value in the shader... I see it in the animation timeline property, but I cannot get the keyframes to accept different values, even though the fields are red and animatable.

 

I see no reason it can't be animated, because AFAIK I haven't made anything that different in GUI inspector, so if Unity standard shader can be animated, UBER shader should be also capabale. BTW - have you changed your material transparency type to cutoff ? I guess so. _Cutoff is not used at all for shader other blending modes.

 

ok good to know, thanks! yes, I'm using the cutoff type..its beautiful with custom patterns in the alpha channel.

 

Hey Tom, Great bunch of shaders, I look forward to using them in Space Joe. I ran into one problem I need assistance with, I loaded uber following the instructions and received the following error:

Assets/UBER/_Examples/ExamplesController.cs(276,45): error CS1061: Type `Button' does not contain a definition for `colors' and no extension method `colors' of type `Button' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

Im running unity 5.2.1 p1.

I have used it in a empty project under 5.2.1 p1 with no problems. not sure what the examplesController is picking up different.

Any help would be great.

ps. a tutorial on how to utilize the emission features would be great. not sure how your doing the cycling of the lights in the demo. can not seem to replicate with a simple emissions map and turning on the pulsate or pan mask.


Garry@crazybeardentertainment.com

 

Looks odd, because officialy UnityEngine.UI.Button class has colors field:

docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/UI.Button.html

It's either Unity 5.2.1p1 patch bug or you've got Button class defined in your project somewhere else ? Try to change the declaraction buttonSun (and the other) in ExamplesController.cs from:

Button buttonSun;

to

UnityEngine.UI.Button buttonSun;

to be sure Unity's UI class is actually used.

For animated emission it's not any magic out there. On cube you've got a texture with emission color - RGB and mask stored in alpha channel. Mask is animated over time along UV coords specified as UBER material parameter.

Tom

 

Tom,

you where right, I had an older version of Forge3D ForceShield in the project and it had a class defined as button. fixed it with an update to the product.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

I wish to request that you add a flicker option to the emission section of the shaders.


Thanks again.


Garry.

 

Could you describe flicker option in detail ? Isn't it pulsation feature that's already available ?

 

Erm hi
I am very new to unity. For my first project I am planning on a fantasy game.
But my pet projects are more sci fi.
Will Uber work well for metal material?
and the big question. for glowing (emmisive) and animated materials, under glass? (Eg computer screens?)

Anyways this is a pre sales question. Shader forge is really expensive and I'm already planning on getting RTP for my first game. (the water effect is amazing enough that I want to build an underwater level with it)

This would help me greatly. Thank you!

--Joshua

 

do the vertex blend allow to simulate the spreading of the second texture i wonder

 

Uber works perfect for metal of any kind. The animated emission feature is awesome too, we are using it for computer screens and many more things

Yes it does. There are detail textures blendable via vertexcolors but there is also a full 2 layer shader included. Not 100% sure what you mean with "spreading" though.

 

Don't get confused with the showcase video. RTP does not consist of the ovean/underwater solution. What it has is - caustics effect on the terrain which you can put below water level. Wetness effect in RTP are related to surface water (like during the heavy rain).

Tom

 

Hi,

Great shader; playing around with it in our current project. I'm not a shader expert, but I have one question:

Using secondary maps with a detail mask is really useful, but is it possible to have multiple sets (secondary, tertiary, etc.) and then use an overarching detail mask to blend between them?

 

You want to control which textures cover the surface with a mask, similar to terrain splatmap behaviour?
That's not directly possible with Uber shaders, although you have the option to use vertex controlled blending of two texture sets with full features (not just normal, metallic and albedo as in detail mask), but no more.
Maybe the RTP shader on mesh supports that - idk exactly though.

 

Yes, RTP standalone shader could mix 4/8 layers even, but not with some new hi-end features introduced in UBER (new snow model, translucency).

UBER can alternate between 2 full layers or main/detail textures.

Tom

 

This a great shader you have forged there Sir. I had question about zdepth testing.

Is it at all possible to do with the Uber shader and if so, can it be customised between multiple passes to achieve a halo effect when a character is behind a building?

ManyThanks, Collin "Fish Cakes" Davies

 

I'm not an expert in shader programming, but I'm pretty sure you didn't meant ZTesting - that is simply the decision which fragment to draw based on the depth it writes, so objects that are nearer to the camera occlude objects that are farther away. ZWriting, on the other hand, is the fragments writing to the depth buffer (ZDepth), which is then used for ZTesting.
Both are basic features of each and every shader, else it wouldn't really work as expected.

Don't know what you mean exactly with the halo effect behind a building... The halo, for example that of the sun, is only drawn when the sun is NOT occluded.

Could you explain a bit more what you meant?

 

Testing the snow with UBER

 

Thanks for the reply.

I apologise for not being clearer. By Zdepth Testing i did infact mean ZTest command that unity's standard shaderlab supports. Currently, I am using a shader that has its ZTest set to Always so that when my character goes behind something, he is still visible. I have read that this is the more favourable option when attempting to show your characters through walls and other materials in the world.

The problem however is that the character looks like he is floating above everything and less like he is behind a building. I have read other posts that suggest setting the ZTest to LEqual and Greater than will yield the desired effect if they are both assigned in separate passes.

The Uber shader is a fantastic solution for quality environment and character shader and i would prefer to use it for key things within our project and i was hoping that the ZTest setting maybe customised.

 

Yes when you simply render it ontop it will look like floating. Depending on what eclxactly you want achieve, what you have to do is make the character look different when occluded, so you really know it's occluded (look at this asset for reference).

For that, you need some shader modification and thus a pretty good shader knowledge.
You have to access the current depth texture in the character shader and, if it's less than the character depth, apply some filter, like additional colors or noise.

A better, more complicated way would be to let the sourroundings of the character see through, too. Complicated, as you need to make that per image effect.
option 1: make the scene render normally but the object(s) that occlude the player. Then render these objects seperately to a texture, and add it to the scene with custom ztesting (if it's partially occluded), but leave space around the character.
option 2: Make the character shader write to a rendertexture where the character is l. Modify the uber shader on every game object so it writes alpha when its on these spots.

There are references for this on the asset I linked, too. The asset itself probably cannot be used with UBER, unfortunately.

Reminding me of... As it's for a character, IF it serves to always see the player in 3rd person views, you might want to simply adjust the cameras distance to the player so its always seen.
Hope thats what you wanted

EDIT: Don't want to advertise the asset too much, but it seems it's shader independent. That means it could be used with UBER shaders

 

Thank you once again for the informative reply,

I managed to achieve the desired effect after editing a shader i made in shader forge. The see-through seems to be an interesting asset and if it is not performance heavy, i think i'll be looking into implementing it.

As for UBER shader, i will definitely be picking it up soon as the product is fantastic and would take my teams project to the place it needs to be

Quick question though. Does UBER shader perform as fast Unity's standard shader because i intend to have a rather large map with quite a few enemies being drawn at once.

ManyThanks, Collin "Fish Cakes" Davies

 

Everything depends on which features you'd like to enable. With POM Z-write, snow, water, translucency, glitter triplanar it would be ridiculous to ask for the same performance Unity Standard Shader has... But with just vanilla features used and translucency, diffuse scattering - it's comparable.

As always when performance is considered - no matter the shader engine you use - I did my best to reduce computational cost of features, but it's up to developer to check where you can put UBER shaded object with more ddemanding feaures and where you need to reduce it keeping balance between quality and performance.

Tom

 

Thank you Tom for clarification,

I love the product and will definitely be getting a copy of it. I will take into account the performance drop for heavier shader operations.

At the point of our project completion, i would be happy to show and share with the community, the games usage of the UBER shader.

ManyThanks, Collin "Fish Cakes" Davies.

 

Thanks Tom (and Seneral), appreciate it.

 

Tessellation seem to be an important aspect of these shaders, and I'm really interested in using that! So, apart from dynamic changes where the answer is more clear, how does tessellation compare in terms of GPU usage to just adding all those extra triangles to the geometry, and under which circumstances are one of the options more favorable than the other?

 

Hey,
I just purchased UBER yesterday and have some questions.
- Since I am missing heightmaps for me Interior Textures I supposed POM will not work?
- I suppose without heightmaps Tesselation will also not work? Because I tried it but nothing really happens. Any tools to create heightmaps if you have normal maps for free? I also own Photoshop.
- I am using Deffered Rendering mit Linear Colormap in my project and added the DeferredParameter Script to my camera. Do I have to add the Fixscript to all my Point Lights for deferred like described in the deferred .txt file? I am only using Point Lights in my projects since it's an interior so my question here is if all the lights need this script as component to get Deferred and Translucency working.
- If I switch my Texture from Standard Specular Shader to UBER Specular Core Setup Shader I see that the Smooth Value is set to 0.5 but no Smooth is used. It's like after changing the Shader Smooth is set to 0 but the editor is showing 0.5 anyway. Only after changing the slider by hand the Smooth Effect is really drawn on the textures. Is this intended or a Bug?
Because after switching the Shaders on my textures I was wondering where the Smooth Effect went. Only after changing the Slider by hand the smooth effect was really used.

Thanks a lot!
Ronny

 

1. When you need to have complex silhouettes tessellation will work faster than POM (on simple objects like cylinders POM Advanced might be better though).
2. Tessellation optimizes better comparing to Z-write.
3. Tessellation with really small detailed triangles can be slower than POM

[EDIT - added]
4. Tessellation performance doesn't depend on heightmap type while POM does (very big heightmaps with large "holes" and deep extrusion value makes it more expensive).

5. POM can sometimes do things tessellation cant - try to extrude a quad like in my animated emission example - with tessellation this will fail - triangle edges placed diagonally makes all straight grooves look quite ugly. So - there is a class of objects/heightmaps that simply work good with POM while tessellation can't help (like here this sci-fi stuff).
6. Downward extrusion algorithm or distance map algorithm should be a lot faster than tessellation (and tessellation can't make such objects) as far as you don't stack too many surfaces with z-write on each other (GPU z optimizations don't work then).

POM works on SM3 GPUs or OS that can't use DX11 (Win XP - yes - a lot of users in Asia, esp. in China have this OS installed). Currently Macs can't use tessellation. This should change with U5.3 though.

 

No heightmaps - no parallax effects nor tessellation displacement (only phong smoothening for meshes with continuous normals). I don't know if free xNormal can make it, but I'm sure knald should be able to produce heightmap out of normalmap. Or use tools for light recognition that produces normalmaps and heightmaps out of diffuse textures (like B2M).

In deferred place scripts on the camera (look at which one are assigned in my example scene). For POM with selfshadowing to work you place light script on ONE light (no multiple litghts POM selfshadowing available in deferred). You decide which one - you could place it on more slights but enable only one, at a moment - probably closest to camera.

Your smooth issue might be GUI inspector related. Simply iterate thru your materials that you switched from Standard to UBER.

Tom

 

Thanks Tom for the fast response.
Sorry for the question but I don't understand this scenario if I use a scene with multiple point lights. (Take a look to the Interior Kid Demos of 3DForge which I am referring to). Should I only use ONE active light with the script in my whole scene?
Imagine I have X Rooms which are using 2-6 Point Lights (mostly near Candles and Walls to lighten up the room). All rooms are using the same wall material which should use POM.
If I only add the script to one Pointlight in one room the other rooms will not have the script on one point light, which is needed as I understood. So how can this be handled? The Interior is completely closed so no Directional Lightning only using Point Lights.
Since I dont have any heightmaps right now it's not so critical but I am trying to understand how I need to work with lightning when using UBER and POM, because I want to have POM on the Walls Floors etc.

Thanks again.

 

Script on light in deferred is needed to have POM self-shadowing in deferred ONLY. So - if you don't have POM (no heightmaps yet) - it's no problem for you. When you have heightmaps and POM you don't need necesarilly need the POM to cast self-shadows. If you would like to have self-shadowing you can get it for one light in deferred (so one selected lights can be shadow caster on POM walls with the feature used).

Tom

 

perhaps this is a stupid question, i changed the shader in the graphics setup, but in the demo and prefabs the double layer appears pink ... what is escaping me

 

Could you give me Unity version and UBER package version used. I understand you just imported UBER on fresh project, opened example scene and applied dedicated deferred shader in graphics settings ?

Tom

 

the unity version is the latest and the uber package is the one downloaded from the unity store today.
Nope, not a fresh project, its a project i am working on, and yes i applyed the deferred shader in the graphic settings!
perhaps a shader incompatibility or something

 

Hi, I've been using uber for a month or so now, really like it. I have one request for a feature and I've had trouble finding anything that can do it, I was hoping Uber would have this option. A simple checkbox to pan base detail/normal etc in the same way you have that option now for emissive panning. It would be very useful for things like conveyor belts, waterfalls, moving mechanical inlays etc.

 

I am trying to get an effect that we can do in Alloy through Uber with transmission and having the shadows show through cloth but cannot seem to get it so far. Anyone else accomplished this? Here is what we are able to do in Alloy:

You can see the shadows through the mesh. I imagine this is possible but cannot get it figured out. They are single sided meshes and the 2 sided shader core looks good but doesn't show shadows through it for some reason.

 

It's already possible by animating the main maps offset, which will take care of every map

 

Hi, Im getting a strange errors:

Shader error in 'UBER - DynSnow - Specular Setup/ Core': Failed to find parameters of a compiled D3D9 shader (on d3d9)

Compiling Fragment program with DIRECTIONAL SHADOWS_OFF LIGHTMAP_ON DIRLIGHTMAP_OFF DYNAMICLIGHTMAP_ON _WETNESS_FULL _PARALLAX_MAP

Shader error in 'UBER - DynSnow - Specular Setup/ Triplanar Selective': Failed to find parameters of a compiled D3D9 shader (on d3d9)

Compiling Fragment program with DIRECTIONAL SHADOWS_OFF LIGHTMAP_ON DIRLIGHTMAP_OFF DYNAMICLIGHTMAP_OFF _DETAIL_TEXTURED _GLITTER _PARALLAX_MAP _WETNESS_DROPLETS

 

2sided UBER material (used on one sided geometry like vegetation leaf) can have shadows received on the other side it's matter for tweaking translucency parameters. On the above screenshot sail surface has this T cross sign on one side, so we would need different translucency albedo setup for both sides. That's currently also possible with new UBER 1.04 where you can use 2 layer shader where layer setup is selected not via vertex color but via side of mesh observed.

 

Could you check how many textures in sum are used ? With Unity lightmaps and shadow map it might be possible that maximum limit for SM3 is reached (for SM5 - DX11 Unity reuses 2 samplers for lightmaps so we can have 2 more texures used in shader). Otherwise your problem looks odd and I can't really tell.

You might tell me exact Unity version and UBER version used ? Could you check this on fresh project after installing UBER ? It would be simplier for me to reproduce the issue on my side then. I'm going AFK these weekend though, but I can take a look next Monday.

Tom

 

I am at my third hour of trying to get this to work. Can you show an example, please? I must be missing some crucial settings in the shader that is needed.
Belay my last. I started all over from scratch and just kept changing one slider at a time until I saw some response. I am not quite sure what exactly I changed but one run it worked perfect and is down to minor tweaking.

 

Cant get the 2 layer shader to work...
probably i dont understand it fully

I want to use one substance (some random scifi texture)
mixed with some other substance

I put the different mats so all slots are filled
but the second texture does never show up

the manual states "and alternate them thru vertex color channel (R)"

what do I have to do here? ^^

 

You need to apply vertex colors, either via a custom script or a vertex paint tool. Basically it works like with splat painting on a unity terrain. I think there are a bunch of vertex painters on the store, some free ones too, but if you are using vertex painting a lot you might want to get a good one for some bucks(not sure which one is the best but i think the Ikari vertex painter is quite good).

 

Thx time to get a vertex painter ^^

 

While working on another shader system I ran into similar issue caused by D3D9 compiler. Apparently uniform bool variables used in conditionals like:

Code (csharp):

1. if(aFeatureEnabled) { ... }

get miscompiled.

To avoid it I would need to check every conditional in core code which would take some time, but you could try quick fix, placing this in shader header (where features nd switches are placed between CGINCLUDE ... ENDCG):

Code (csharp):

1. // DX9 doesn't like bool type in conditionals...
2. #if SHADER_TARGET<=30
3. #define bool float
4. #endif

I'm not 100% sure if it will work in all cases but you can try it (keeping in mind it can introduce side effects in code that I 'm not aware yet... )

Tom

 

Hi,
first: thanks for this great package, its really fun to work with!

Right now, I struggle to enable GGX Specular in Deferred Lighting
I was able to enable it in Forward Rendering by following your documentation:
1. Changed UBER_"StandardConfig.cginc" file from #define UNITY_BRDF_GGX 0 to 1
2. Reimported the shader (in my case _UberShader_Metallic)

> camera in forward rendering: specular changed, looks good

For Deferred Rendering I did
1. Change "#define UNITY_BRDF_GGX 0" to 1 in the "Internal-DeferredShading_UBER" Shader

> camera in deferred rendering: nothing changed.

I also tried to reimport the ""Internal-DeferredShading_UBER" shader and the metallic shader i used... but still no changes. Do I miss here something ?

Screenshot: Forward Rendering with modified GGX Uber (6 spheres in the back) and Unity Standard material in the front. By switching to Deferred Rendering, there is no change on the specular between Unity Standard and Uber Shader.

 

The question is if you actually have "Internal-DeferredShading_UBER" Shader used in deferred (Unity/Edit/Settings/Graphics) ?

 

Ha! Now thats strange! Actually, yes, I changed Deferred from built-In to custom. The "Hidden/Internal-DeferredShading_Uber" was automatically assigned - and this didn`t work. I assigned it again manually and now it worked! thanks for the hint