UBER - Standard Shader Ultra

Hi there,

Very interested in this product!

Three questions:

1. Terrain shader support (e.g. rain effect with a mask map of some kind for specific areas?)
2. Performance rates? Should we prepare for significant dips?
3. Is there full (and I mean complete) Substance PBR support?

Absolutely beautiful looking, very much keen to try it out.

EDIT: also, is there any rim lighting built in? Sometimes used in AAA games these days...

 

Yep,

Found something the same odd in my UBER_StandardShaderGUI.cs

1. Find every occurence of 3001 (2 times) and make it 3000 for right depth sort of transparent objects.
2. Find one occurence of 3002 and you can remove it (or all 3 lines with conditional).

Should help.

For odd semi-reflection - can't tell but might be related to other issues (refraction rendered last grabs things that are in the front of the glacier wall).

I'll put this fix in next UBER update.

The ice block was made by a friend, so I can't really tell. He used Knald for baking normals and occlusion/translucency textures. But I guess it might be also done in free x-Normal maybe (from hi-res model to get normalmap on lo-poly resultant mesh).

ATB, Tom

 

The ice block has it's translucent appearance as per the DICE translucency method mentioned in the UBER documentation which requires a transmission map to be baked for the model. The transmission map is essentially the result of inverting a UVd models normals, baking AO then returning the normals to their original state but you can get the maps from knald, which costs around 100 dollars but is very fast, or xNormal which is free but not so fast

So long as you can get that information from the volume represented by the mesh in a map then you can use that translucency feature

If you have zbrush there are many tutorials for sculpting rocks but additionally there are scripts for 3ds max at scriptspot.com for generating rocks and probably free alternatives for blender

Interestingly and I'm not sure if this useful for UBER but i saw a mcg (fancy new tool in latest 3ds max) at scriptspot for creating something like a transmission map but at the vertex level and baked into vertex colours?

 

1. Terrain shader is separate thing (currently my RTP - Relief Terrain Pack, v3 available, in time - don't know when I'll find enough though - I plan to match RTP & UBER to work better together, I mean the same models for snow, etc.)

2. Performance - depends on features used. If you don't plan to make everything POM with z-write you should get decent fps.

3. UBER is substance capable (it has inspector which can manage procedural materials). Was tested by me and some other users and works fine.

rim light - in UBER it's named Diffuse Scattering and is core functionality (available in every shader variants)

Tom

 

OK great, RTP looks fantastic as well. Will be considering both.

 

It relies on custom lighting so while it can be per material in forward I think it's per light with additional setup in deferred, I think it's explained in the documentation

 

Not sure wether to go with this or alloy - I know you guys are working with Uber/RTP, but have any of you tried both and found this better?

 

If we must setup it from camera so what if we need different translucency value on two different object?

 

There are limited parameters that can be per object in deferred. Only color (to be choosen from palette of 4 colors) and strength. Rest is globalised per camera (when you attach translucency script on the camera like I do on my example scene).

So - your objects in deferred can have different strength and translucency color. For full control you need to render object in forward. That's it - for given UBER shader you can comment out pass for deferred and the object will be always rendered in forward.

Tom

 

Hi Tom,
I'm loving the Uber shader pack so far! I love the easy to use UI and also the huge amount of flexibility!

I'm currently working on using the triplanar tessellation displacement shader ("specular setup/tessellation/triplanar selective") on a dynamic terrain made of multiple meshes (Terravol).

When "world mapping" is turned off, the shader looks fantastic! Except for the seams that appear between meshes. When "world mapping" is turned on, the seams go away perfectly, except now the diffuse/albedo layer is now offset and no longer aligns with the heightmap.

world mapping off:

world mapping on:


On a side note, is it possible to use secondary tiled normal maps on the triplanar selective 2 layer shader?

Thank you in advance for any help you are able to give, and thank you for the awesome shaders!

 

World mapping off means that normals used for triplanar (mapping direction) are taken from local object space. It seems like sticking togheter TerraVol objects in this mode produces seams because normals in local space doesn't fit at mesh edges. That's what I suspect.

For the second screenshot with world mapping on (which is preferable because terrain is static object and world mapping needs a bit less calculations in shader). I can't judge the offset issue looking only at this.
I assume it's closeup of the terrain "soil like" surface. I can check this again sample meshes - let's say 2 planes sticked togeter and will get back to you.

2layers doesn't have "detail" (secondary) maps because of texture limit. For such usage I'd need to think about specialised shader but shuch would be part of RTP next release (don't know when) rather than UBER which is not focused on terrains (they use a lot of layers).

Tom

 

I'm currently trying to adjust my workflow mudbox/substance painter/unity. Next step is to use POM.
Thanks for this shader/tool/whatever !

 

A snowy carpet ? Hmmm, interesting... OK, OK, I know it's rusty copper .

Tom

P.S. This is almost scary ... botumys got UBER in his smarty hands. Who knows what's going to happen now...

 

Pince sans rire ?

 

Oh non, cela signifie que j'attends un autre l'environnement magnifique

 

Very cool, I'm loving it!
I tested it in an example scene built out of cubes to check what it's capable of.
First, I noticed that it a HUGE increase in performance when using planes with 2-sided shader (around 65fps) instead of cubes (down to 30fps), with POM and Z-write on. That's a bit surprising to me, though doesn't really matters. But then, with 2-sided planes, I found a bug regarding z-write:
That's from the front of a plane, normal pointing to the camera:

And that's exactly the same plane flipped: (Camera has an exaggerated ssao to show the effect)

The depth seems not to be written when the normal is pointing backwards, and thus the scene geometry behing the plane is still in the depth buffer for the ssao...

EDIT: When inspecting a behavior that custom planes with 2 tris take longer to render than default planes with 200 tris (still no clue) I also found that when using 2-sided material on planes, rendering the backface takes exactly 4 times longer to render than the frontface. Is that expected behaviour or does the culling system something wrong?

EDIT2: That's the solution to my first find that custom planes take longer to render! :O My custom planes have the normals opposite than these of the default plane, and as a result of more planes flipped to the one way than the other way, this inconsistency in render times regaring custom and default planes occurs. Seems logic, doesn't it? Why exactly the backface takes so much longer to render is still a mysterium to me, though...

 

Hi there ! Can i make curve decals on static objects with UBER? I need behaviour like with deferred decals showed in yjat post http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/02/06/extending-unity-5-rendering-pipeline-command-buffers/

 

In forward, anything that behaves different comparing to standard opaque shader will just not work. I don't provide UBER with shader replacement tags for forward depth shader (it's separate shader that can be configured by rendertags). So - the answer is - use deferred instead. That's the way PBR with new lighting pipeline in Unity5 is designed for - less draw calls (separate depth buffer passes in froward, the same for shadow collecting) means better overall performance (unless you've got low-end GPU which might handle deferred multiple render targets rendering slow).

I haven't done any tests on 2 sided - backface. I see no reason it might be that slow. I'm using VFACE semantics which is handled in both cases - front/back so I know I should flip normals for backfacing triangles. It must be some GPU architecture or Unity's low-end architecture detail which makes it slower. In shader code there is nothing computational expensive for flipped faces.

If you're asking if UBER is production ready decal system - the answer is - no. You need to take care about such projected deferred decals yourself. If you're asking if UBER objects can get these command buffers decals projected on them - the answer is - yes. Go into deferred mode and render an object with UBER shader (not transparent because it means forward rendering). Then you can use this example Unity decals (with all their limitations - they're only an example - no drawcall wise batching, no ambient lighting and so on).

Tom

 

Performance got alot better now with deferred and the depth bug is gone, but now translucency is not showing up anymore... What can I do to make this working in Deferred now?

Additionally, on some angles I'm experiencing strange artifacts with POM: Basically, the depth goes insane:

Disgusting
Also, when switching rendering path I also tried to change color space; I observed double the depth in Gamma space than in linear space, even if it's not very important.

 

Can you use UBER and RTP together?
I am looking at both products right now as I would like to combine
Indoor/Outdoor Scenes.

Is this possible in the same "Scene" or do i have to do something different?

 

UBER and RTP are two shader systems, which can independently applied to objects (or Terrains in case of RTP). So yes, you can, just as you can use the Standard shader along with the old legacy shaders

 

You need to apply custom deferred lighting shader. Go to unity settings/graphics and set deferred custom shader with this provided in UBER. Go to my pdf docs for more info (eh, people never read it...). You also need to set script on the camera that handles deferred rendering.

Depth problem might be caused by 2 resons:
1. your mesh uv ratios are not set correctly (for Unity quad they should work with defauilt 1,1 values though)
2. using big triangles always causes problems with parllax effects as far as view dir in tangent space is intepolated per vertex (is not set per pixel). That's the default behavior of most parallax shaders, including UBER.

Tom

 

Today I again tested newest Unity (5.2.0f3) vs newest RTP (3.2i) vs newest UBER (1.04). It works, only one small glitch I found - solution posted in RTP thread.

Tom

 

Got depth issue fixed by replacing with smaller triangles as you proposed, and translucency working with deferred in scene view only. Ingame there's still no translucency, camera has script correctly assigned, is's rendering HDR and I replaced the deferred shader - what am I missing there?

 

For main camera where translucency is missing, try to remove command buffer attached. Script wil try to reattach this. Maybe you upgraded from lower UBER and this doesn't work with U5.2

Tom

 

Did not work, and when I looked up the example scene how it's done properly I noticed the camera is set to forward rendering in the example. Why?
When I set to deferred I notice artifacts like these:

 

Translucency in deferred works generally in game view only. Although in UBER 1.04 translucency should work in scene view as well, because I put part of code which injects command buffers in scene camera. If they don't prepare translucency texture you can see such junk.

Tom

 

No matter what I do, I only get translucency in the scene view.

I also found that those artifacts only do not appear in the refractive shader version, so it might be worth checking that. Strangely I also cannot reproduce them in my scene, they only appear in the example scene.

 

Refractive/transparent shader variants are always rendered in forward, so no command buffers or other fancy techniques needed to make them translucency working. Your issue is making me curious. Can you give me your platform, unity version and UBER version used ?

Can you tru install newest UBER on fresh project. In the example scene set main camera to deferred. Remove command buffers from the camera component (if there are any). Then click play and see in game view. Translucency should be present on first (Hebe figurine) model ?

Tom

 

After installing in a completely fresh project and switching the camera to deferred, I have neither in the scene view nor in the game view translucency.
To get it working I also had to switch the deferred shader, as mentioned in the documentation. That works perfectly fine in both scene view and game view at first glance.

Then it gets very strange:
After stopping the game the scene view has these artifacts shown previously.
They dissappear when opening a seperate window (like a floating window/the build settings) or when changing translucency strenght, though. Until resuming to scene view after game mode again. Also, when switching to linear color space, these artifacts only pop up for one or two frames after resuming...

I'm using the latest UBER version (1.04), Unity 5.2.0f3, run on Windows 7 DX11, graphics card is Radeon HD 6900

In my initial project I still have the same thing, on deferred transluceny only works in the scene view, I try to exchange project settings tomorrow and track down the issue there

 

Forgot to mention, translucency in deferred works only when camera is in HDR (which sometimes might be turned off for some reasons like MSAA, but is not the case for deferred I guess).

The only difference on my side is GPU which is nVidia GTX470



(linear lighting set)

After going back to scene view from play mode I need to switch to game view/scene view back to get translucency work there (render texture need to be refreshed by fresh command buffer attached to scene view camera).

So, I'm out of clue here.

Tom

 

@tomaszek,

I'm interested in using UBER for skin rendering. Can you use a thickness map or a grayscale map to define which parts on a mesh will be more translucent, such as the ears for example?

 

Ear on the example use thickness map. I baked this in xNormal. Then I added some veins in Gimp (photoshop, whatever). It's the same occlusion texture but uses separate color channel (so occlusion and thickness map are independent).

Tom

 

Ok, so is there a way to refresh by code? I tried a little bit like recreating new Command Buffers and reassigning them but I couldn't get it to work.
And btw, if you want to take a look, I made a quick reproduction vid on that problem.

 

Yes, but the issue is only in scene view because Unity probably reinits the scene view camera after going back from play mode. You can also simply switch to game view tab and scene view to make it working back in scene view. I don't see it the major issue as you can still preview you settings in scene view while it's supposed to work always in game view which, in the end, is the goal here.

Tom

 

Hi!
How can I fix this:
I have a 3d sphere and added a triplanar tesselation shader to it. But the maps are not aligned with the displacement. To me it looks like the tesselation is based on normals while the diffuse maps are based on planar projection, thus resulting in swimming /offseting textures. It doesnt matter which mode i choose. World or local.
Regards! Tom

 

Hmmm, somebody asked about it recently in regards to terrain (UBER used for patches of custom mesh terrain), but I couldn't reproduce this on my side. I ssume we're on the same page with platform (DX11) Unity version and UBER version. Could you give me more elaborative (screens are welcome) way to reproduce ? I believe the problem is easy to fix as soon as I know what hurts here.

Tom

 

heey, it is easy to reproduce...just create a sphere, add triplanar tessellation uber shader and add some feature promininent texture. (pebbles, bricks etc)

You'll see the mapping and displacement is not aligning...
see image! Again, to me it looks like the textures are world mapping projected, but the tessellation is not. (if you might be able to fix that the world mapping is matching the tessellation, I think you fixed the well known triplanar issue and your uber package is gold ;-)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9gqo66803a2id5/Knipsel.PNG?dl=0

 

I'm getting a green tint to the lighting when i run in editor mode. But the lighting works fine when built for standalone.

Any ideas what causes this?

Running Deferred Lighting, HDR Camera

 

Might it be in scene view ? With previous versions of UBER (1.03) sceneview didn't work with translucency. Currently (UBER1.04) you need to switch to game and back to scene view after returning from playmode. Could you give me a screenshot of your issue ?

Tom

 

Wow!!!
It looks fantastic!

 

Guys, I've got a hot fix for you. For triplanar selective tessellation shader the issue comes from 2 reasons:

1. a bug for "world mapping" mode which seams to flip coords, so find such line in UBER_StandardCore.cginc and UBER_StandardShadow_Tessellation.cginc:

Code (csharp):

1. half3 hVal = float3(tex2Dlod(_ParallaxMap, (normBlend.x>0) ? float4(uvz.zy, level.xx) : float4(-uvz.z, uvz.y, level.xx)).PARALLAX_CHANNEL, tex2Dlod(_ParallaxMap, (normBlend.y>0) ? float4(uvz.xz, level.xx) : float4(-uvz.x, uvz.z, level.xx)).PARALLAX_CHANNEL, tex2Dlod(_ParallaxMap, (normBlend.z>0) ? float4(uvz.yx, level.xx) : float4(-uvz.y, uvz.x, level.xx)).PARALLAX_CHANNEL);

and replace with this:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. #if defined(_TRIPLANAR_WORLD_MAPPING)
3.   half3 hVal = float3(tex2Dlod(_ParallaxMap, (normBlend.x<0) ? float4(uvz.zy, level.xx) : float4(-uvz.z,uvz.y, level.xx)).PARALLAX_CHANNEL, tex2Dlod(_ParallaxMap, (normBlend.y<0) ? float4(uvz.xz, level.xx) : float4(-uvz.x,uvz.z, level.xx)).PARALLAX_CHANNEL, tex2Dlod(_ParallaxMap, (normBlend.z<0) ? float4(uvz.yx, level.xx) : float4(-uvz.y,uvz.x, level.xx)).PARALLAX_CHANNEL);
4. #else
5.   half3 hVal = float3(tex2Dlod(_ParallaxMap, (normBlend.x>0) ? float4(uvz.zy, level.xx) : float4(-uvz.z, uvz.y, level.xx)).PARALLAX_CHANNEL, tex2Dlod(_ParallaxMap, (normBlend.y>0) ? float4(uvz.xz, level.xx) : float4(-uvz.x, uvz.z, level.xx)).PARALLAX_CHANNEL, tex2Dlod(_ParallaxMap, (normBlend.z>0) ? float4(uvz.yx, level.xx) : float4(-uvz.y, uvz.x, level.xx)).PARALLAX_CHANNEL);
6. #endif
7.  

to find the line search for this sequence "hVal = float3(tex2D"

2. world/object position uvs for tessellation displacement are taken from original mesh (_before_ displacement) while uvs for regular mapping the object are taken from displaced mesh (so vertex positions that are involved when determining texture uvs changed). That's obvious limitation here and can't be fixed by easy replacement tweak. For texture mapping I need to pass position _without displacement_ at the same state as vertex displacement takes it. I'll try to introduce solution in next UBER update. Meantime you can adjust midpoint tessellation value to minimize the wrong offset. It depends on textures, but generaly 0.5 value (default for UBER is 0.1) works fine for most cases.

Kindest Regards, Tom

EDIT: better explanation wording and typos for point 2.

 

Hee thnx for the workaround...as for bug 2..just out of interest, but is this even possible? I can only imagine that you would need to 'bend' the world planar mapping to align with the tessellation if you stick to normal direction of the tessellation. In 'real' 3d software, one has to really 'bake' the world mapping into the UVs.

 

Yes it is possible. I fixed this already (passing vertex position to fragment shader _without displacement_ for getting triplanar mapping. Triplanar selective objects with tessellation instantly look MUCH better now . I'll look if I can fix or improve some more things before I'll release update to AssetStore. Maybe my updater is thing I'll open because vetting takes very long nowadays (sometimes 2-3 weeks even as I've heard from other publishers).

Tom

 

@tomaszek,

I have a question about Tessellation, Phong Smoothing. When I apply it to my mesh there are specific edges that split, leaving a curved gap between two verticies. I wasn't sure if it was your shader or not, so I tried Unity's Phong Tessellation and the same thing happens. I even tried re-building the geometry and it still has issues. If I set Phong to 0 it works fine. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks.

 

Any vertex displacement (phong or by heightmap) here relies on mesh normals which are not continuous at your edges. This produces gaps. For example a cube has not 8 vertices, but every side has its own vertices, they don't share normals, but evey side has its own normal. If you'd like to smooth your mesh you need to provide model with continuous normals (either shared or doubled but with the same value - no matter). You can also use UBER feature to disable displacement for certain vertices basing on vertex color. Look at the header of tessellation shader you're using - there are switches for that. Then using any vertex paint tool you can exclude these vertices from being moved. People already used it and it works fine to hide this "tearing" issue on edges (- inside single mesh or several models sticked together.

Tom

 

Perfect, thanks!

 

Hello,
Can you please explain how you created the dissolve effect from your video? Emmisive masking... its the only bit not in the demo scene (that i can see)...
Thanks!

 

It's the carpaint object in the example scene, in the demo the alpha cutoff value was changed by a script

 

Oh cool! I'll look at that, thanks.

edit: wow, awesome.. had no idea it was as simple as switching to cutout rendering mode and adding an alpha to the albedo. Uber rocks.

edit #2: Can you please share that script? Does Uber allow for keyframe animation? I tried using the alpha dissolve for a quick pre-viz and doesn't seem possible. thanks!