Official Visual Effect Graph Public Roadmap Now Live!

Please check out our newly created public roadmap: https://portal.productboard.com/unity/1-unity-graphics/tabs/9-visual-effect-graph

What do card states mean?

In Progress means it is currently being worked on. This is not a commitment that it will land in the next version of Unity - a lot can happen in development, larger features might take multiple releases to finish or miss the landing window.

Next Up this is the work we plan on getting to as we clear out in progress. Votes here might impact the order we do things. As with everything, these items could move around depending on priorities.

Planned we expect to do this work. This isn't a timeline commitment, just items we have identified as being important to have in Visual Effect Graph. Votes here will definitely help shape priority order.

Under Consideration we think these might be useful. We could use votes here to know how helpful it is and especially if there's anything burning especially in comparison to everything else on the roadmap.


How does voting work?

1) Click on the item you're interested in.

2) How important is it to you? If it's "Nice-To-Have" that doesn't mean we won't do it - it might be great to knock out a bunch of nice to haves. On the other hand, "Critical" doesn't mean we'll drop everything else for it. Sometimes things are only critical for certain uses, sometimes we have to do other foundational work before we can get to the criticals.

3) Why do you need this? This information helps us understand why you need something, and we can validate that it will solve your problem. Sometimes people will vote: "I need this in order to do A, B, C, and bananas!" and we'll go "Oh, this solves no bananas problems so we have to create another item to deal with bananas". I will also let our technical writer know about this information - so that as documentation is written with those uses in mind. If you give me something fantastically specific (actual Shader Graph example: "Make rpg party portraits tint-pulse when character is hit/heal and desaturate it when reach zero hp." - I love this) then when folks are creating example content I'll pass it along as an option for the kind of example we might want to make.

4) Your email address. This has to be a verifiable email address. Your email address will not be added to any mailing lists or get directed to any marketing/sales type things it says just in our feedback directory. I will email you if: we're thinking of an approach to a problem and want to make sure we're solving that problem for you. We have questions about your use case - like "this will really solve our bananas problem" and we're not sure the feature will actually solve for bananas. I might also drop you a line when the feature has landed and, asking if you wouldn't mind trying and giving us feedback (I haven't always done this in the past because sometimes the volume is hard to keep up with).


Submitting New Ideas

1) Click "Submit New Idea" in the top right corner.

2) - 4) Same as "How does voting work" section.

The only thing to note is that it appears in the inbox as "Unity Graphics" and whatever you write. We have no context for which board you were on when you clicked new idea - so make sure to include thorough information on what feature area. We won't add every item - sometimes we will want to do technical due diligence (as we don't want to put up things we have no idea on the feasibility about), and sometimes items won't be a match for our current priorities (in which case, I do hang onto all of those so we can review them every so often).


Updating Public Roadmap, Triaging Feedback and New Ideas

Every 2 weeks I'll be meeting with the wonderful Visual Effect Graph team to 1) make sure our "In Progress" and "Next Up" are accurate (and make changes as needed), 2) Go through all the received feedback, flag any questions or follow up and 3) Go through all the new ideas to see

Will you folks take a look and please vote on things? In this thread, would love any feedback on the descriptions - this is just the first pass, and I'm sure we could add more clarity. This thread is not for "why isn't feature x on the roadmap?" as the answer I will give is "because you haven't submitted it yet" : D

 

@andybak While I tend to agree with your statement, do not forget one of the main target users of VFX Graph are artists. Not all teams have resources available to extend the VFX Graph, and we also need to ensure it's not only a framework to build on top but the tool is also provided with the required set of features out of the box.

So all this is not mutually exclusive, we plan to focus on opening doors for extensibility incrementally and all features we're developping are consistent with that. C# API for custom nodes will come when we're happy and sure that the API is mature, robust and clean enough to be made public because once it's public it cannot be changed anymore and we have to ensure backward compatibility (and also API needs to have full doc coverage). So we don't want to rush it and will unlock stuff incrementally. In the meantime we provided a subgraph feature that allows you to extend quite a lot the graph features already (even if of course not replacing C# API but rather complementing it)

So yes, we're aware of the need to improve extensibility and that it will allow more missing features to emerge and be developped directly by users and we take that into account when defining priorities. Our goal is that the VFX Graph becomes a fully extensible framework both for artists and programmers and we have no plans to keep things hidden or opaque on the code side.

 

We expect the skinned mesh renderer sampling functionality to land in the 11.x package, so early in the 2021.1 cycle. Regular (non-skinned) mesh sampling is already available in 10.x

 

Hi @valarus ,
The VFX Samples repository? Yes, we have a few more samples to add and will update it to 10.x.
I'm not sure when we'll get around to it, but it's on the to-do list

p.s. Many of the effects should update fairly easily if you'd like to bring them to 10.x, with a possible exception of VFX using Shader Graph, which might have to be manually re-assigned. (the actual issue behind this has been fixed in latest)

 

Hi, operations per vertex are available since 2021.2. You can do so by creating any HDRP or URP Shader Graph and enabling 'Support VFX Graph' in Graph Inspector. After that, in Shader Graph asset, new sub-asset pops up. Assign that sub-asset to VFX Graph and you are good to go.

Also, I'd like to inform you that Visual Effect Target is deprecated and it is highly recommended to use HDRP/URP Shader Graph targets instead.