Tag: Shaders

Shader graph: Rigid body animation using vertex animation textures

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Using Unity 2019.2.1f1, LWRP 6.9.1 and Shader Graph 6.9.1. You can get the article’s code and shaders here.

I saw two Youtube talks (The Illusion of Motion: Making Magic with Textures in the Vertex Shader, Unleashing Houdini for AAA Mobile Games Production – MIGS) about using specially encoded textures in the vertex shader to animate mesh. Both talks use Houdini to generate animations and because I don’t have Houdini, I decided to do everything in Unity.

The whole castle is the single mesh, in which recorded physics simulation.

Overview of example

Creating vertex animation consists of the following steps:

  1. Selecting the target
  2. Recording positions and rotations
  3. Combining meshes into single saving pivots and mesh ids
  4. Encoding position and rotation textures
  5. Using special shader that decodes these textures
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Shader graph: Scan effect

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Using Unity 2019.2.1f1, LWRP 6.9.1 and Shader Graph 6.9.1. You can get the article’s code and shaders here.

Scan effect shader uses depth intersection to determine where to render the scan object’s mesh.

Depth intersection

When the camera renders a scene, it creates Depth texture, writing in it all opaque objects. Using this texture, you can get distance from scene geometry to camera. Scene Depth Node provides access to the Depth Texture in several different sampling modes. (For LWRP to access Depth texture, it must be enabled in the Pipeline Asset)

When you render your object, you can get the fragment’s distance from camera and compare it to the distance to scene geometry. The main trick is to compare Scene Depth node output and Position/Screen Position node output in the same space.(comparing value A in range 0..1 with value B in range near… far plane won’t make any sense.)

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Shader graph: Dissolve effect

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Unity 2019.2.1f1, LWRP 6.9.1 and Shader Graph 6.9.1. You can get the article’s code and shaders here.

Dissolve effect used for gradual appearing/disappearing of characters, force shields, etc.

Opaque

In opaque rendering mode, this effect uses a texture, that is usually generated noise, as the mask to discard pixels.

Discarding means that for every fragment of your mesh, you sample the discarding mask. Take a value from any mask’s channel (for example, red) of the sample and compare it against the DissolveValue. If the value in the channel is less than the DissolveValue, then this pixel is excluded from rendering, otherwise it’s rendered.

DissolveValue is the value that controls the visibility of the object. This value is in the range from 0 to 1, where 0 is the fully visible object, and 1 is fully invisible (all fragments were discarded). Also, the value of any texture channel is in the range of 0 to 1.

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