Accessing Shader Graph properties via code

You can create and name properties in shader graph using the Blackboard

These names really just serve as labels, so if you want to access these properties via code (to use material.SetColor, for example) then you need to peek at the shader code.

Right-click the master node and select 'Copy shader'

Paste that into text editor of choice and look at the Properties code block at the top 

My property was named _ColorTest and the actual name of it is Color_A2.. etc

Now I can do

material.SetColor("Color_A208B217", Color.magenta);

 

Coroutines

I'm working through a tutorial on catlikecoding.com and wanted to take a moment to make some notes about coroutines.

I have used coroutines in almost every game I've made, but not stopped to think about how they really work.


Source for the below text: http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/constructing-a-fractal/

My own notes and additions are in bold/blue

What does yield do?

The yield statement is used by iterators to make life easy for them (this part could potentially be explained better. Iteration is the act of repeating a process. Usually, when people talk about working iteratively, they are talking about working, making a small change or fix, then continuing to work and repeating that process, as opposed to doing it all in one go and fixing everything at the end. In this case, I think the sentence is talking about iterative functions and loops.).

To make enumeration possible, you'd need to keep track of your progress. This involves some boilerplate code (boilerplate code refers to code that has to be included in lots of different sections without being changed eg declarations or the basic empty template in HTML) that is essentially always the same. What you'd really want is to just write something like return firstItem; return secondItem; until you are done. The yield statement allows you to do exactly that.

So whenever you're using yield, an enumerator object is created behind the scenes to take care of the tedious bits.

Alternate definition: 'The yield statement is a special kind of return, that ensures that the function will continue from the line after the yield statement next time it is called.'

How do coroutines work?

When you're creating a coroutine in Unity, what you're really doing is creating an iterator. When you pass it to the StartCoroutine method, it will get stored and gets asked for its next item every frame, until it is finished.

The yield statements produce (return) the items (actions?). The statements in between – the stuff that you want to happen – are side-effects of the iterator doing its job.

You can yield special things like WaitForSeconds to have more control over when your own code continues, but the overall approach is simply that of an iterator.

Alternate definition: 'A coroutine is like a function that has the ability to pause execution and return control to Unity but then to continue where it left off on the following frame.' (source)

Post frequency increasing

If you notice that I'm posting more regular blogs, it's because I want to also use this blog as a sort of personal notebook where I store things that I find useful, but other people might also like (inspired my friend Ming Wai's blog)

I will still post bigger blogs every now and then, but I also want to write about smaller things to remind myself about them or understand them better.

Shaders aren't as scary as I thought: My first shader with Unity Shader Graph

Disclaimer: I have worked at Unity since September 2016, but this is not a marketing blog or anything like that. This is my personal blog with my genuine experiences and reactions. Also, my boyfriend works on the Shader Graph team, but he wasn’t actually even in the country when I was making these.

***THIS IS NOT A TUTORIAL***

If you’ve ever played any of my games, you will know that I am definitely not an artist. Art is fun and I appreciate it, but I’m not good at it.

For those new here; hello, I’m Sophia. I’ve been working as a programmer for a few years (in various roles/companies). I studied Physics at university, and I’m pretty good at maths, so I have been asked to help when my friends have had issues writing their shaders before. Small stuff like figuring out relationships between variables etc.

While I’ve always wanted to make shaders, I never really knew where to start. It felt very counterintuitive to write code relating to visuals but with no visual feedback.

During Scenario Test Week at work, my team has been working on a golf game. I was working on pickups/modifiers, and I wanted some cool effects to happen when certain modifiers turn on. My initial thought was ‘I need fire’. Since 2018.1 is the release that includes Shader Graph, it felt like the time had come for me to finally make my first shader.

I was going in pretty much completely blind. I just started adding nodes.

I’m not sure why I thought the Hue node would be relevant at all, but it turned out pretty fun. It's not included in the gif, but the Time node is definitely involved here.

I came back to this “Disco Fire” later. I didn’t want to get distracted before I even started.

Time and noise were definitely relevant, but I just didn’t really know how. Most of these connections are definitely irrelevant, but I wanted to show what I actually made.

So this sort of resembles fire, but it’s definitely not great.

At this point, I went back to the Disco Fire, because it was way more fun. This ended up being used on the golf ball when the speed boost is applied, so I was pretty happy with that one and moved on.

I don’t know why I didn’t include all the nodes for this one :( sorry. It's meant to be lava-ish.

I guess with this one I was going for like a… moss… thing? Idk. shaders, man. The checkerboard node was because I wanted to input more than one colour, and the Voronoi noise was because I wanted it to be sort of blobby (like lava).

This one is definitely my favourite, and I actually started to kind of understand what I was doing. As you can see, there are a lot fewer pointless noodles, and the final look is a lot closer to the lava effect I was trying to achieve. I ended up using this one for the slow ball pickup because it made me think of stone.

Here’s each of them before I added shadows. I was backporting these shaders to a Unity project that wasn’t using the Lightweight Render Pipeline, so I had to make a few changes to the shader file (I don’t want to go into this in this non-tutorial, but happy to make a separate post showing what I did, if anyone wants.)

Aaaand here's my lil test scene showing the fast ball in action (with shadows!)

So that was my experience with using Shader Graph to make my first ever shader! Hopefully this will encourage more people to try using it because it's really not as scary as it looks.