Materials wish list

[frustum]

Please describe what kind of new materials you would like to see in the engine.

[steve3d]

add a reflection mask for mesh_reflection_*, which use same uv as diffuse.

 

Can I ask for a function in editor?

 

Currently In node editor tab, all the flags and name, property are suitable for one node selected, if I want to clear all selected node's property, I have to clear it one by one, this is annoying work. so is it possible to make those operation also applies to all selected nodes?

[alexei.garbuzenko]

what we need is material for custom impostors - billboard that is able to blend between N images depending on view angle.

[steve3d]

what we need is material for custom impostors - billboard that is able to blend between N images depending on view angle.

Maybe what you want is what I want, just impostors system like speedtree's billboard.

 

And I want more, full speedtree material system support.

[carl.sutton]

I'm not sure if the code exists to manage this already but I haven't investigated into it yet so I thought I'd bring it up here. I would like to be able to layer multiple materials onto one surface using simple stencil masks for each area that a material needs to be placed upon. (i.e. so that one surface can have areas that are dull, shiney, reflective, transparant etc). I'm not sure if this can be handled with decals already, or how easy the systems would work together.

[alexei.garbuzenko]

I also want more than just a material. Everyone would benefit of speedtree-line impostors, but at the moment we are discussing new materials :)

[ulf.schroeter]

I would like to see some texture-array based terrain material with some alpha-based blending between primary and secondary texture as described here. This material should give much more realistic/complex terrain surfaces and also could be the base for some DX10+ only ObjectTerrainExtended with much higher detail texture counts (up to 256). With such an approach the RGB masks image would index primary texture index (e.g. R component), secondary texture index (e.g. G component) and their blend ratio (e.g. B component).

 

Some similar approach - but I think not as good - can be found here.

[steve3d]

I think if unigine crew can write some tech documents about how to extend/write new materials or shaders would be much better to this. There are so many experienced developer here can write their own shaders. but in fact there is no any information about unigine's internal shader architecture, only by reading existing shader to extend unigine's shader system is a hard work.

[binstream]

There is a custom shader usage example available in the recent SDK.

[danni.coy]

A few requests from the artists in my studio this year.

1) Independent tinting of diffuse and specular textures.

2) a material that can blend between sets of maps based on distance from the camera.

 

more to come...

[danni.coy]

something like this would be cool.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2011/12/Overgrowth-a160-video-changelog

[ivan.cuevas]

A color_scale parameter for Emission. Actually emission color is defined by emission texture but this make difficult to create color transitions.

[ulf.schroeter]

water droplets post processing material imitating fading water flow on virtual camera lens e.g. when changing view position from under to over water position

[steve.brodie]

We are still waiting on the ability for the import diffuse maps to terrain the correct way around, ie mirrored from the current projection.

 

We have still not used unigine Terrain in any projects due to this projection issue. Is there any plan to fix it?

[danni.coy]

from our artists

option A: and Option B

[frustum]

Option A is ready. Updated core.ung will be available tomorrow.

[danni.coy]

Thankyou very much....

[frustum]

The material name is mesh_layer_base.

Rename this attachment to "core.ung".

core.zip

[danni.coy]

it is possible to have another version of this material but that automatically fades between the two mask textures based on distance from the camera. So two extra parameters the distance that material shows 100% material1 and the distance that material2 shows 100% any value in between these values is a blend.

[alexander.zubov]

what is the practical application if you don't mind me asking? :)

[danni.coy]

Another one from our artists

Independent tinting for Diffuse and specular channels. Quite often we want to tint the diffuse channel but keep the specular highlights white.

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Just a quick stupid question Danni, how tid you get your editor to look like that :) Looks much nicer than the default blue one.

[manguste]

it is possible to have another version of this material but that automatically fades between the two mask textures based on distance from the camera. So two extra parameters the distance that material shows 100% material1 and the distance that material2 shows 100% any value in between these values is a blend.

Could you please specify in some detail what you need such material for?

[manguste]

Another one from our artists

Independent tinting for Diffuse and specular channels. Quite often we want to tint the diffuse channel but keep the specular highlights white.

That would make shaders even more heavier. If you need this simple colored materials, why not create a number of them with small 16x16 textures?

[alexei.garbuzenko]

That would make shaders even more heavier.

 

sounds like nonsense to me. There are lot of things in shaders that have much more performance hit (i.e. all shaders always use normal/specular map lookup even if default ones are used; environment mode is always querying ambient lighting texture, etc.). Separate specular tinting would add just one more half4 multiplication that costs almost nothing in general case.

 

+1 to this request.

 

If you need this simple colored materials, why not create a number of them with small 16x16 textures?

 

I think you got him wrong. Just imagine an apple model with a branch that use single unwrapped texture. Branch and apple have different specularity, so we need a specular map that is 100% black at branch part. It is very easy to tint that apple from green to red, but highlighed part would also be redish instead of white. There is nothing we can do here with 16x16 specular textures cause branch would be also lit, so we need adequatelly tinted specular maps for each color or even separate diffuse maps and no color tinting in material at all.

 

(not 3d, Photoshop tinitng only)