Material/Shader Creation Editor

[ken.mayfield]

Currently is difficult to make base-level custom shaders in Unigine without spending a lot of time or having the support of a graphics programmer.  Simple things such as composing textures with three separate images stored in the R-G and B channels, and re-compositing them with some simple math and UV operations (for custom behavior) will take hours of work or longer.  I would like to see a node-based editor for creating custom shaders.  Unreal has had this for years, and Unity has a 3rd party plugin called Shader Forge which will add the same functionality as well.  

 

One thing on the top of my mind that I could use this for is to be able to fake lighting on particles by being able to use a normal map with my grayscale particle mask, and do a dot product operation based on my (manually defined) "light angle".  This is something I am easily able to do in both Unity (using Shader Forge) and in Unreal's material editor.

 

Some reference of nodes and their usage in each engine:

 

https://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MaterialsCompendium.html

 

http://acegikmo.com/shaderforge/nodes/

[silent]

Hi Ken,

 

Thank you for suggestion.

 

Indeed, node-based shader editor will be a really helpful. We've added this request to the our internal bug tracker (unfortuantely, we can't give you any ETA right now, sorry). Currently (for this year at least) we don't have plans to implement such tool.