Unity Shader Graph Tutorial: Height Blended Vertex Painting.

[@harrysanders818]

How can one say thank you, but mean like, beyond thank you?! Thank you! This is one of the best resources for this stuff on the net! So glad this video exist. It again helped me tighten my understanding and abilities to apply these concepts.

[@PolyToots]

Many thanks! I think the channel still has a long way to go but we'll get there in the end.

[@ReadyAimSing]

Two possible solutions to the normals problem: 1 - use world-space normals (only works if orientation never changes -- i.e. "floor" can't be a "wall") or 2 - compute perturbed normals with a TBN (tangent, bitangent, normal) matrix either supplied to the shader or derived in it

[@StarkTech47]

Awesome video, unfortunate that is not directly in Unity as Unreal but thanks to your video, it's now possible. If I can suggest you a modification, here it is: Vertex Color -> Split (R channel) -> Remap (from 0 -> 1 to -1 -> 1) -> |Add -> Clamp (0 -> 1) -> |Add -> Clamp (0 -> 1) -> Lerp ... Height Map -> Split (R channel) -> | Blend Amount -> | I hope it's clear enough to reproduce it. It allows you to use the blend Amount as a Layer. At -1, the T value of the Lerp is always equal to 0, at 1, T value is always 1 and at 0, the T value will progress from 1 to 0 depending on the vertex color. This allow you to clamp the Blend Amount between -1 and 1 and higher or lower the general hight of your snow. I am not sure my explanations are clear enough, if not, let me know

[@PolyToots]

Sorry for the late response! Yeah I've been meaning to come back to this shader and re-do it, pretty sure I understand what you're saying, and I really appreciate it. Thanks!

[@jacksonsmollen4575]

@@PolyToots that would be really cool and if u do would there be a way to add more textures

[@YuriNoirProductions]

oh my god i love your channel...you are explaining all the things i wanted to learn for my next project and you do it in such a simple way...thank you so much...please keep pumping out these amazing shadergraph tutorials

[@abdullahgulcur8737]

Your videos helped me alot. I didnt use poly brush but i ve been working on procedural generated terrains for a while. That was hard for me to apply different textures depending on algorithm to the procedural mesh. Finally found ur videos and realized that i can make this possible with vertex coloring method. Thank u, keep up the good work ;)

[@yakgames2454]

These tutorials have helped me improve my university work allot. Thank you for such amazing content!

[@PolyToots]

You're welcome! Good luck with uni!

[@MatrakenKEN]

The effect is cool, just one thing, when you keep increasing the blend amount and you still get some snow it is not because of your height map, it's because it does not matter what you multiply 0 by... Edit. I'm currently trying this effect with 4 textures, using R G B from vertex color... it does become very tricky.

[@canaldojohnny8824]

How can I add more colors? I didn't get it.

[@Vovan07]

Very good tutorial thank you. I just wanted to note I think you got the order in reverse for the world space tiling/sensitivity. With what you have right now the tiling increases as you approach zero which is the inverse of the expected behaviour. If instead you do it in reverse and you take your world coordinates and multiply by the input value then you divide by the preset vector value (sensitivity) you would get the expected result where tiling increases as the input value increases. Sry if it's a little knit-picky, I found this tutorial invaluable in building a vertex colour shader so thank you so much!

[@mapopi-mm]

Really helpful, excellent explanation, thank you!

[@tehuster]

You deserve more subs dude, really amazing content. Love the way you explain everything and all the imperfections in the tutorial give it character and make it fun. So don't worry about it and keep up the good work. One question tho, how would you go about implementing realtime vertex painting? I'm planning to make it all cpu based but i can imagine it being not very performant. Is there anyway you can think about doing it with shadergraph within the same shader? Thanks!

[@PolyToots]

Technically the shader is "realtime ready" as far as I'm aware, it's just waiting for something to paint on it. The thing you need is a vertex painting feature that also works in real-time. And that, is a topic I don't know much about.

[@tehuster]

@@PolyToots haha thanks for the reply anyways. I've already made something that works very well. Thanks again!

[@h2acomunicacion]

Thanks for this AMAZING tutorial, this has helped me so much.

[@faimenDev]

Thx man, it's save my life

[@jeffertef]

Awesome tutorial, thanks a lot !

[@PolyToots]

You're welcome, hope it proves useful!

[@jacksonsmollen4575]

hay i have a problem i cant get polybrush to vertex paint on the material. im using URP

[@momosietube]

THANK YOU FOR THIS!

[@momosietube]

I may be wrong, but is the tiling supposed to work only on a flat plane? Because I copied everything you did and if I try and change the tiling of my cube, it only goes in one direction. (up and down)

[@clechtom1960]

Really good, and well explained thank you !

[@andreymelnikov5084]

Thank you! This is nice tutorial!

[@PolyToots]

Glad you like it!

[@ulus2109]

Does this work on mesh with unique textures?

[@Andredy89]

Best tutorial

[@thisGuy481]

Does probuilder no longer havea brush for vertex painting? Can't seem to get it to show the brush anymore.

[@thisGuy481]

Just fyi everyone. ProBuilder vertex painting was deprecated, and now you would use PolyBrush available in the package manager

[@lauch8844]

Can you please make a triplanar shader tutorial where you only use the top projektion to display snow or moss on a surface like a rock? Thanks for the video!

[@PolyToots]

It'll be world space, but yeah I'll try to get a recording session done as soon as I can

[@lauch8844]

@@PolyToots great, thanks a lot! I wait for it :)

[@PolyToots]

Just to keep you in the loop, I've managed to build a full tri planar shader now (using 3 textures for top/bottom, back/front and left/right) but when I find time to do the recording I'll also quickly show how you can just change the setup a bit to only use two textures (one for the top, and another for everything else). Should get it done in a few days or less hopefully! Thanks for the suggestion.

[@lauch8844]

@@PolyToots That sounds great! Is it possible to use the uv map AND the triplanar mapping? Would be very useful. For Example, if i want to do a rock with a finished texture on the uv map and on top of that a snow material which uses the trianar top projection. Thank you very much for your time!

[@PolyToots]

Ah right, yeah I think that's fine. Would need to build it to test it out but I'll let you know.

[@gurnoorrana1977]

Hi, can i get these same map from somewhere? my maps for tiles are not working properly

[@nestoracabal5051]

This looks very nice, would it work for blend meshes with terrains?

[@PolyToots]

I don't think it's compatible with unity terrain at all. not sure if Shader Graph allows that at all just yet.

[@foxtrox1887]

For some reason fog doesn't work with this shader. If anyone has a fix please let me know.

[@InquisitorSama]

Hey, great tutorial! One question: Do you know how to paint with a brush in recent ProBuilder? It alows me to select vertices seperately, but can't find a brush tool.

[@PolyToots]

I believe they removed the vertex painting functionality in ProBuilder because it also exists in "PolyBrush". It is either included with ProBuilder or a separate download (still free)

[@InquisitorSama]

@@PolyToots Thank you for the reply :) Is ProBrush compatible with ProBuilder out of the box?

[@durangogames4146]

Very nice! Thanks!

[@paranormalgamesstudios]

Ive built a shader like this but much bigger. My problem is that when i change the lighting angle some texture layers seem to not be receiving light. Did you have this problem/effect? If so how to solve it?

[@paranormalgamesstudios]

All good I solved it by making sure layer one is not affected by displacment or RGB mask Maps/Vertex Colours and is always a solid layer that all other textures are on top of. If that makes sense.

[@david3atista]

Does this work in HDRP? Send help

[@RichardMorton73]

hey there, im really loving your tutorials, do you have anything for a 3 way blend shader on LWRP with albedo, normal, ao, metallic/smoothness and height blend mask?

[@PolyToots]

Hey Richard, that's quite a specific request for the types of textures used! What I will say is this video shows you how to create the two channel set-up just to get you familiar with the logic, you should be able to take this logic and add an extra layer yourself. There is no real difficulty in hooking up different texture maps, it's just a case of making sure that if a texture (say, albedo) is using the blue channel UV's, then the corresponding normal map/ao/metallic/etc will also use the same blue channel UV's

[@dawgvinci7209]

Great tutorial again. Is it possible to paint on all 3 axis? Like copying the combine node 2 times just with different inputs? Or would'nt that be the right way. :'D

[@PolyToots]

That would indeed not be the right way, but you're on the right lines! What you're describing is a tri-planar shader. Shader Graph has a triplanar node, but it's pretty limited. So don't worry, I have a tutorial on how to build your own, hopefully this will help you understand how to project on different axis': kzbin.info/www/bejne/r6bMgqJraaeUpdU

[@dawgvinci7209]

Great, thanks. Another Question.. sorry if bother you too much.. You can paint your textures so nicely on the mesh/plane.. this doesn't work for me at all. i can't even paint on everything, just some areas it seems. Even tho i just created a plane like you did

[@PolyToots]

Pretty weird. What vertex painting tool are you using? If it's ProBuilder, make sure to "Probuilderise" your mesh.

[@dawgvinci7209]

Yes, with Probuilder and i did that. Hm, maybe i try Polybrush instead.

[@dawgvinci7209]

Okay, Polybrush works like it should :P

[@Niko_3D]

Finally found tutorial for this. THANKS! Does the same work for terrain? I imagine not...

[@PolyToots]

Aye not for terrain unfortunately. Bit of a different beast as far as I understand it, but I get a lot of requests for terrain shaders, so I should probably look into them!

[@Niko_3D]

@@PolyToots yeah if you could come up with something like this for terrain that would be great.

[@cranialab5363]

At around the 12-minute mark when you are discussing world space, is it correct to say that this makes the approach limited to a 2-D object, specifically a floor / terrain? In other words this would not work for putting moss on a brick wall or worse, a rock?

[@PolyToots]

Yes and no. It's a projection from one axis for sure (in this case top down), buuut there's nothing stopping you from doing projections in the other axis' as well. This is what's known as "Triplanar" and Shader Graph has a node for it built in, but you can only use one texture for it. I have a triplanar tutorial for Shader Graph if you're interested in learning more. kzbin.info/www/bejne/r6bMgqJraaeUpdU Sorry it's a bit long!

[@cranialab5363]

@@PolyToots Thank you. I don't mind the length, I find your pacing and depth to be very good on these more challenging Unity topics. I will check it out!

[@HigashiBashi]

Hey! I'm trying to follow the tutorial but in my Unity there's no Vertex Colour Painting tab or brush. Using Unity 2019.4.1. Clicking these, ProBuilder > Vertex Colors > brings up a small window with only a Color Palette and many colours.

[@PolyToots]

Hey, I've been told that ProBuilder no longer comes with vertex painting, as it's included in "PolyBrush" instead.

[@HigashiBashi]

@@PolyToots Thanks for the speedy reply will check that out right now!

[@RNeilen216]

@20:53, you have mentioned that you will show another way of making a height blend when you don't have one. So where is the steps to that? I watched the entire video twice, but I still didn't see it. Did you forget to do so, or did I miss understood you?

[@PolyToots]

31:45

[@SoldatDuChristChannel]

PBR graph doesn't pop up when i follow those step! :( what do i do now?

[@PolyToots]

Do you have shader graph installed?

[@drewwhite3890]

Great tutorial, but I'm having some issues with it within Amplify as to get it compatible with URP. Vertex paint functionality is working fine on a plane, but once placed on a much larger/more complicated mesh it seems to have mapping issues between the channels and doesn't want to function correctly. For context I'm using Polybrush as the vertex painter. Have you or anyone had much luck with this style of shader in Amplify and using Polybrush?

[@PolyToots]

That's pretty odd, when you say a more complicated mesh, what do you mean exactly? If you remember we are only doing world space mapping from the top down, so if you're trying to map textures to the sides of an object too, you'll need UV mapping for those as well. That's my guess anyway, since I can't really think how the vertex painting would change depending on a mesh.

[@drewwhite3890]

@@PolyToots It's a large mesh serving as a terrain with mainly weird stretching along its sides. The main issue I'm having is the base diffuse not appearing as the initial diffuse, but instead the other channels are all layering over it before any painting is actually done. How would I be able to map textures to the sides?

[@dylanzayas4895]

Thank you, it was very useful. I would like to know if it possible to implement this shader with unity Terrain system and its texture painting mode.

[@PolyToots]

Not that I'm aware of, amplify sahder editor has specific terrain shaders that we can make, but I don't know if shader graph has such things yet.

[@Suggo]

I tried following this tutorial in HDRP, 2019.2, and I just couldn't get the ProBuilder to vertex paint. All it gave me when I clicked on Vertex painting is an option to create a palette. Would you have any idea about this?

[@PolyToots]

Hmm, I'm planning to get back into some vertex painting magic soon so I'll check it out, but in the meantime I'm pretty sure I remember some update to probuilder that either crippled or yanked out the painting stuff, because "PolyBrush" by the same devs (unity bought both plugins) does the same thing. So have a look for PolyBrush, if it's not in the package manager, it will be free on the asset store.

[@Suggo]

@@PolyToots Thanks a lot for responding so soon, I truly appreciate that, and I did try out Polybrush and it worked just fine in terms of vertex painting.

[@boomclapplayltd5088]

@@PolyToots hey, I'm just at the start if researching this. The current HDRP shaders that come with the Polybrush package seem to be restricted to albedo inputs, much like your first vertex tutorial. Do you know if this shadergraph approach to include normals and height maps is viable with the Polybrush?

[@PolyToots]

@@boomclapplayltd5088 yeah it should still be okay, it's just a shader to say "when vert colors are X, then display Y" y'know? It should work on any mesh with any vertex painting tool.

[@boomclapplayltd5088]

@@PolyToots thanks, we'll give it a go!

[@whidzee]

Could this kind of blending be done on terrains? Also instead of using a heightmap could you use the brightness values of the normal map to indicate high and low regions?

[@PolyToots]

Terrain shaders are a whole different beast unfortunately, and not something I know much about. I do know that the Amplify shader editor has terrain templates to get going, but I've not used any. For your second query, there aren't really nay high and low regions of a normal map, unless you're talking about a greyscale bump that's converted to a height map? And yeah, sure you can use that sort of information to determine what goes where. You could even not use a texture at all and instead just grab the Y height of an object and texture it according to that.

[@izvarzone]

normalblend would look not as good as heightblend

[@andreagallina4089]

Hi man, sry i'm still bothering you.. i'm trying to increase the number of materials i can put inside 1 shader ! now they are 2 and they work good, i'd like to blend 3/4 materials. after createing the textures, being the lerp already taken how can i add more layers?

[@PolyToots]

Hey no worries, I'm here to teach so it's no bother at all. More layers = more lerps! Just keep the chain going. The "last" lerp you have, would lerp into another lerp, which lerp's into your newly added texture. That's now your last lerp. I realise that's probably confusing. And I know how hard it is to keep track of when you're making the shader too.

[@muaddib9433]

Hey, great tutorial! Could you tell me what's the intro piano music called? I'm replaying it for 50th time already lol

[@PolyToots]

I need to stop checking the comments on my phone, I've read your message about 8 times and keep forgetting to look it up when I'm back at my pc. If you haven't found it yet, reply to this message so I'll get an email reminder!

[@muaddib9433]

@@PolyToots Yea i was looking for it with no success :((( you'd be very kind if you do that :D

[@PolyToots]

@@muaddib9433 Here you go! kzbin.info/www/bejne/sIPFiouHgc5lhpI

[@muaddib9433]

@@PolyToots thank you so much !! ^^

[@silicy619]

thank you，master xD

[@PolyToots]

You're welcome!

[@nikitazuev3331]

You are the best.Thanks for this tutorial)))

[@sandscraper]

Hi Polytoots, loved the video but I ran into some issues. Double and triple checked my graph and I can't get over an issue. I'm trying to vertex paint in polybrush but I get an error message saying something along the lines of "you don't have any materials on that which will work with vertex painting" any idea why this might be? Thanks!

[@PolyToots]

I think that's a bug with PolyBrush, I've had it before but it still let me paint just fine. If you ignore it and try painting, does it work?

[@sandscraper]

Probably worth mentioning I'm using HDRP, I did try painting but it didn't work at all :(. I later tested out layered tesselated material and that worked with vertex painting so I don't think it's the plugin. Any ideas?

[@PolyToots]

Hmm, I would say to check what colours you're painting with, and also beware of the color mask (RGBA) options. I went back and found the original shader I'd done for the tutorial and I grabbed PolyBrush to give it a test. It does say the material is not supported, but it paints just fine with red and black, made a little gif here i.imgur.com/sV0njXj.gifv

[@johncostello4743]

There isn't a 4 texture height blend vertex shader anywhere for default Unity or URP. I'm absolutely exhausted looking for one and most shader artists wont commit to making one for me for $. Would you please consider releasing one or create one for our team?

[@PolyToots]

Hey John, if I were to expand on this shader I would likely do it in Amplify using the legacy (default) rendering, though I think switching it over to URP wouldn't be a hassle. Shader Graph is still a pain to work with in my opinion, things get real messy real fast, and vertex paint shaders are notoriously busy. Which render pipeline do you prefer? Legacy or URP? Do you need all the bells and whistles (smoothness/metallic/normals)? Or something a bit simpler, Diffuse + height blend? I can't promise that I'll create one for you as my time is very limited these days, but I will promise to look into over the next few days.

[@johncostello4743]

@@PolyTootsThank you for a reply! Yeah we're having trouble with shader graph too, we understand the woes. Ideally we would love 2 versions of the shader under URP, the simple lit albedo height blend for our current stylised project and the full pbr support one for future projects. Currently URP doesn't sport all the features we need so we currently using a depreciated set of shaders, but its likely that default Unity will be fazed out over the next few years so better to be future proof. Everyones time is valuable, I genuinely appreciate any time you can put into this, no rush and no expectations, thank again. Looking forward to hearing how you go with it. Also we are of course happy to compensate you should you like/able to make a set with some support :)

[@PolyToots]

Hey again John, do you have an email address I could reach you at?

[@IIIQZAIII]

you best

[@KarlooAudi]

Is this good for water puddles?

[@PolyToots]

Hey, you can use it for water puddles for sure, for basic stuff (tinting the colour so it's "darker" and giving it high smoothness so it looks wet) you can check out my first vertex painting tutorial: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mHKcc4usjsuUeJI Otherwise, you've got to incorporate a custom puddle shader (like kzbin.info/www/bejne/aWO5lniwnbZmj9U) into the chain. It's certainly possible. The snow in this video for example, could be the rain drop ripples, just hook everything up to the right channels and the right lerps, and you're good to go.

[@Foxtrop13]

for some reason they removed the vertex painter from probuilder

[@PolyToots]

Ah, maybe because ProBuilder and PolyBrush were made by the same company (that Unity bought), so now I guess the focus for vertex painting will be on PolyBrush? Still free though!

[@Foxtrop13]

@@PolyToots yes, its on polybrush now, pretty much the only change

[@112colonel]

Would this work as a terrain shader

[@PolyToots]

Unfortunately not, Unity terrain shaders are a strange beast and unless you're coding up your own shaders from scratch, we have to rely on the shader editor to give us a "terrain template" of sorts. Amplify Shader Editor for example has support for terrain shaders, but I do not believe Shader Graph does yet. It's not really a topic I've looked too much into, so could be wrong about a few things, but this is my current understanding at least.

[@112colonel]

@@PolyToots ok,thanks for the answer

[@tertiumorganum5665]

It would be greate if you attach your sample graph to this (and other) you video, or at least a screenshot of it

[@PolyToots]

I'm thinking about setting up a patreon where I'll give all the shader nodes for free, at the moment I don't really have a good solution for an "archive" of sorts to keep track of all lessons. So watch this space!

[@tertiumorganum5665]

@@PolyToots It's ok, thanks for teaching! I moved to ASE, your approach works here as well.

[@davidmcmahon9150]

How expensive are the sub divisions?

[@PolyToots]

A better question might be "How expensive is the alternative?". Everything has a cost, and you often just have to look at what it is you want from your pipeline or your end-goal for the art. If you need to paint out pathways in the snow or have convincing mud transitions at the edges of pathways, then you've got a few options. Manually (and uniquely) texture everything, splat mapping, vertex painting, geometry decals, or a mix-and-match of those options. All come with their own pros and cons. Obviously if you're uniquely texturing everything then you're going to have a lot of textures, and a lot of materials, if you go the polar opposite and use tiling textures then you're saving a lot of memory, and draw calls (from materials), but you no longer have nice looking transitions between textures. So, how you decide to meet that problem in the middle, depends on your own goals, your game, your target platform, and in a lot of cases even your camera angle. The nice thing about just vertex painting though, is you can decide what level of detail you want, games have been using vertex paints since before we could even render textures on screen, so it's not a new tech or anything. And with using a height map for a better blend (like in this tutorial), you can definitely decide to not use as many triangles.

[@davidmcmahon9150]

@@PolyToots Ok great. Sorry for asking so many questions. My experience with this stuff is limited since Ive mostly had my models/textures rendered out in 2d and composited or used in a pre-visualization pipeline where the over all look isnt polished to the level games are. I want to use multiple tiles and your shader to paint the highest level of detail possible. The disconnect for me is that when I drop an fbx/obj into the engine its not going to pop in ready to render straight from the assets folder. So I wonder about how that pipeline would work in a production setting with multiple artists contributing to the end result. Is there a way to save the maps or something? Idk anyway, Im getting way off the reservation now and the bottom line is that this shader kicks ass. I cant wait to play with it. Thanks again for all your help!!!

[@PolyToots]

I think what you're probably looking for is "Prefabs", so a whole level can be made of many prefabs, even whole sections can be prefabs (technically the whole thing could also be a prefab, but let's not get crazy). Basically they allow many people to work on a scene, without everyone tripping over each other. Like you could have an area in a level that's just a box primitive, scaled to a certain size and placed on the floor, you put that into an empty game object, and then create a prefab out of it. An artist can come along and essentially replace that box with whatever they want, and it will automatically update in your scene, without them ever needing to even go into the scene (although they should at-least check it, but that's beside the point). Then from there, you can even use that prefab multiple times, in entirely different scenes too. And all the artist would need to do is update the prefab, and everywhere it's used will update too.

[@caxmxhe5209]

use world pos for uvs

[@PolyToots]

I mention this at the very beginning of the tutorial. It's at 10:47 where we use World Position node for UVs.

[@YuriNoirProductions]

40:36 you can use Probuilders smoothing groups to get rid of the facettes :) just select all of them and click smoothing in any of probuilders panels. but who am i to tell this to the teacher :D

[@niallmccaffrey791]

I just kind of wanted to kind of say that this kind of tutorial was kind of great, even when you kind of keep kind of saying "kind of" every few kind of words. Kind of. Did you kind of see what I kind of did there?

[@PolyToots]

I kind of like this comment.

[@PolyToots]

Oh no, I'm editing another tutorial at the moment and I just skipped to a random point in time and I said "kind of" twice in about 4 seconds. I think I might have a problem. Thanks for pointing it out though!

[@niallmccaffrey791]

@@PolyToots haha, sorry, you'll never un-hear it now :) actually, I didn't listen to the audio at all, I was stealth-watching this at work with the closed captioning turned on. It makes bad grammer, repeated phrases and so on stick out

[@IIIQZAIII]

ahujienas

[@BingoSwaggins]

Is there any way to create a height blend material without using the HD Render Pipeline? I'm super beginner to unity technical stuff, but professional game artist so know what I want just not how to get there...

[@PolyToots]

Not sure who told you that you needed to use the HDRP (pretty sure it wasn't me!). But this vertex painting shader tutorial will work for URP, HDRP and Legacy just fine. I have a legacy version built with Amplify Shader Editor in another project.

[@BingoSwaggins]

@@PolyToots Ah ok! Just got confused when you created the PBR graph shader and I didn't have it, Google implied was only with HDRP. After looking into it a bit more I've realised I want to use HDRP anyway so I've upgraded my project now. Thanks for the reply and a solid tutorial!