Unity Shader Graph - Grid Shader by UGuruz

June 16, 2021

Shader Graph

Unity

Title: Grid Shader in Unity LWRP - Shader Graph Tutorial
By: UGuruz
Youtube - Tutorial #3
Description: Experimenting with tiling and the rectangle node in Unity Shader Graph to create a Tron-like glowing grid pattern.

My Final Grid Shader Graph (w/ Color Change Addition)

Overview

Following my exploration of Unity's shader graph, I did this tutorial by UGuruz on creating a grid shader similar to what you see in Tron. I really liked the effect so I continued it slightly further by adding a color changing effect over time, as can be seen in my examples provided.

Learnings from Tutorial

Using a Fraction node with a Tiling & Offset node is an effective way to give you standard expected tiling and offset results. I however had some strange effects because of interactions with the UVs of the models. The base UVs of just a standard Unity cube did not tile effectively for me, so I tried using Unity's ProBuilder to make a basic cube since that also gave me easy access to modifying UVs if necessary. This gave me much more consistent results similar to those in the tutorial, since I wanted to avoid the step of modifying UVs in Blender.

They mentioned the shader would only work well on flat surfaces, but I at least wanted to test on another surface to see what the result would be and see if I could improve it. That's why I included a sphere in the environment. It immediately gave very strange results as expected, but I found that grouping faces together through the ProBuilder tool helped give a better result, as this allows it to treat the many faces of a sphere similar to a single large face. This concept works well with a basic tiling pattern like I used here.

I did end up using World type UVs to get a decent visual result on everything, especially the sphere. While this gave something very close to what is desired, it is still a somewhat strange appearance when viewed from some angles as this inherently treats the positioning in world space as the coordinates for applying the shader. I still need to investigate the UV types and UVs in general though to get a better understanding of how to control them.


Unity Shader Graph: Tutorial by UGuruz with Color Change Addition from Steve Lilley on Vimeo.

Video Example of the Grid Shader Result with Color Change Addition

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Online Multiplayer Networking Solution Tutorial Using Unity and Mirror - Tutorial by: Jason Weimann

February 2, 2021 Networking Online Multiplayer Unity & Mirror Title: Let's build a 4-Player Networked Game LIVE - Online Shooter (with Mirror & Unity) By: Jason Weimann Youtube - Tutorial Description: Intro to using Mirror for networking online multiplayer play in Unity development. Introduction This tutorial has Jason Weimann implementing online network play into a basic Unity twin-stick shooting game. They use Mirror, which is a Unity asset used for simplifying the online network synchronization process. This is a live implementation where they work through many errors transferring a game from simply working locally to working with a host/client relationship. Mirror Mirror - Home Page Mirror is "a high level Networking API for Unity, supporting different low level Transports" (from Mirror themselves). It is a clean solution for implementing a quick and simple online networking option for Unity projects. The core components breakd
Read more

Exporting FBX from Houdini with Color

April 17, 2019 Exporting From Houdini FBX and Color Information Exporting the Model Using my balloon Houdini example from class, I was able to export the geometry using the Educational version (the Apprentice version does not allow exporting FBX, but you could export an OBJ for my purposes possibly). This was very straight forward, as you can just use File -> Export -> FBX in Houdini. Since I was doing this for a class to use in a Snapchat filter (using LensStudio), I wanted to reduce the poly count a lot. I opened the FBX in Maya and used a basic Reduce to reduce the poly count a lot before exporting that for use in LensStudio. While this was good enough to export the geometry, I could not get any of the color information to come with it. I originally exported out an OBJ and had the same issue, so I exported FBX in hopes it would keep the color information somehow, but this was not the case. Exporting the Color Information My first thought to get the color
Read more

Houdini Assignment - Fuse and Group

Image
April 8, 2019 Houdini Assignment Fuse and Group I worked on a Houdini class assignment to make a basic model and decided to try and create the bulb on the back of a Bulbasaur, a Pokemon that is half plant and half dinosaur. I figured I could use a lot of the basics we learned in class to get me pretty far, while also needing to cover a few new things to get it exactly how I wanted it. In class, we created a basic hot air balloon. This consisted of tracing a curve over a background reference image of a hot air balloon, creating a section of the balloon from this original curve, then replicating that section as many times as needed to fully encompass the full balloon. These were a lot of principles I used for creating my bulb. The biggest hurdle I needed to overcome was that that top of each of my sections would all need to connect at a single point, so I would need some additional nodes after simply creating a "left" and "right" variation of my addit
Read more