Are procedural textures possible with shaders?: Page 2

Are procedural textures possible with shaders?

Megalomaniak

Yeah, would need to re-engineer it to not use the step node. But it does basically demonstrate how to get started with producing procedurals out of the UV channels. Once that clicks with you the world is your oister, or something. Not a native English speaker but I seem to recall a turn of phrase along those lines.

cybereality

@Megalomaniak said: I think the most appropriate solution here was to merge the two topics instead, so I've gone ahead and done so.

Okay, thanks.

cybereality

@Megalomaniak said: I'm not sure how similar to substance designer the godot based material maker is vis-a-vis runtime generated procedural textures/shaders. I'd have to give it a more thorough look, though the quick glimpse I gave it a while ago(a month maybe?) left a lot to be desired far as I could tell.

Material Maker is very powerful. Of course it is a newer program and not as feature rich as Substance (which has been around for longer and has had much more funding) but I don't think Material Maker is limited in any way, or that you can't get good results. Here is an example of the kind of advanced stuff you can do with it.

And it was made with Godot, and supports Godot material formats, meaning you can easily export and iterate on the art and basically update your game within a few seconds, which, IMO, makes it a better solution for use with Godot.

Megalomaniak

Yeah, as I said I was commenting more on the UX. I do think it has got tremendous potential and I'm not berating it by any means. Just saying that in terms of polish I don't think I'd want to be working with it 8 to 16 hours a day every day in production as it currently stands.

As for the runtime material publishing, all I can see in the docs is:

When exporting for the Godot game engine, Material Maker will generate a .tres file that describes a fully configured SpatialMaterial.

Which doesn't sound like what I'd want. And even if they mean ShaderMaterial I have my doubts, would be better tho.

Honestly the same goes for godot's current state of VisualShaders. I think long term it has a bright future, but it's not currently very nice to work with and I'd rather write shaders in code as it stands. But given some additional major features such as compute shaders and most importantly lots of QoL polish, such as node groups and an easy way to preview any nodes output on the viewport mesh(a la node wrangler and viewer nodes in blender) or frames for commenting sections of your graph I think it'll be great.

cybereality

The export from MaterialMaker is a standard SpatialMaterial. It just automatically sets the textures and parameters, it's not a custom shader. However, you can also just export images and do it yourself if you want.

And in terms of UI/UX, I like MaterialMaker better than Substance. It is a little confusing at first (just like Godot itself) but it is easier to use and once you learn it it's pretty fast to pump stuff out. But it is pretty new and not even on 1.0 yet, so overall it is kind of quirky and rough.

Megalomaniak

@cybereality said: The export from MaterialMaker is a standard SpatialMaterial. It just automatically sets the textures and parameters, it's not a custom shader. However, you can also just export images and do it yourself if you want.

Ah, there in lies the problem, from my understanding this whole topic is about dynamic runtime adjustable generated texture data not static baked textures. What your video shows being done inside MM is certainly intriguing enough, but the big million dollar question is how do you get that in that same dynamic and fairly adjustable manner into godot or unreal or unity or what have you.

With substance they have their DLL/middleware that can be integrated into a runtime environment to bring in support for the substances authored from designer. The substances remain dynamic and procedural. I'm hoping MM could become that for godot too, at least for godot, since it's made with godot, it could maybe become a plugin/gd extension.

cybereality

I mean, I think it will get there. It's pretty promising, and it's not even on 1.0 version yet. But still early.

Megalomaniak

Yeah, I'm quite excited to see where it goes. And where the VisualShaders will too. Both are certainly still useful tools already.

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