Alloy Physical Shader Framework is the complete solution for bringing Physically-Based Shading to your PC, webplayer and Next-Gen Console Unity projects! Alloy comes with over two dozen shaders, and an epic Sci-fi Demoscene with 30 complete textured materials designed to get you up and running fast!
The Alloy Framework is the latest evolution of our in-house toolset, which many of saw this past January in the DX11 Contest winning Museum of the Microstar. Though the set we’re releasing this week is purely the DX9/SM 3.0 shaders, we’ll be patching in out DX11 set sometime in December, free to everyone who’s purchased Alloy.
As longtime users of Beast/Turtle, and light-mapping obsessees, we’ve built our technology around getting the maximum fidelity out of a Beast-centric workflow. Alloy has been designed to get the most out of Unity’s advanced graphical feature-set including:
Linear HDR Lighting
- Deferred Rendering*
- Directional Lightmaps*
- Light Probes[/B]*
The shader set that comes with Alloy has been designed to cover as many of the common permutations of features you might want as possible. Additionally, we’ve structured our shaders such to maximize the convienence of building your own variants on top of the Alloy core. So if you need to add in an extra fx map, or need your texture transforms rooted differently, you can do so without messing with the functional core of the set.* - *Included Shader Variants:** - - Cubemap and RSRM Reflectance* - - Rim Lighting* - - Detail Mapping* - - Self-Illuminated* - - Masked Incandescence* - - Transluscence w. Distortion* - - Alpha Cutout* - - Terrain w. Up to 4 Splats* - *- And various permutations of the above.** - *Other Demos you can Download Right now!**
* - Download The Hold* | A game demo we produced last year that was our first use of Alloy! - *Technical Details and FAQ:** - *What Versions of Unity does this support?**
Alloy currently supports Unity Pro 4.2.1 and up on Windows and OSX.* - *What sort of performance should I expect?**
As cheap as Physically-based Shaders can get. Most of the cost you’ll incur will be through having deferred mode engaged (if you use it), and having normal-mapping on every surface.* - *Does Alloy work on Mobile?**
No, as Alloy requires linear lighting (and a pretty fat memory bandwidth), Alloy is not yet supported for mobile. We’re still waiting for the hardware to catch up.* - *How are you handling reflections?**
All Alloy shaders have two variants: RSRM and Cube-mapped. An RSRM is our in-house look-up texture for a sort of generalized horizon-style reflectance, that is pre-computer for 256 specular powers. What this means is that even if you don’t want to manage unique cube-maps for your scene, reflective materials will still look shiny and distinct with only baked light (Museum of the Microstar used no cubemaps whatsoever). If however, you have a metal material that you want to have use a specific reflection, you can use our Cube variant, that lerps between the RSRM and you cubemap based on the material’s smoothness. Thus you get the best of both worlds in terms of workflow/data management, while maintaining a coherent aesthetic!* - *What BRDF are you using?**
We’ve chosen the Normalized Blinn-Phong BRDF for Alloy for several reasons. The first of which is that it plays nicely with a Light Pre-Pass renderer. As our projects have made almost exclusive usage of Deferred mode in Unity, we built our tech around this constraint from the beginning. Secondly, Normalized Blinn-Phong is cheaper than Cook-Torrance by a ridiculous margin, and having a Physically-Based model that could scale to much large scenes was of greater importance to us. We tried out Simplified Cook-Torrance, but found that it has a nasty tendency to blow out luminance values at grazing angles, and as such was inappropriate for scenes making heavy use of HDR, and visual effects reliant upon it. Though Normalized Blinn-Phong isn’t as accurate as more expensive models, we’ve found that one gets most of the characteristic visual traits and benefits from physically based shading using it, at a marginal cost.*
@GamehubDev Sadly, there won’t be a trial for this (no way to do that sort of thing unless its an editor extension). We’ll be releasing more videos though over the next two months, showing the workflow, tons more examples so you can see how Alloy fits into smaller products (and how clean it is to work with). We might even do a live-cast workshop so folks can ask questions directly.
We’ll also be posting our roadmap to the site and this thread soon, as we have big plans for continuing to develop Alloy, especially for DX11/SM 5.0 users.
What we would need is to integrate your physical based shading parameters within RTPv3 shaders.
As a Customer i can act as Bridge between the two products - Integration…
Or you Can Also contact Relief Terrain Author…
If you Guys Can Add Your Shader Methods Integration
( or at least teach us how t make your shader Methods ) from this Framework work Inside RTPV3 Shaders
/ I will buy it for sure ! If you guys can do that !
PS: Why using relief Terrain pack And not your provided terrain ?
Relief terrain pack got Blending Meshes / triplanar 16 texture layers and Hundreds Features That are needed to my levels …
Unfortunately RTP doesnt Have phisical based shader or so soon wil have and i realy need the integration betwen This Shader Framework Methods and Relief terrain pack ful features.
Can you guys Help this Integration of ALLOY RTPv3 happening ?
If you think you can ! You Possible have here a customer !
I didn’t even know that there was shader model 5…
And Xenius can you tell me if I need shader model 3 to use the shaders or am I fine without sm3?
I will definetely buy it if I can use it without sm3.
@Gamehub Dev: Oh no! The set here isn’t SM5, its SM3.0/DX9. We’re GOING to be adding MORE shaders to the pack next month that are SM5.0 (tessellation stuff mostly).
@Soulssaga: At the moment, we probably wont try any integration for terrain (terrain is fairly low on our priority list as we have 3 more content releases for this set planned first). However, the framework is setup to be as mutable as possible, so if you wanted to modify the Alloy terrain shaders yourself to add in the RTP stuff (if you can fit it in the DX9 register limit), you can do so. We’ve tried to keep the Physical-shading code and the surface-shader setup code as separately-organized as possible to make that sorta thing easier for people who need to merge systems.
Well I need a new computer then. My video card doesn’t support SM 3 even though I bought this PC post 2013.
I only have a laptop so changing the video card is way to difficult…
How is that even possible (unless in 2013 you bought a laptop that was made in 2003)?! I mean, all GPUs made since roughly 2006-2007 have SM3 or better.
It is nice tech, a bit expensive. Since this is physical it would greatly benefit from some sort of realtime GI when light change often. For a static lightmaping GI i stick with skyhop when i can control reflectivity by fresnel parameter.
I paid about 1.000 dollars for the laptop. And the people in the store said that it was great for video editing and gaming.
It’s a Samsung laptop with a amd processor and video card.
I’ll find the specs later.
Greetings fellow developers. This shader pack looks great but I have a question that is the big yay or nay for me. Do these shaders have a tri-planar option? My game uses procedural terrain and also allows for voxel building so we need tri-planar shaders. Either way great job on this awesome package!
@Tethys: At the moment we don’t have a tri-planar option, but would be open to having them in a set. The only problem is that doing triplanar texturing tends to use up a ton of registers (and we’re limited to 39 I think in DX9), so it might be possible, but not necessarily alongside some of the shaders that already have a ton of input channels. What sorts of channels would you need in that situation? How many of those would have to be different based on direction (like, is this a tri-planar using the same texture set per direction, or different textures for the top/bottom/etc.). Twould be a messy shader for sure with all the inputs, but I can ask our resident ninja about it specific challenges of doing it later today.
@GamehubDev: Have you tried running the downloadable demo scene listed above? (the main one) If not, run it, and send us a screenshot or two at Alloy@rustltd.com. Feel free to include the specs on your laptop as well.
@Xenius - Hey thanks for the quick reply! I can’t be too specific on the technical aspects of it (I have asked our terrain programmer to take a look at the thread) - however I can comment on what I know Our current tri-planar shaders have options for 1-3 sides (a 1 sided, a 2 sided top and side, and a 3 sided top, side and bottom). In addition, our 3 side tri-planars take a normal map for each side and two diffuse maps with a noise option for variety, for each side. Gratitude for taking a look and responding!
@Tethys - Just got done talking with our ninja n00body and it looks like the tri-planar stuff is very much possible. We’ll add it to our list for stuff to add in the future. If you want to contact us directly at Alloy@rustltd.com I can take a closer look at what sort of geo and setup you’re working with to make sure you could cleanly convert over to using Alloy in your project.
Finally we got PBS into Unity. Thanks a lot for that! What a pity that your shaders can’t do IBL like Skyshop. I also miss the Fresnel term.
It’s really tragic that the great shader packages for Unity only provide subsets of functionality needed for photorealism and can’t communicate with each other. The one shader package provides IBL, the other POM and now we get PBS. But no shader package that does PBS + IBL + POM.
I hope this will come once Unity completes their ubershading system with state-of-the-art monolithic shaders.
@SeanM3D Glad you’re happy to see it! I wanted to mention two things. First, the Alloy shaders do have a Fresnel term, which in our case is mathematically correct (which does make it subtle on many rougher materials). If you walk around in the main demo scene and especially look at the terrain, you can see the added luminescence at grazing angles.
In terms of IBL stuff, we do want to eventually add skyshop support, as we absolutely love the stuff their tool outputs.
As for parallax occlusion mapping, while gorgeous in certain circumstances, I’ve always felt that its something that fairly special case, and is already being replaced wholesale with Tessellation/other displacement techniques. Cone-step maps can be wonderful too, but they’re a nightmare from a generation/workflow standpoint. Granted I think there’s room for all of these techniques. Also, if you wanted to use POM with Alloy, the structure of our framework is such that you could make your own variant without having to mess with any of the Physically-based lighting code.
@Bawss-man I haven’t used Jove, so I wouldn’t want to presume anything about what it can and can’t do. We’re each using different BRDFs from what I see, but I don’t know the technical details of any of the other lighting math they’re using.
There are a plurality of shaders and related systems on the asset store, each covering various use-cases and combinations of requirements. I also don’t think its going to benefit anyone to start a Shader-boxing-match on the forum.
I’d be happy to answer any questions you have though about Alloy if there’s anything unclear about the product that isn’t covered by our walk-through video and documentation.
