The Shader Graph team is excited to announce the release of the new Node Reference Samples, available now for 2021 LTS, 2022 LTS, and future releases.
Node Reference Samples is a collection of over 140 Shader Graph assets. Instead of using these graphs for materials in your project, you can use them as a reference to learn what each node does and how it works. Each graph represents a node that’s available in the node library. It also contains a description of the node, explains its functionality, and breaks down how the math works under the hood. To learn how to use a specific node, open its reference file to see descriptions, examples, and breakdowns of that node.
In the samples below, we’re using the Shader Graph tool to illustrate how you can use Node Reference Samples in your next project.
Examples of available samples
Let’s take a look at the Dot Product node:
There’s a lot going on here, so let’s break it down. At the top of the graph, we have the node and a basic description of what the dot product operation does.
On the left, we have the Under The Hood section, which breaks down the dot product operation into more basic math so you can see exactly what’s happening when you use the Dot Product node. Notice that there are helpful tips and descriptions of what’s happening and why.
This section shows you what you can do with the Dot Product node. We can see the node can be used to desaturate a color or as a handy method for texture channel selection and that the dot product is used as the basis for diffuse lighting calculations.
This is just one example. We’ve created over 140 similar graphs representing a large majority of the nodes available in Shader Graph, each containing descriptions, examples, illustrations, and helpful tips.
For more information, read the full blog.