Organic generative shaders

I’m working on some shaders to generate organic structures like cells, roots, seed, fibers, and so on. Here are the basic filters I’ve found so far:

First, Shader Graph really needs an option to print these at 100% scale. I’d hang them in my walls :wink:

If you know of any other branches please share.

Also, the Normal from Height node produces pointy maps, is there a way to obtain a normal map that is actually rounded like the output node in that image?

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And the answer is… there are different approaches to generating height maps from textures, but they tend to fall in the land of image recognition since they try to determine height based on shadows. The algos I’ve found seem complex and resource intensive. Some generators like Gradient Noise are blurred and can be directly feed into a Normal from Height node, for others Gaussian Blur would be a naive solution but it’s still not trivial, not even the Shader Graph samples have a single blur implementation for that reason. BTW, the samples also contain procedural patterns but these are mostly geometric.

Any plans for making them available on asset store?

Glad you asked. Those are the basic nodes, since then I’ve found a few more. Here is a sample of what can be generated with them:

It’s possible to increase the details by creating structures inside structures all the way down and that makes materials way more interesting at close view, concealing texture pixelation.

As for publishing the shader graphs, that is something that crossed my mind, but I’m not sure how much interest this generates.