It is several month now since we start to work on our first Unity Extension. And we are happy to announce that Shader Painter v1.0 Beta is now available. Not all features are available. The price will increase with every BETA update (see “major improvements” below).
Shader Painter is a painting tool which allows you to paint advanced shader effects.
It’s not a vertex tool ! With this extension you will be able to paint directly on pixels. This way you can add extremely complex shapes on a simple polygon.
Pixel painting which let you paint detailed shapes on very low poly models
Multi layers support (4 layers)
Metallic/Roughness and Specular/Glossiness light mode
Skinned mesh support
Lightweight (LWRP) support
Multiple ID materials support
Import custom brushes
Simple interface to get a clear overview
Shaders already available in v1.0 Beta :
Standard/Multi layers
Water
Cutout
Wind Dx11
Water Dx11
Upcoming major improvements :
Substance support
Maps exporter
High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) support
Animation Editor support
Brush/painting optimisations
New shaders/new effects
And so much more.
Do you have suggestions ? Post here your ideas and help us shape this tool to your needs.
We will be happy to hear which shaders or features you would expect in this extension.
Any problem with Shader Painter don’t hesitate to contact us directly at : contact@ciconia-studio.com
Hello I am DeBugs and I am in the Shader Painter dev team.
I am glad you like it. We are doing our best to make the best tool possible !
Thank for your question.
In fact it is in our plan to paint with more than two layers. We have made Shader Painter while thinking of this functionality. We wanted to release Shader Painter as soon as it was usable in a real project and here it is the beta 1.0 (1.01 coming soon \o/ ). Several functionalities are planned to be added before the end of the beta phase and this is one of our top priorities. So stay tune!
If you have more questions or remarks/comments or even request you can use this thread but you can also show your support by posting a comment or/and by rating Shader Painter in our asset store page!
We have unanimously good reviews since we release Shader Painter and that make us very proud of our work.
Thank you all for showing your appreciation!
Thank you for your question.
As you can see in our videos (and in our gifs), Shader Painter doesn’t need a lot of vertex to paint detailed shaders. You can look for instance at the water example : with just a plan there are a lot of details. That is one of our main difference with Vertex Tools pro. But to achieve this kind of wizardry we have to add some magic sparkle in our shaders, this can not be done with only scripts. That is why with Shader Painter you have to use our shaders. You can see what you can paint in the first post of this thread. We have made our shader with as much personalization as possible to fit most use cases. For instance, with the water shader you can also paint blood or lava or any liquid. However, we know that in some cases you will need more than that. That is why we plan to propose more and more shaders in future release, coming soon. You can see on the Ciconia Studio asset store page what our shader designer team is capable of. Feel free to suggest what shaders you would like us to add!
Yes. You can see on the store page in the package contents section, in the folder “Shaders” there are .shader files. However as I said earlier there are a lot of options in those shaders and thus it is not easy to understand how it works. Moreover, there is Shader Painter specific code inside that will not make it easy to use in non-Shader Painter project.
If you want shaders include in Shader Painter alone (like water shader or wind shader) you can find them on Ciconia Studio asset store page.
Important : Before upgrading Shader Painter make sure to close the Shader Painter Window. Otherwise, the shader of the model selected in Shade Painter will be reset to default.
You will not lose your painting but you will lose all chosen settings and maps!
This is a really good question, we never thought about that. Unfortunately, we do not have enough informations to allow us to answer that question yet.
But yes, if it’s possible we will do so.
Thanks for the idea, we will definitely keep it in mind.
Is it possible to use this with uModeler (a modeling unity asset).
In uModeler you need to assign material to the 3d model face by face. I tried to assign Shader painter based material to the faces, however I can’t use the painter to paint onto these material. Furthermore one uModeler model has many Shader painter materials.
The reason why it’s nice to have this functionality is that I want to model directly in unity sometimes.
Hello and thank you for your interest in Shader Painter,
We did not know about uModeler and this asset looks great too! We have taken contact with the publisher and we will make it compatible. As we don’t know yet all the implications this development will require we can not give any release schedule. Stay tune for more info during the following days!
Is it possible to use an atlas for the second layer so that we can paint different types of textures for the details. 2 layers is ok, just need more textures to create more complexity.
Thanks I hope it can work with uModeler in the future. This way we can really model some detailed models directly in Unity.
Thank you, that is something we didn’t thought about and it is a really useful feature.
We have found a way to do this by changing the shader at execution if DirectX 11 is not available on the platform. The only difference between the water shader and the DX11 water shader is the tessellation so you can see how it will look like if DX11 is not supported by disabling tessellation. And of course, if you don’t use tessellation, you may use directly the regular water shader.
We will implement this fallback functionality soon, so stay tune !
Thank you! We are glad you like it. Don’t hesitate to rate and comment the package, this will help us a lot
This can happen because Paint Mode is enable. You need to switch to Shader Mode if you want to select or transform models in your scene view.
Let us know if this fix the problem.
Yes! You will have the possibility to export the combined maps (Albedo, Normals…) and/or the painted mask. This way you will be able to use those maps with Unity Standard shaders, UBER or any other shaders you want.
You can already create this effects :
Also good to know, a preset feature will be added for the water/waterDx11 to easily create Calm water, Dirt water, Heavy rain, Blood, Oil and so on.
