So yup, that's what I've been up to. I've probably missed a few things, but if so I'll cover them in the next post (which hopefully won't take a month!!!).
- Sean Boettger 10/12/2015
I give up...
Shader Sandwich!
Anyway hey everyone! I'll cut right to the chase, Shader Sandwich V1.3 is finished! I've sent it to the Asset Store team, should be online in a week :).
Here's the feature list: - Completely rewritten shader generation and many core parts of Shader Sandwich
- No longer Surface Shaders, so more possibilities in the future!!
- Improved Interface (looks pretty slick in my opinion haha)
- Improved realtime previews
- Less code regeneration (really fast editing!)
- More optimized code generation (especially for unlit)
- Unlimited passes
- Parallax Occlusion Mapped shadows
- Custom fallbacks and replacements
- Tessellation Point generation
- New Mask layer type
- Unity 5.3+ support
- Updated documentation
- Fixed(?) shadow casting? I know a few people had issues with this but I could never recreate it...hopefully it's fixed :)
- Some stuff to improve mobile shaders speed
- ZTesting and render queue selection added.
- Some stuff I've forgotten...
- A whole lot of bug fixes..
- A whole ton of junk code I need to remove...
- A whole lot of new bugs that I haven't found yet...
Alright so now for the excuses as to why it's taken more than four months to make this!! First off I'm really sorry to all my customers, I'll be making a proper apology on the asset store thread, but yeah I feel really bad for how crappy I've been in supporting Shader Sandwich recently.
In all honesty I don't have that many good excuses, it mostly came down to me prioritizing school and film making over Shader Sandwich. Basically, what happened was I had been working on this version a few months back and had started on pretty much every new system (volumetrics, code editing, POM shadowing and proper edge clipping, the new shells system etc etc), and in all of them I hit road blocks. I spent weeks and weeks trying to solve them but I just couldn't, mostly due to bugs or limitations in Unity.
So I slowly started to give up, and around this time school was kicking into full swing so I started to dedicate more time to that, and using my free time to make short films. I was just really really really really really really really sick of programming! Haha XD.
But anyway, about a month ago I got an email from Unity saying my asset would be going on sale for their Level 11 customers, which made me realize how much I'd benefited from the previous sale and how little I'd given my customers in return, so I felt really crappy and decided to dive head first back into Shader Sandwich and get the next version out.
I pretty much had to scrap all the work I'd done on the next version up until that point, as I decided to leave the comfort of Unity's Surface Shaders and completely rewrite shader generation. And so I did that! I improved the interface along the way, and added a few new features that I literally could not have previously due to the Surface Shader system.
Edit: I completely forgot to mention the part where my harddrive failed and I lost tons of work, and how I'm currently working off a small FAT-32 drive which is making everything a pain haha XD.
So now I'm at the point where I can release what I have, I know it's not much and most of the changes are in the back end of Shader Sandwich rather than in noticable features, but hopefully now I'll be able to develop for it alot quicker and get in all the other features I'd promised :).
So yeah, planned for the next version are:
- Volumetrics
- POM edge silhouettes
- Masks as inputs
- lots and lots of tutorials!!!
On that last note, I'll be posting a bunch of new tutorials in a few days. The main reason I waited for that was since I knew I'd be changing the interface a bunch and didn't want them all to go obsolete, of course the version took way longer than expected, sorry :(.
Films!
So yeah, I've made a lot of short films recently :). Most of them are on private, but I'll share with you guys one I'm planning to release in a few months once all the episodes are finished:
And here's another that's actually public, it's actually based on the final straw that pushed me to move to custom Vertex/Fragment shaders in Shader Sandwich :)
Songs
I also wrote/performed/made people's ears bleed with a couple of songs, you can find in under the Creations menu in...songs! Pretty crazy I know XD. They're mostly emo shite that was made literally for me to listen to, so they aren't very good but I figured hey, why not chuck them online. So there ya go.
I've seen a few movies recently that I enjoyed quite a bit. Deadpool was pretty good, dead simple plot but the comedy and action were fantastic! The "Count the Bullets" sequence is probably the best action scene I've seen. One of the VFX teams behind the film posted a VFX breakdown, here:
Also saw Zootopia which was much better than I expected. While holes can be poked in the plot and world, and there wasn't enough time spent developing the bunny's (sorry I don't do names) inner prejudice, I thought that the actual message and the way it was told in the story was surprisingly intelligent for a kids film. But Gazelle, Gazelle needs to die...
Finally saw Batman V Superman yesterday or whatever it was called and it was the most broken film I have ever seen. I'm actually planning on posting a full review, or maybe even a video, exploring it. I find the film fascinating actually, how literally not a single thing works and how the entire thing feels like a joke. I was honestly surprised, I went in expecting it be mediocre but it turned out as entertaining as Birdemic 2...
Welp...
So yeah that's my monster of a post explaining...something? I'm not really sure, but anyway hopefully those of you still out there enjoy the Shader Sandwich update, I'll be posting on the asset thread shortly. Thanks for sticking around!
Posted 8 years ago
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