Great tutorial! If you've got a fairly complex vertex distortion with several nodes, is there a way to recalculate at the end, rather than having 3 duplicate node trees? Thanks!
Well, it's possible, but depends on what your distortion logic is doing. In some cases, there are math formulae that are better to use than my technique in this video. Those are generally very complex, and require a deep understanding of the math behind your distorion. The more straightforward case is if some chunk of your logic does not invalidate the normals. For example, if the first bit of your logic just adds Y to the position, then you can do that before calculating neighbors. Or if the end of your logic does something similar, then you could recalculate your normals early, before finishing the position transformation. All in all, this technique is set up to be generic and somewhat brute force. The benefit is that it'll almost always work. The downside is that it is hard to optimize.
@@GameDevBill in your example, the distortion is caused by a math set up. A real cool one at that. I'm driving my distortion with voronoi noise planner plus a 2D LOD texture, and subtracted by another texture mask. So there are a few different items involved, and of course the result is distorted geometry that doesn't shade according to the distorted normals. I tried to use your nodes at the end of my tree but it didn't work, I'm assuming because it needs to be placed before the distortion? I'm wondering if I can take the final output of my vertex displacement, and offset that output?
GameDevBill, Hello Hello! I try to use this for shape deform for my characters in the game but cant get correct result, like the shape normal not recalculated and i have wrong normals result as it work by default. How recalculate normals for the shape deform?
Man, great tutorial. Super helpful and selfless. But I think you should have a better name for the title. It's too "humble" for you to name like this. I literally thought it's an beginner level tutorial which just talks about normal node. You should mention "after deform" to get more views IMO.
Bill walking around with his hat covered in nerf dats: "What are you all looking at? It's a perfectly normal hat" Keep the amazing content up, I'm learning and enjoying it a lot :D
Hey, great video, results are stunning, thanks ! I had a hard time figuring out how from a plane orthogonal to the original normal, we could ever get a different normal resulting of cross product of vectors made from the neighbours on the already orthogonal plane. It turns out we apply the transformation on neighbours as well, the written tutorial helped me to figure out I missed that step in the video. Thanks!
Glad you got it worked out! I try to keep the videos high level and the write ups more detailed, but sometimes am too far one way or another. Just glad you got to the solution :)
Glad I found this ....but using these two subgraphs has no effect on my normals. is this really usable also for terrain-like meshes with more complex geometry?
Sweet jesus man this is helpful, the number of vertex shader things out there that don't even mention normals is upsetting. This is massively helpful stuff.
I'm not totally sure I understand the question. If you are saying that your model isn't centered around 0,0,0, but you want to do some math that, say, moves things outwards. So you want to figure out where the object-space 0,0,0 is, right? There are a few ways to figure this out, the most straightforward is to feed object-space position into the color output of your master node. If everything is black, then the position is negative, and you need to do a one-minus to figure things out. If it's full brightness on one or more color channels, then you can divide to work out scale (maybe the feet are at 0,0,0, but the head is at 0,100,0, so you need to divide the Y by 100 to see a color gradient)... or subtract if it's too high. All in all, this is a guess and check method, but it'll help you visualize through the shader how the coordinates are getting fed in.
Awesome information here! Thanks so much for this!!
Did you have to actually make the hat, or was it just a consequence of working in a gamedev office?
Btw, great explainer on normal generation!
Lol, I've definitely been hit in the head more than a few times during nerf wars. Thanks for the feedback :)
Great tutorial!
If you've got a fairly complex vertex distortion with several nodes, is there a way to recalculate at the end, rather than having 3 duplicate node trees? Thanks!
Well, it's possible, but depends on what your distortion logic is doing. In some cases, there are math formulae that are better to use than my technique in this video. Those are generally very complex, and require a deep understanding of the math behind your distorion.
The more straightforward case is if some chunk of your logic does not invalidate the normals. For example, if the first bit of your logic just adds Y to the position, then you can do that before calculating neighbors. Or if the end of your logic does something similar, then you could recalculate your normals early, before finishing the position transformation.
All in all, this technique is set up to be generic and somewhat brute force. The benefit is that it'll almost always work. The downside is that it is hard to optimize.
@@GameDevBill in your example, the distortion is caused by a math set up. A real cool one at that. I'm driving my distortion with voronoi noise planner plus a 2D LOD texture, and subtracted by another texture mask. So there are a few different items involved, and of course the result is distorted geometry that doesn't shade according to the distorted normals. I tried to use your nodes at the end of my tree but it didn't work, I'm assuming because it needs to be placed before the distortion? I'm wondering if I can take the final output of my vertex displacement, and offset that output?
This tutorial is a gift to the world. Many thanks!
This was super helpful!! It's a damn shame you don't have more subs, you deserve them. Thanks so much!
Great videos, but please consider not overlaying your portrait when showing shader graph or code etc especially when covering relevant areas
Damn, this stuff is crazy! Thanks a lot!!
I tried in Godot but I don't understand :(
vec3 normal = NORMAL; //??
vec3 point = NORMAL; //??
vec3 position = VERTEX; //??
float d = normal.x * point.x +
normal.y * point.y +
normal.z * point.z;
(...)
GameDevBill, Hello Hello! I try to use this for shape deform for my characters in the game but cant get correct result, like the shape normal not recalculated and i have wrong normals result as it work by default. How recalculate normals for the shape deform?
Man, great tutorial. Super helpful and selfless. But I think you should have a better name for the title. It's too "humble" for you to name like this. I literally thought it's an beginner level tutorial which just talks about normal node. You should mention "after deform" to get more views IMO.
That's great! 👏
Thanks for the kind words Alan!
Bill walking around with his hat covered in nerf dats: "What are you all looking at? It's a perfectly normal hat"
Keep the amazing content up, I'm learning and enjoying it a lot :D
"perfectly NORMAL hat".... normal...
Thanks for the kind words, and the intentional or accidental normal pun!
Hey, great video, results are stunning, thanks !
I had a hard time figuring out how from a plane orthogonal to the original normal, we could ever get a different normal resulting of cross product of vectors made from the neighbours on the already orthogonal plane.
It turns out we apply the transformation on neighbours as well, the written tutorial helped me to figure out I missed that step in the video.
Thanks!
Glad you got it worked out! I try to keep the videos high level and the write ups more detailed, but sometimes am too far one way or another. Just glad you got to the solution :)
Thanks! The real life "hat + nerf darts" example made it really clear.
awesome!
This is awesome! Thank you so much!
Glad you like it!
Glad I found this ....but using these two subgraphs has no effect on my normals. is this really usable also for terrain-like meshes with more complex geometry?
Sweet jesus man this is helpful, the number of vertex shader things out there that don't even mention normals is upsetting.
This is massively helpful stuff.
Thank you very much. Unlocked some ideas for my shader. 🙏
That neighbors subgraph looks amazing - so much to learn from! Thank you!
Thanks for the tutorial! Is there any way to recalculate the normals when the source of displacement is a texture map?
Pls continue making videos dude!...
Thanks man, I was a bit lost on that one.
Very helpful
Cool video thank you for the effort!
My pleasure!
Useful tutorial, thank you so much
that is interesting. I must try this method in UE.
little late but you are awesome!
Great tutorial! easy to understand
My shape is totally jacked. Noob issues... how to get the transform of the object at 0,0,0?
I'm not totally sure I understand the question. If you are saying that your model isn't centered around 0,0,0, but you want to do some math that, say, moves things outwards. So you want to figure out where the object-space 0,0,0 is, right?
There are a few ways to figure this out, the most straightforward is to feed object-space position into the color output of your master node. If everything is black, then the position is negative, and you need to do a one-minus to figure things out. If it's full brightness on one or more color channels, then you can divide to work out scale (maybe the feet are at 0,0,0, but the head is at 0,100,0, so you need to divide the Y by 100 to see a color gradient)... or subtract if it's too high. All in all, this is a guess and check method, but it'll help you visualize through the shader how the coordinates are getting fed in.
@@GameDevBill this helps! Thanks!
Very cool 👍😊
Really nice video! The info on your website vanished though :(
Ugh, it is broken. Thanks for the heads up. I'll try to get that back up and running today or tomorrow.
@@GameDevBill looks like you got it now, Thanks a lot! :)
yeah, I just got it back up! Hope it helps :)
You are an absolute Legend !
Thanks!!