- Feedback
-
Ideas
+28
texture arrays and gpu instancing.
next month on the 16th it appears the next unity patch will introduce gpu instancing and support for 2dtexture arrays. Would be nice for shader forge to support these new features to reduce the need of manualy updating the shaders :)
doc on the texture arrays:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JDmAJT04FpGk7hB2L-pX1cfsHLeP_AisuNVs0sPgHyE/edit#
doc on the GPU instancing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RS6cVjE8mBVOKqQUuXbaZcPW3kmw3ZWySJwr-5rDwSs/edit#
Customer support service by UserEcho
I also second this request, being able to access texture arrays would allow us to make use of more "virtual" samplers
GPU instancing sounds fantastic in concept, but the issues are in the implementation. Some nice guy in the unity forums made a version of the big unity standard shader that i tried....my scene ran slower(doubt its that guy's fault, he just implemented based off of their docs)...so either it's going to be some growing pains and more of a 5.5 feature and/or its more a situational feature based off its caveats(no lightmaps ect..)...maybe it is good on foliage and other things that are too dense for dynamic batching but have properties that make them unable to be flagged static. While i will welcome when we can get the ability to add these features in Shader Forge, it is prudent to see unity actually implement this in their shaders first and getting the bugs out before Joachim burns cycles implementing it (imho).
Please I need texture arrays :)
Would be nice -- at the moment I create a shader in SF, then port the generated code into a skeleton shader I wrote that works with GPU instancing.
Exactly what I am doing now to a bunch of vegetation shaders we built in SF - pretty tedious and repetitive for me. Actually, as the UNITY_MATRIX_MVP will be transparently replaced with the instance matrices when the multi_compile is enabled, basic support should be pretty easy (macro here, macro there, sv_InstanceId into the data). But I see that the task may be more complex when looking at the full SF featureset...
Texture arrays would be a must, as they are really important and can solve many issues and give better performance than sampling many textures. I don't thing they should be to complicated to implement. Also, it would be nice to have a support for Volume textures 3D textures).
+1