Translucent Shader

Farfarer

Spent my lunch break working up a translucent shader based on DICE's presentation. Might be useful to some

Code's here;
http://www.farfarer.com/blog/2012/09/11/translucent-shader-unity3d/

Envart

This is cool - nice work!

Stromberg90

I have no idea about shader writing, but I think this looks really cool

LoTekK

Nice one, I took a crack at this myself a while back. Good fun!

ZeroCartin

Nice How heavy is it for performance? Could it run on mobile or only pc/mac?

Farfarer

Uh, it's not massively heavy code, you could certainly optimise it for use on mobile at the expense of a few features.

SimonT

do you have a link to this presentation?

Farfarer

http://www.slideshare.net/colinbb/colin-barrebrisebois-gdc-2011-approximating-translucency-for-a-fast-cheap-and-convincing-subsurfacescattering-look-7170855

RaffScopel

Looks great. Work fine with shadows?

Farfarer

Kind of. They'll cast and receive shadows fine, but the shadows applied to their surface will also affect the translucent effect.

By which I mean, if you imagine the shadow value they receive if they were simply opaque, the translucent effect will also be masked by that shadow value.

The other option would be to stop the translucent effect from being affected by shadows at all, but that has the downside that the light that hits them will receive no attenuation due to distance. In Unity's surface shader system, the "atten" value contains the attenuation (falloff) and the shadow value for the light, combined together.

I tried getting the attenuation value without the shadow value - technically it's possible, but it ended up breaking shadows across the entire scene for some reason

To do that you'd replace the line

fixed3 transLight = (atten * 2) * ( transDot ) * s.Alpha * _SubColor.rgb;

with

fixed3 transLight = 2 * ( transDot ) * s.Alpha * _SubColor.rgb;

That's about the best I can offer sadly, although you could get around that by writing it as a pure CG shader.

Scorpyx

Great stuff Farfarer!
i played a little with this shader
and really like visual result