#thankfully i just needed to plug in a remap node

[cerbreus]

today has been. a work day.

[volno]

Hello! I've been playing around with some bg3 (3D) fanart and I just wanted to say your texture toolbox is absolutely game-changing. Thank you so much for building it! Even just looking through how the skin shader works has been fantastic for learning more about shading systems

I also wanted to ask, if I wanted to, for experimentation sake, similarly reverse engineer a game shader, say just for skin or clothes or whatever - where would I... begin to look at how the in-game shaders are constructed? I know that's kind of a huge question, so no problem at all if you can't answer, I just wanted to give it a shot.

Thanks again!

heya! I'm always glad to hear that people have been enjoying the toolbox. Initially, everything I made was based off of guess work, then later on, Norbyte gave me some decompiled versions of the shaders which I then had to basically translated from GLSL into Blender nodes, which was its own challenge. But thankfully, with the toolkit released, we now have a much easier option: the Material Editor.

To open up an existing Material in the editor, right click on it and select the 'Open in editor' option. The editor is node based, just like Blender's editor, but goes from right to left instead of left to right. Its also currently broken! (yay) because of this you won't be able to compile any materials, you'll also notice that the material preview is broken, so that's fun. There isn't really a viable way around any of this until Larry Anne™ fixes it, but thankfully all you need the editor for is to see how the material is put together.

Now that you've got the shader graph open, you can begin the task of replicating it in Blender; word of advice, not everything has a Blender equivalent. You will inevitably have to take some artistic liberties with it. But, I've already done some of the hard work for you, under the tab you'll find the notes I made while remaking the hair shader, hope this helps!

Toolkit on the left, Blender on the right:

Lerp = mix node

Component mask = separate rgb/xyz

Negate = multiply node (A) = -1.0 (B) = var

Remap = map range

Smooth step = also map range (set to smooth step)

Colour ramp with a LUT input = god fucking help you

Camera Vector = Camera Data (?)

Transform direction = vector transform

world normal = texture coordinates object info plugged into a vector transform node set to normal, object, world

Dither Temporal AA Node = there is no god here

When a clamp(0.0, 1.0) is needed you just need to tick the 'clamp' box on the node in blender. Other wise you can use the clamp node. If its a vector, you will need to separate the xyz cords, then clamp each of them, before combining the cords again.

Blender has separate math nodes for vectors and floats, vector math nodes don't have the same amount of option as floats + don't support vec4s*. You will need to make use of the separate xyz node when required. For operations on vec4s, do all of the operations via the vec3 vector math nodes, and have an additional float value for the missing vector follow along and copy the operations done on the vec3s like some sort of node pilot fish.

*blender does use vec4s but only for colour nodes. You can't actually access or do anything with that 4th vector though. When a vector output is plugged into a colour input, blender adds an additional a hidden alpha channel to the colour. When a colour output is plugged into a vector input, this hidden alpha channel is discarded.