UE5 Tutorial - HLSL - Introduction To Raymarching

Topic: Technical Shading In Unreal

This video is where we start to branch into slightly more complex code. We will go over how we can write our very first Raymarcher using HLSL in Custom Nodes in Unreal 5.1+

This Tutorial is still aimed at beginners but ideally requires the user to watch all previous tutorials in this series, each video will be adding a bit more knowledge and skills to help you become a better artist technically and artistically.

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Tags:
Computer Graphics, SDF, HLSL, Raymarching, Technical Shading in Unreal

[Cadellinman]

As an alternative solution to the centering issue, you can also use objectposition as SphereCenter, and change the distance calculation to RayOrigin + SphereCenter instead of subtract. That removes the need for the extra subtraction operation in the material graph.

Edit: Ah, I see you handled inverting the view direction in the next video also.

[torgath]

Hey man! You're the best! I've been needing this kind of tutorials for a very long time. Unity tutorials for raymarchng and HLSL and dominant on youtube. This one, for Unreal, for beginners is the best! I'd love to understand how to make fog using raymarching that either utilizes volume texture or procedural noise. Or even know both! That would be perfect!

[nevermore]

Hi renderbucket. Im loving your series, always mind opening for me. I have a suggestion tho, you end up quite often using IF, but in reality is not a very good idea doing these opperations on a GPU. 99% of the times you can have basic math operations to do these IFs for you, example step(x, y) is non other than an if statement. Also you can use floor and ceil, min and max.

[Nicholas-nujx]

In newest version of Unreal, Custom node now has code editor like in Niagara. I am so so happy now.

[angelvega]

Hey this is great video man, the only problem I found is that I cannot scale the cube without getting glitches with the sphere any idea how to fix it?

[taoyu]

i get some trouble in this i can get a sphere but flat if i scale the cube i can get a slice of the sphere what can i do?

[zebingxu]

hey, I change the"rayOrigin=worldPos" . Then in the loop I change "rayOrigin-=rayStep". That comes out the same result! Is it true?

[nickharding]

I have a question, as this material can be used on any shape, say i use it on a plane which would be two triangles, would this be better performance than using a sphere, say 10, 000 instances of each, which would be better a sphere or a plane using this material?

[FishMannsk]

Yes but how to make it smooth? Like a gradient?

UPD: Unreal actually has a node called spere mask 3d which doing pretty much the same but better :D

[nickgennady]

Funny enough I just did something similar for atmospheres and somehow this video pops up lol.

Anyway I wish you het a hlsl node in material editor like one in Niagara. Much easier to read and write code.

[darshmewada]

Could you explain the practical usages of the things you explain in the tutorial ?. Because to learn more efficiently if we can get a practical usage of all these HLSL and using it in an actual production case that'd be more beneficial.
Thank You

[DRockafella]

What would a practical reason for doing something like this?

[VanYang-equb]

wtf？ are you serious？why are you define "rayOrigin" as viewDir - worldPos? hop you can Give
me an answer, I think it's totally logically wrong