Shader materials¶

Introduction¶

For the most common cases, Godot provides ready to use materials for most types of shaders, such as SpatialMaterial, CanvasItemMaterial and ParticlesMaterial (@TODO link to tutorials/classes). They are flexible implementations that cover most use cases.

Shader materials allow writing a custom shader directly, for maximum flexibility. Examples of this are:

Create procedural textures.
Create complex texture blendings.
Create animated materials, or materials that change with time.
Create refractive effects or other advanced effects.
Create special lighting shaders for more exotic materials.
Animate vertices, like tree leaves or grass.
Create custom particle code, that responds to baked animations or force fields.
And much more!

Traditionally, most engines will ask you to learn GLSL, HLSL or CG, which are pretty complex for the skillset of most artists. Godot uses a simplified version of a shader language that will detect errors as you type, so you can see your edited shaders in real-time. Additionally, it is possible to edit shaders using a visual, node-based graph editor.

Creating a ShaderMaterial¶

Create a new ShaderMaterial in some object of your choice. Go to the “Material” property and create a ShaderMaterial.

../../_images/shader_material_create.png

Edit the newly created shader, and the shader editor will open:

../../_images/shader_material_editor.png

Converting to ShaderMaterial¶

It is possible to convert from SpatialMaterial, CanvasItemMaterial and ParticlesMaterial to ShaderMaterial. To do this go to the material properties and enable the convert option.