[Feature Request]: Add support for shaders and material editor

[spark-farahani-ahmad]

This is probably going to be a huge time investment but since unity material editor is hugely lacking and requires custom editor for almost any kind of useful functionality, supporting shaders and material editor would have a huge impact for users IMHO.

By material/shader support I mean creating a custom editor for Material type and add support for useful attributes inside a shader properties block. You can do this through a custom shader GUI class to keep the functionality of existing shaders.

MaterialEditor already has support for attributes (drawers and decorators), but the implementation is very naive and has lots of limitations (check MaterialEditor.GetShaderPropertyHandler()). You can get array of strings of shader propertiy attributes (includingattribute arguments) using Shader.GetPropertyAttributes() and from there make your own implementation of the shader attribute system. You might want to check MaterialPropertyHandler to see how unity handles attributes internally.

Attributes I'd like to have:

• Saints UI attributes ->
  • Layout
  • Hideif/showif/enableif/disableif
    • Support for checking if a texture property is assigned or not (e.g. showIfAssigned("SomeTexture"))
    • Support for checking keywords (e.g. showIfKeyword("_SOME_KEYWORD"))
  • InfoBoxes
  • RichLabel
• Inline (drawing texture properties inline, see MaterialEditor.TexturePropertySingleLine() and MaterialEditor.TexturePropertyTwoLines())
• Indent/Outdent
• Auto assign keywords based on properties
  • Enable/disable keywords based on a texture property being assigned or not
• Vector2/Vector3 support (UI only. Material system uses vector4 always)
• Tooltip support
• Min/Max attributes (Maybe with vector support)
• Min-Max slider for Vector type
• FormerlySerializedAs attribute. This is extremely useful yet not supported by unity.

※Some of these would probably need a custom material post processor (something like URP material post processor) or even a build preprocessor to work correctly, but all of them should be doable.

Implementing this is not going to be easy but I think will definitely be worth the time.

[TylerTemp]

Hi,

Thanks for the detail!

I'm not quite sure about this. I work on #356 because I've already planned to make SaintsEditor integratable into other editors. #356 is a chance that I can actually test it.

I'm not very familiar with Shader development, so I have little knowledge about it.

I'll check about this when I get some time after I finish some features I need for my own project :)

[spark-farahani-ahmad]

I'm not very familiar with Shader development, so I have little knowledge about it.

I'll check about this when I get some time after I finish some features I need for my own project :)

That's completely fine ^^b You already have the best unity editor extension out there even without shader support.
Actually I have already implemented most of the stuff in the original post using the default material editor in my project but it's not very scalable and that's why I asked for the feature. I might try to port those to a fork of SaintsField and make a PR if I find some free time.

[spark-farahani-ahmad]

@TylerTemp

Hey ^^/
I played around a bit with the current code base to see how I can implement this.
For material properties the SerializedProperty instance exists but attributes/memberinfos don't.
So I thought if I provide the required renderers and and attributes in some custom code the rest should work just like normal fields. What do you think?
Basically I think I need to

• Change SaintsEditor.Setup/SaintsEditor.HelperMakeRenderer/SerializedUtils.GetAttributesAndDirectParent/SaintsFieldWithInfo to work with material properties
• Write some kind of helper class to provide attributes/SaintsFieldWithInfo/renderers for material properties

And then the current rendering logic should work with property materials, right? Basically is there any hard dependency on the serialized property/serialized object aside from those I mentioned above?
Any better way to do this?

[TylerTemp]

Im not sure about that. MemberInfo is heavily relied for many attributes.

You may want to have a look at https://saintsfield.comes.today/saintseditor/integerate and https://saintsfield.comes.today/saintseditor/extend (api outdated), but I guess it does not solve the problem.

I'll have a look at this after I finish some features I need for my project