What's new with the shader graph?

Shader Graph has received several updates and enhancements as presented in various sessions at WWDC 2024. Here are the key highlights:

1. MaterialX Shaders in Shader Graph:

   • RealityKit now supports MaterialX shaders in Shader Graph, a shader creation system within Reality Composer Pro. This feature is now available across VisionOS, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, allowing for consistent visuals across these platforms. Shader Graph enables designing shaders without coding, making experimentation fun and fast. Several bespoke nodes are available to creators, which can be integrated into content creation applications to streamline workflows (What’s new in USD and MaterialX).

2. Hover Effects and Shader Graph Integration:

   • New hover effects and shader styles have been introduced, which integrate with Shader Graph materials in Reality Composer Pro. This allows for advanced visual effects, such as custom hover effects that light up specific parts of a model when interacted with. The hover state node in Shader Graph provides inputs like intensity value, which can be animated to create dynamic visual effects (Discover RealityKit APIs for iOS, macOS and visionOS).

3. Environment Radiance Node:

   • The environment radiance node in Shader Graph can be used to add more realistic lighting effects to materials that do not require full PBR shaders. This node allows the use of shading information from image-based lighting (IBL) within an unlit shader graph, providing reflections and other lighting effects without the need for complex shaders (Optimize your 3D assets for spatial computing).

4. Shader Debugging and Profiling:

   • Enhanced tools for debugging and profiling shaders have been introduced. The shader profiler now supports new features for converted shaders, helping identify bottlenecks by displaying the most expensive shader function calls and annotating source code with performance statistics. This provides deep insights into shader execution and helps debug complex shader issues (Port advanced games to Apple platforms).

These updates make Shader Graph a powerful tool for creating and optimizing shaders across Apple's platforms, enhancing both the development process and the visual quality of applications.