1000 Forms of Bunnies victor's tech art blog.

Infinite Possibility Of MatCap Shader

MatCap (Material Capture) shader uses an image of a sphere as a view-space environment map. It’s very cheap and looks great when the camera doesn’t rotate. It is widely used in 3D sculpting software (like Zbrush) to preview meshes.

Reference

Demo

This is a simple MatCap shader showcasing application I made by Unity:

  • Scroll mouse wheel to zoom;
  • click and drag to change view angle;
  • click top arrow to review the MatCap texture panel and try different effect.

Shader Code

This is the shader code of a typical MatCap shader. It is extremely straightforward on the theory and easy to implement.

Shader "MatCap_Victor/Plain"
{
  Properties
  {
    _Color ("Main Color", Color) = (0.5,0.5,0.5,1)
    _MatCap ("MatCap (RGB)", 2D) = "white" {}
  }

  Subshader
  {
    Tags { "RenderType"="Opaque" }

    Pass
    {
      CGPROGRAM
      	#pragma vertex vert
      	#pragma fragment frag
      	#include "UnityCG.cginc"

      	struct v2f
      	{
          float4 pos	: SV_POSITION;
          float2 cap	: TEXCOORD0;
          float3 model_normal : TEXCOORD1;
          float3 world_normal : TEXCOORD2;
          float3 view_normal : TEXCOORD3;
      	};

        v2f vert (appdata_base v)
        {
          v2f o;
          o.pos = mul (UNITY_MATRIX_MVP, v.vertex);

          // this is model normals
          o.model_normal = v.normal;

          // transform normal vectors from model space to world space
          float3 worldNorm =
            normalize(
            	_World2Object[0].xyz * v.normal.x +
            	_World2Object[1].xyz * v.normal.y +
            	_World2Object[2].xyz * v.normal.z
            	);

          // this is world normals
          o.world_normal = worldNorm;

          // transform normal vectors from world space to view space
          float3 viewNorm = mul((float3x3)UNITY_MATRIX_V, worldNorm);
          // or use built-in UNITY_MATRIX_V

          // this is viewspace normals
          o.view_normal = viewNorm;

          // this is in the context of view space
          // get the coordinate on XY plane, ignore z coordinate
          o.cap.xy = viewNorm.xy * 0.5 + 0.5; // clamp (-1,1) to (0, 1)

          return o;
        }

        uniform float4 _Color;
        uniform sampler2D _MatCap;

        float4 frag (v2f i) : COLOR
        {
          float4 mc = tex2D(_MatCap, i.cap);
          return  _Color * mc;
        }
      ENDCG
    }
  }
  Fallback "VertexLit"
}

TBC

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