Shader Docs

Understanding and leveraging RED3 shaders

We do not have official documentation from CDPR about how shaders are used by artists. Thus any 2d/3d artist is looking at hundreds of black-box shaders with unknown usage. This is extremely demotivating for anyone looking to bring new assets to life with REDengine. The following list of tables is an attempt to make life easier for artists by using the community to document commonly used shaders.

About the documentation

• The name and path of each shader will be documented by the header.

• Next we are using a table for each texture parameter with the exact name listed by CDPR in the w2mg file, how REDengine uses each specific RGBA channel, and the usable range of the channel if not 0-1/0-255.

• When applicable, vertex color properties will be listed underneath the texture table with a similar format.

• Scalar, vector, color, and other properties will follow with their own unique description table.

• An asterisk (*) is used to notate some degree of uncertainty, or need for more independent testing.

Shaders

pbr_std_tint_mask_det

engine\materials\graphs\pbr_std_tint_mask_det.w2mg

Texture Channels	Red	Green	Blue	Alpha
Diffuse	Color	Color	Color	Transparency
Normal	Normal	Normal	Normal	Roughness
Tintmask	Ambient Occlusion	Tint	Detail Mask (128-255)	None

Properties	Description
SpecularColor	RGB value to assign specular highlight
DetailNormal1	1 of 2 procedural normal map detail overlays
DetailTile	X/Y tiling values for DetailNormal
DetailRotation	Rotation values for DetailNomal
DetailRange	Distance at which DetailNormal is applied to mesh
Roughness_min/max	Clip values to add a global min/max to roughness texture
AOPower	Multiplier for Ambient Occlusion

Notes

• Extremely common for character assets

• Uses EnableMask flag to create alpha clipped transparency mask from diffuse texture

pbr_std_tint_mask_2det

engine\materials\graphs\pbr_std_tint_mask_2det.w2mg

Texture Channels	Red	Green	Blue	Alpha
Diffuse	Color	Color	Color	Transparency
Normal	Normal	Normal	Normal	Roughness
Tintmask	Ambient Occlusion	Tint	2 Detail Masks (0-0.5/0.5-1)	None

Properties	Description
SpecularColor	RGB value to assign specular highlight
DetailNormal1	1 of 2 procedural normal map detail overlays
DetailNormal2	2 of 2 procedural normal map detail overlays
DetailTile1/2	X/Y tiling values for DetailNormals
DetailRotation1/2	Rotation values for DetailNomals
DetailRange	Distance at which DetailNormal is applied to mesh
Roughness_min/max	Clip values to add a global min/max to roughness texture
AmbientPower	Multiplier for Ambient Occlusion

Notes

• Extremely common for character assets

• Uses EnableMask flag to create alpha clipped transparency mask from diffuse texture

• Based on pbr-std-tint-mask-det

• The tintmask texture packs 2 maps into the blue channel, one map from values 0-127 and another from 127-255. The "zero value" for both textures is at the midpoint, while using values closer to 0/255 will increase the detailmap strength.

pbr_std_tint_mask_2det_fresnel

engine\materials\graphs\pbr_std_tint_mask_2det_fresnel.w2mg

Texture Channels	Red	Green	Blue	Alpha
Diffuse	Color	Color	Color	Transparency
Normal	Normal	Normal	Normal	Roughness
Tintmask	Ambient Occlusion	Tint	2 Detail Masks (0-0.5/0.5-1)	None

Properties	Description
SpecularColor	RGB value to assign specular highlight
DetailNormal1	1 of 2 procedural normal map detail overlays
DetailNormal2	2 of 2 procedural normal map detail overlays
DetailTile1/2	X/Y tiling values for DetailNormals
DetailRotation1/2	Rotation values for DetailNomals
DetailRange	Distance at which DetailNormal is applied to mesh
Roughness_min/max	Clip values to add a global min/max to roughness texture
AmbientPower	Multiplier for Ambient Occlusion
FresnelPower	Fresnel multiplier
FresnelStrenght	(misspelled by CDPR) Fresnel multiplier

Notes

• Uses EnableMask flag to create alpha clipped transparency mask from diffuse texture

• Based on pbr-std-tint-mask-2det

• The tintmask texture packs 2 maps into the blue channel, one map from values 0-127 and another from 127-255. The "zero value" for both textures is at the midpoint, while using values closer to 0/255 will increase the detailmap strength.

• Uses "fresnel" values to add extra fresnel effect to the mesh. Read more about fresnel here.