Reference

Nodes

The shader node catalogue. One graph drives 2D, three.js, and the C++ engine.

121 entries

Input

Where a graph starts. These nodes read something from outside — the position of the pixel being shaded, the timeline clock, a texture you supplied, a plain number you typed. Every graph begins with at least one of them, because nothing downstream has anything to work on otherwise.

Coordinates

The coordinate systems a texture can be mapped in. Local is the safe default; UV matches an unwrapped mesh; Object survives the object moving.

Surface Info

Surface properties at the shading point.

Value

A single number, so one slider can drive many inputs at once.

RGB

A colour swatch.

Time

Timeline position in seconds, so a graph can animate. Wrapped on the CPU — an unbounded value reaching a noise hash quantises on mobile GPUs.

Fresnel

Grazing-angle falloff — the reason glass rims glow. On a flat 2D layer this reads off the layer normal, so it still produces a usable edge gradient.

Facing

Fresnel and facing falloff as a blend factor — the usual way to mix two materials by view angle.

Instance Info

Per-object values, so one material can vary across instances instead of every copy looking identical.

Ambient Occlusion

Crevice darkening supplied by the renderer. 2D layers have no occlusion, so this reads 1 there rather than blackening the layer.

Motion

The category a node set inherited from 3D surfacing does not have, and the one that matters most in a motion tool. Oscillators, seeded noise over time, springs, easing curves, staggered delays. Every one is a pure function of the timeline clock and never of a wall clock, which is why a graph scrubs and exports identically.

Oscillator

A repeating waveform driven by the timeline. The simplest way to make anything in the graph move.

Wiggle

Seeded smooth random over time. Organic drift that never repeats, and is identical on every playback because it is a function of the playhead, not a running counter.

Easing

Shape a 0..1 progress value with the standard easing curves.

Spring

Damped harmonic overshoot. Stiffness and damping are real physical parameters, so the settle behaves predictably.

Progress

A 0..1 ramp between two times. The value nearly every transition and reveal is built on.

Time Loop

Wrap or ping-pong the playhead so a graph cycles without keyframes.

Stagger

Delay by index, so instances or glyphs animate in sequence instead of together. The single most-used trick in motion graphics.

Pulse

A decaying spike at a moment in time — impacts, flashes, beat hits.

Beat

Tempo-locked pulse train in BPM, so motion can be cut to music without hand-placing keyframes.

Audio Level

Amplitude from the project audio, supplied per frame by the renderer. Zero when no audio is loaded rather than failing to compile.

Random

Stable pseudo-random from a seed or an index. Same seed always gives the same number, so a render is reproducible.

Shape

Signed distance fields for the primitives you would otherwise draw by hand. A shape node returns distance rather than colour, so you can grow it, outline it, round it, and combine it with another shape smoothly — things a rasterised shape cannot do.

Circle

A shape node.

Rectangle

Rounded rectangle. Corner radius is a real distance offset, so it stays circular at any aspect.

A ring segment. Sweeping the end angle from a Progress node is the standard radial-wipe and loader build.

Shape Boolean

Combine two distance fields. Smoothing blends the seam instead of creasing it, which is how metaball merges are built.

Outline

Stroke a distance field at an exact width. Perfectly even at any zoom, which an image-based outline can never be.

Expand / Contract

Grow or shrink a shape by a real distance, rounding corners as it grows the way a physical offset does.

Layer Mask

The silhouette of the layer this graph is applied to, so a graph can shade text or a vector path rather than a rectangle.

Texture

Procedural patterns evaluated per pixel: noise, gradients, cells, stripes. Because they are functions rather than images, they stay sharp at any resolution and can be layered without a bake between levels.

Noise

Fractal noise. Value is cheapest, Perlin has no axis bias, Simplex is cleanest on a triangular lattice.

Cellular

Cellular texture. F1 gives cells, F2−F1 gives the cracks between them, and the cell id gives flat random tiles for shatter looks.

Multifractal Noise

Multifractal noise. Unlike fBm the octave amplitude depends on the value so far, giving smooth valleys with rough peaks — the classic terrain generator.

Waves

Bands or rings with optional noise distortion — wood grain, marble veining, ripples.

Checker

Two-colour checkerboard. The standard UV-distortion test pattern.

Bricks

Offset running-bond rows with mortar gaps and per-brick colour variation.

Gradient

The ramp shapes: linear, radial, spherical, diagonal and their eased variants.

Sine Interference

Iterated sine distortion — psychedelic banding that is hard to get any other way.

White Noise

Dot / Halftone

Regular dot grid with adjustable radius and softness — halftone printing, perforations, LED panels.

Weave

Over-under warp and weft — fabric, baskets, carbon fibre.

Maze Tiles

Randomly rotated quarter-arc tiles that connect into endless maze-like paths. A pattern no raster tool ships.

Hex Grid

Hexagonal tiling with per-cell random id — honeycomb, sci-fi panels, shield effects.

Scratches

Directional streaks for wear, brushed metal and grime — standard in dedicated texturing tools, absent from most 3D packages.

Image Texture

Sample a bitmap. The one node that is not procedural, and the bridge for scanned or painted maps.

Distort

Nodes that move sample coordinates rather than colours. Feed a texture through a warp and the pattern bends; feed a shape through it and the outline ripples. This is the family that stops procedural work looking mechanical.

Transform

Move, rotate and scale coordinate space around a pivot.

Polar Coordinates

Swap rectangular and polar space. Wrapping a linear gradient into a radial sweep, or unwrapping a circle into a strip.

Kaleidoscope

Fold space into mirrored wedges around a centre.

Repeat

Tile coordinate space into a grid, with an optional per-cell index for randomising each tile.

Mirror

Reflect space across an axis — instant symmetry without duplicating anything.

Twirl

Rotate space by an amount that falls off with radius.

Ripple

Concentric wave displacement radiating from a centre.

Wave Warp

Directional wave displacement — flags, banners, liquid edges.

Noise Warp

Displace space by fractal noise. The organic-turbulence workhorse — smoke, heat haze, liquid edges.

Sphere Warp

Bulge or pinch space through a lens, with real refraction falloff at the rim.

Offset

Slide space and wrap it. Scrolling backgrounds and endless conveyor motion.

Color

Adjustment and mixing. Ramps, blends, corrections, colour-space moves. Most graphs end with two or three of these shaping whatever the generators produced.

Gradient Ramp

Map a 0..1 factor through a multi-stop gradient. The workhorse for turning any grayscale generator into colour.

Blend

Blend two colours with any of the standard blend modes.

Colour temperature in Kelvin → RGB. Fire, hot metal, practical lighting.

Wavelength

Visible spectrum in nanometres → RGB. Prisms, iridescence, spectral dispersion.

Vector

Maths on 2- and 3-component values — building them, splitting them, transforming them. Unglamorous and constantly needed, because half of graph work is getting a coordinate into the right space.

Mapping

Position, rotate and scale a texture coordinate. How you place a texture without moving the object.

Turn a height value into a perturbed normal by differencing it across the pixel. What makes a painted texture actually catch light.

Normal Map

Decode a tangent-space normal map. Expects the usual (0.5, 0.5, 1) neutral encoding.

Normal Blend

Combine two normal maps without flattening either. Reoriented blending, not a naive average — averaging normals loses detail from both.

Displacement

Height into the material output. Real vertex displacement where the renderer supports it, bump-style shading where it does not.

Height to Normal

Sobel-filtered height field into a tangent-space normal. The texturing-tool workhorse, and unlike Bump it does not need screen-space derivatives.

Converter

Scalar maths and plumbing: arithmetic, clamping, remapping, comparison. The nodes you reach for when a value is in the wrong range rather than the wrong shape.

Math

Forty scalar operations. The most-used node in any graph.

Clamp

A converter node.

Remap

Remap one range onto another. The node that turns a 0..1 mask into whatever a downstream input actually wants.

Mix

A converter node.

Curve

Freehand response curve. Four control points, Catmull-Rom through them.

Pick one of two inputs. Both branches are evaluated on a GPU, so this selects — it does not save cost.

Filter

Neighbourhood operations — blur, sharpen, edge detection and friends. These read more than one sample, which is what separates them from the per-pixel families above.

Levels

Remap input black/white points with a gamma in between, then to an output range. The standard contrast tool.

Threshold Scan

Sweep a soft threshold across the value range. Driving position from a Progress node is how erosion and burn reveals are built.

Posterize

Collapse to a fixed number of bands — cel shading, contour maps, retro colour depth.

Dither

Ordered 4×4 threshold matrix — banding traded for texture. Screen-space, so the pattern stays crisp at any zoom.

Edge Detect

Gradient magnitude of the incoming value — outlines from any field. Uses screen-space derivatives, so it costs nothing.

Sharpen

Unsharp mask from the local gradient — pushes values away from their neighbourhood average.