Loop in visual shader

Question

is there any way to run loops in visual shaders right now? I wanna do ray marching and that requires a loop, which is possible in a text shader (some dude has an open source godot ray marching project with shaders that do it) but I can't find any way to do it in a visual shader

Comments

Can you add to your (edit) question a link to the ray marching project. Maybe that can give us hints.

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https://github.com/Eptwalabha/raymarching-godot

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Was my answer useful? If so please mark it as such :-)

Answer 1

Thanks for the link. I tested with an Expression node with an input Scalar times and output Color color.

color = vec3(0.5,0.1,0.1);
for(int i=0; i < int(times);i++) {
  color = color + 0.1;
}

so you can add loops :-)

This loop gets injected into the VisualShader output like:

// Expression:3
vec3 n_out3p0;
n_out3p0 = vec3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0);
{
    n_out3p0 = vec3(0.5,0.1,0.1);
    for(int i=0; i < int(n_out4p0);i++) {
      n_out3p0 = n_out3p0 + 0.1;
    }

}

Comments

Technically this works but the idea was to create the loop, and the content of said loop, entirely using node

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But this is the only method available using an Expression so is the right answer IMHO ;-)