DERIVE FAQ
GENERAL QUESTIONS
Yes, at this point, Derive is only availalbe as an Editor Extension for Unity3D, Thus you will need to have Unity 2020 or newer installed to import and use Derive.
No, but upgrading to the final release will be priced very low, so that the overall price (BETA + Final) will be at least 50 % lower for BETA-users.
Some time in 2022. We don’t have a precise date in mind, but we will notify all members once we know.
Derive is and editor extension for Unity3D and is availalbe on the Unity Asset store.
No. All resources for Derive that come through the Derive Website are free. We will also provide additional resources on the Asset Store, those will also be free.
However other people might also offer resources for Derive. Those may not be free and are considered third-party. We have no control over that.
No. Everything you produce using Derive is your property and you have all the rights to it.
Absolutely! They are your property, you own all the rights to them.
CONTENT GALLERY
It depends. When you submit a project, obviously it has to be a Derive project file. When you submit finished textures, we would prefer if it was content created with Derive, but if you also use other tools to create the final output, we will accept it, as long as you are the copyright owner of that content.
No, you don’t, although project files will be of little use without Derive. Finished textures however do not require Derive and can be downloaded by anyone who is a registered member and logged in.
Yes. The licensing accords to the Creative Commons foundation and is thus free of charge. However that does not mean that there are no restrictions on the downloaded content. Even Creative Commons licenses may involve restrictions, such as an obligation of attribution (crediting the original author). Read more about the licensing options >>
No. All content from the content gallery go under creative commons. This means that while there may be restrictions on it, none of it is paid and can be downloaded free of charge. To learn more about the available licenses for the content gallery, click here >>
Yes you can, but we strongly urge you not to. You are the copyright owner of your work, so legally you are allowed to distribute it whichever way you see fit, but offering something for sale in one place while sharing it for free in another can lead to very confusing states of licensing. E.g. if you sell a texture you made with Derive on some marketplace, while you are offering it under a Creative Commons license on Derive’s content gallery, it becomes near impossible for you to detect, if someone obtained a copy of your work illegally. Our advice: Choose the way in which you want to distribute your work and stick to it.
Please see the licensing options >> for information on restrictions on content from the gallery. The only license that would allow such conduct is CC0. Under that license content is considered public domain, which means anyone can pretty much do whatever they want with it. However aside from being questionable behaviour to sell content that others shared with you for free, you must be aware that the content remains public domain, effectively eroding your ‘entrepreneurial’ efforts. Our advice: Don’t do it!
TECHNICAL QUESTIONS
Currently the maximum resolution for output textures is 4096 by 4096 pixels per map. We are working on increasing that to 8k.
Derive can export lossless PNG, TIFF and JPEG files.
Yes and no. The editor itself works only with Unity’s Standard Render Pipeline, the results however are standardized and can be used with any render pipeline.
This goes only for the BETA. The final release will support all of Unity’s render pipelines.
Sure, as long as they stick to a certain standard for normal maps, it should be no problem, to use Derive outputs in UE, Blender, C4D, Maya, 3DS and others.
Coding is not required, if you want to use Derive. It is 100 % artist-focused.
Derive will work on most machines, both new and old. However if you want to work with high resolutions, the machine that runs it, should have a lot of memory. E.g. when creating 4k by 4k textures without photography, it is recommended to have at least 16 GB of memory. Lower resolutions will of course require a lot less than that.
TROUBLESHOOTING
In that case simply right-click the desired node in the menu. If that does not work, you may have to close and reopen the Derive editor.
In that case you might have to close and reopen the Derive editor. Make sure to close all tabs of the editor, if you are working on multiple projects simultaneously. If that does not work, you may have to restart the Unity editor.
When working with specularity, you must keep in mind, that most shaders read specularity data from the alpha-channel. If you have your specularity data stored in the RGB-channels and your alpha-channel is empty, the shader will not be able to read it. Derive’s POM and Tessellation shaders will read specularity information from the alpha channel of the texture that is plugged into the Master node’s specularity input. Unity’s standard shader also offers the option to read that information from the albedo texture’s alpha channel. If you select that option, make sure, that that is where the specularity data is stored.
That is not as much a technical problem, as it is a creativity issue. If you need advice on how to achieve certain looks, please feel free to post your inquiry on the forum >> and get advice from the community. Dogmatic is active on the forum, but will not be able to address all questions regarding creativity questions.
The content that Derive produces is generic or standardized. Hence it works with all shaders meeting those standards, such as Unity’s shaders and Derive’s shaders. If your custom shader does not render the result the way you want it to, it is unlikely that it is due to the textures, the issue is more likely to be found in the way you built your custom shader.
When building up very large node trees, Derive requires more memory during export, especially when you are exporting at very high resolutions. How large a node tree and how high the export resolution can be depends on the amount of memory that Derive has at it’s disposal. Generally, it is recommended to work with no less than 16GB of memory, if attempting to export textures from projects with 100+ nodes at 4k resolution.
If your project is highly complex, you might consider splitting it, by only building the node tree for a part of your result, such as the pattern and/or the height map. You can export those and create a new project where you import those results via ‘Texture’ nodes and continue from there. This way you can effectively split one very large project into two smaller ones, taking the load off of your machine.
There are several possible reasons for this.
The first one to check, is the scene that is currently opened in the Unity editor. If you have a complex scene rendering multiple opjects with realtime lighting (especially when using multiple light sources), rendering that scene in Unity’s scene view will use up much of your machine’s processing power, even if it is only in edit mode. For the best performance in the Derive editor, it is resommended to either have a simple or empty scene open or to deactivate all game objects that may cause this shortage of processing power, while using Derive.
Secondly you should check the editor resolution you have set in the Derive editor. The resolution you select here will be used to generate the output of every single node on your canvass. When you have a node tree and make changes to a node at the left end of a sequence of nodes, all following nodes will reperform their operations with the newly changed output of the node you edited. If your editor resolution is high it can put a huge workload on your machine every time you make changes to a node’s properties. While the editor resolution may temporarily be set to higher values for preview purposes, it is generally recommended to set it back to a low value while editing. From experience a resolution of 512 by 512 will be fine in most cases.
The third possibility is that your node tree is just simply too large. How many nodes can be handled, depends on your machine and the chosen editor resolution. Experience has shown that even on powerful machines, projects with 200+ nodes can become difficult to manage, not only because of performance reasons, but also because such projects tend to become difficult to overview. Depending on your machine however it may be possible, that less nodes will already impact the performance of the Derive editor. If your project is highly complex, you might consider splitting it, by only building the node tree for a part of your result, such as the pattern and/or the height map. You can export those and create a new project where you import those results via ‘Texture’ nodes and continue from there. This way you can effectively split one very large project into two smaller ones, taking the load off of your machine.
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