Shader materials




  • Create procedural textures.
  • Create complex texture blending effects.
  • Create animated materials, or materials that change over time.
  • Create refractive effects or other advanced effects.
  • Create special lighting shaders for more exotic materials.
  • Animate vertices, like tree leaves or grass.
  • Create custom particle code.
  • And much more!

Godot provides built in functionality to make frequent operations easier. Additionally, Godot’s shader editor will detect errors as you type, so you can see your edited shaders in real-time. It is also possible to edit shaders using a visual, node-based graph editor.

Creating a ShaderMaterial

Create a new ShaderMaterial in some object of your choice. Go to the «Material» property and create a ShaderMaterial.



If you need to you can convert a visual shader to a text shader. However you can’t convert a text shader to a visual shader.

Choose one of them and you can start editing your shader.






In the visual shader editor you can click a button and see what your visual shader looks like as shader code. This can be useful if you’re trying to replicate a text shader as nodes, or it can be used as a preview for converting your visual shader to a text shader.



To learn more about visual shaders, read VisualShaders.

Converting to ShaderMaterial



