Hey Daniel! I'm really curious about what's coming up next. Do you have a roadmap or any plans that you'd be willing to share? Would love to get a sneak peek!
A collection of PSX-style shaders for Unity URP · By
Hey! Still in the process of squashing a few bugs people have reported, and after that, I plan on adding some shaders that people have asked for: an N64 3-point "bilinear" filter shader, a flipbook and billboard shader, dithering, and maybe also a vertex painting tool.
Obviously all of that is subject to change, and I'm always happy to hear feature requests (although I may not add all requests of course)!
Vertex Painting sounds really promising! I've been testing it in a WebGL build with a PSX-style setup. While I encountered a few issues such as the CRT effect and affine texture mapping not working, vertex snapping and the procedural sky are both functioning well. One thing that’s a bit inconvenient with the shader, though, is that when replacing an existing shader on a material (like a Standard material), it removes all the textures. It would take away a ton of pain if the color texture could be preserved when swapping shader
*Edit: Would be great if the "surface option" menu in the shader inspector was open by default also, but that's just me :)
There might be a few unforseen problems with certain platforms. I'll admit I didn't test out WebGL builds, but I have heard before that there are certain shader features that straight up don't work on that platform. The noperspective keyword, which drives the affine texture mapping effect, might be one of them. I'll have to test out the CRT effect with WebGL but I really hope it's feasible to get running, but thanks for letting me know about these problems.
That's actually a bit weird that the base texture isn't preserved - if you mean you're going from Lit to Retro Lit, they both use _BaseMap as the shader reference and I think Unity is meant to keep textures in that case. I'll see if I can get that fixed.
With the surface options menu bit, I can probably find a way to auto-open that, although I'm not sure which people would generally prefer. Interestingly, I had to create that whole bit from scratch - I really wish there were a way to just click a button somewhere and Unity just adds that whole section, but nope, it involves a fair bit of editor scripting!
Oh and also, I'm not sure if the vertex painting tool will get added for sure - I did look into what would be needed for that and it would be a lot of work. There seem to be vertex painting tools out there that might just do what people need anyway. I did release the N64-style 3-point bilinear filter shader earlier today though!
Fantastic news on the N64 shader, awesome work!
As for the materials, yes, I’m converting from Standard Lit to Retro Lit across around 40 materials, but not once has it retained the texture during conversion.
You're spot-on about vertex painting. There are already multiple solutions, both in Unity and Blender, so it’s far from essential.
The reason I asked about keeping the menu open is that I ran into a situation where I needed to adjust the alpha for numerous vegetation assets. For some reason, I couldn’t batch-edit the materials; the values showed as correctly updated in each material but weren't actually applied. So, I had to go through one by one, opening the menu each time; a bit tedious :)
Some more questions/ideas:
- Would it be possible to apply vertex snapping globally, instead of setting it per material/object?
- Could you make a pixelated post-processing effect independently of the CRT effect?
The reason I’m asking is because the Render Scale setting can alter the internal resolution, which lets us achieve a PS1/Saturn aesthetic. By default, this doesn’t work on WebGL, but it can be enabled with a simple script. However, while it works at the native resolution, it disappears in fullscreen mode. I’ve spent hours troubleshooting but still haven’t found a solution. I tought maybe as a post process effect that could be totally reliable.