Better Lit Shader

The Better Lit Shader 2021 is available (only for Unity 2021.2.6 and up)

The Better Lit Shader acts as a replacement for the built In pipleine's Standard, or URP/HDRP Lit shaders with the following features and improvements:

* Supports URP, HDRP, and the Built In rendering pipelines, tested on 2019.4LTS and 2020.3LTS

* HDRP style texture packing, or a custom tightly packed texture format for faster shading

* Tessellation & Parallax Support

* Crack Free Tessellation mesh preprocessor

* Stochastic sampling of textures to remove tiling

* Tint Masking, allowing you to colorize 4 separate parts of the main texture layer independently.

* Full Support for Bakery GPU Lightmapper

* HDRP style Detail Texturing

* Three additional independent Texture Layers, which can be used as a detail texturing, height blended, or alpha blended, with independent options for Triplanar and Stochastic on each layer. These can also be masked via vertex painting, noise functions, and procedural functions, allowing you to create many different effects.

* MicroShadows and Fuzzy Shading available on every layer

* Use UV, UV1, Triplanar, or world projections on each texture layer

* Flat Shading

* Single or Double Sided

* Wetness, automatically integrates with Enviro and Weather Maker

* Puddles, automatically integrates with Enviro and Weather Maker

* Automatic placement of puddles via noise functions and angle filters

* Snow system, automatically integrates with Enviro and Weather Maker

* Wind system, for particulate wind over surfaces

* Dissolve Effect, with optional gradient edge w/ optional emissive

* Trax integration allows you to leave trails on any material you create

* Vegetation Studio procedural indirect support

* Support for all VR rendering modes

* Generate normals directly in the shader to save sampling/memory on low end systems, or use the Surface Gradient framework for higher quality blending.

* Branch Sampling, to reduce the cost of stochastic and triplanar sampling

* Debuging mode to visualize actual sample count used by the shader

* LOD Dither fading

* Custom Material Interface

* Only uses local keywords, no global keywords added

Documentation

Discord

The Better Lit Shader uses only local keywords, and was built with the Better Shaders framework. Source code in Better Shaders format is included, making it easy to modify if you have Better Shaders installed, and allowing you to stack additional effects on to the shader to easily expand it, or use these effects in your own shaders.

Release Notes

1.2.32

- Fix to derivative issue with stochastic sampling

1.2.31

- Change keyword from local to global for LOD dither blend

1.2.30

- Fix to disolve/trax modules turning themselves off

- Fix to meta pass in URP

1.2.29

- Fix to alpha channel being used in texture layers when blending is set to alpha mode

- Fix to snow not covering metallic value

1.2.28

- Switch bakery to use shader_feature instead of multi_compile, which was causing build times to explode on URP.

1.2.27

- Fix to bug with editor spewing errors in HDRP

1.2.26

- Fix to dynamic GI in BiRP when tessellation is enabled

1.2.25

- Optimize out a single keyword to fit under 64 keyword limit on URP

1.2.24

- Fix to dynamic GI

1.2.23

- Fixed issue with serialization of bakery and wind feature toggle

1.2.22

- Windows shader compiler fix for emission issues in 1.2.21

1.2.21

- Fix to emission not working in Texture Layers when albedo texture isn't present

1.2.20

- Fix issue in HDRP world space position calculation in tessellation stage

1.2.19

- Added Stripping options to reduce build size/time by stripping features such as bakery when not in use

- Fix to issue with DepthNormal pass in URP2020

1.2.18

- Remove shader variant optimization that doesn't work in old versions of Unity, this was preventing features from working in Builds on quest..

1.2.17

- Fixing issue that causes the system to need to be reimported after the first import on some systems

1.2.16

- Fix to noise texture showing offset/scale parameters, which are unused

- add _ option to LOD dither fade multicompile option

1.2.15

- _ENABLE_FOG_ON_TRANSPARENT on by default in HDRP

1.2.14

- Fix for motion vectors in HDRP2020

- Fix to alpha lighting vector in HDRP2020, HDRP2019

1.2.13

- Support for Geometric Specular AA in HDRP

1.2.12

- Fixes to bakery's fresnel calculations and support for SpecularGI in URP

1.2.11

- Always compute proper viewdir in HDRP adapter

1.2.10

- Fix to black outline around tint mask when using a single tint with everything else untinted

- Fix to screen space UVs in shadow pass

1.2.9

- Fix to timeout issue when installing render pipeline defines

1.2.8

- Fix to smoothness/ao remapping when in packed forma

1.2.7

- Local/World projection toggle for all UV projection modes

- Bakery able to overried shadow masks in HDRP

1.2.6

- Editor was incorrectly toggling the wrong flag for bakery

1.2.5

- Fix a bug where the mask map was not being sampled stochastic on the main layer when stochastic was set

- Bakery fixes

- Better handlng of editor rollout state. The main headers open/close is now based on the keyword state when you select a material rather than serialized.

1.2.4

- Added invert option to texture packer

- Fix bug where the mask map packer launched with the wrong packing target

1.2.3

- Fix to debug display modes in HDRP2020

- Copy alpha threshold to hardcoded _Cutoff property because Unity likes to hardcode naming requirements and not document them anywhere

1.2.2

- Added Texture Packer to pack textures for users who don't have a way to do that

- Tint Mask changed to not tint areas of pure black (0,0,0,0)

- Fix to compile error with Bakery stackable

- Fix to tessellation when using extraV2f4-7

1.2.1

- Removed keywords pushing HDRP over the 64 keyword limit

1.2

- Added support for Bakery GPU lightmapper.

- Added Stochastic Sampling option for snow

- Optimized interpolator usage

1.12

- Fix to single pass stereo instance rendering on BIRP

1.11

- Fix to normals not working correctly on texture layers 2

- Fix to local space triplanar rotating lighting

1.10

- Fix to derivative lines between stochastic samples (small, subpixel errors)

- Optimizations to interpolators when not using vertex weights

1.09

- Fix to editor script preventing multiple layers from appearing

1.08

- Fix to null ref in material editor code

1.07

- Emissive matches HDRP/URP controls

1.06

- Added noise option to snow, which allows breaking up areas that

- Fix to detail mask

- Fix to local space triplanar mapping

1.05

- Fix to global wetness

- fix to editor GUI when using stackables outside of Better Lit shade

1.04

- Fix to cbuffer issue breaking batching on URP

- Optimized cbuffer usage when not using some features

- Fix to tessellation in distance mode on HDRP

1.03

- Fix to compile issue with gamma to linear conversion

- Fix to specular occlusion in HDRP

- Fix to snow offset on rotated objects

- Fix to compile error when using Surface Gradient

- Snow vertex (non-tessellated) offset improved.

1.02

- Fix to compile error under HDRP2020

- Fix to compile issue when using angle filters and tessellation

1.01

- Fix to UV scale and offset when using UVs

- Added brightness/contrast adjustments to all texture layers