Better Lit Shader 2021

The Better Lit Shader 2021 acts as a replacement for the built In pipleine's Standard, or URP/HDRP Lit shaders with the following features and improvements:

NEW in 2021: Unity 2021.3LTS required as minimum version
NEW in 2021: Support for LTS versions of HDRP/URP in Unity 2021.3, Unity2022.3, Unity 6, and Unity 6.3
NEW in 2021: Mat Cap lighting models, per texture layer or globaly.
NEW in 2021: Parallax Occlusion Mapping
NEW in 2021: Dither Alpha options for transparentcy on opaque shaders
NEW in 2021: Clear Coat mapping in URP/HDRP on every texture layer
NEW in 2021: Approximate Sub Surface Scattering for main and all texture layers
NEW in 2021: Triplanar Texturing, project a texture from each side
NEW in 2021: Effector system, control effects based on spheres and planes in the world
NEW in 2021: Wireframe Rendering
NEW in 2021: Sparkle and Fresnel options on Snow and and every texture layers
NEW in 2021: Noise Quality and Noise Space now available per layer instead of globally
NEW in 2021: Fast Metallic Packing, new packing mode for metallic workflows
NEW in 2021: Fourth Texture Layer
NEW in 2021: 6 sided gradient projection, for Momument Valley style rendering
NEW in 2021: Vertex Coloring
NEW in 2021: Variant Stripping System, to speed up builds and reduce build size
NEW in 2021: URP/HDRP12.x support
NEW in 2021: Baked Lit mode for URP
NEW in 2021: Geometric Specular AA for HDRP
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
Four additional independent Texture Layers, which can be used as a detail texturing, height blended, or alpha blended, with independent options for Triplanar UVs, Triplanar Texturing, 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 UV, Triplanar Texturing, 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 2021 uses only local keywords, and was built with the Better Shaders 2021 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

BLS 1.2.1

- Fix to a bug in 6.3 support

BLS 1.2.0

- Unity 6.3 support

BLS 1.1.46

- Unity 6 fixes

BLS 1.1.45

- Unity 6 fixes

BLS 1.1.44

- Unity 6 fixes

BLS 1.1.43

- Bakery fixes

BLS 1.1.42

- Fix to unity 6 shader issue

BLS 1.1.41

- Unity 6 support

- Bakery updated to latest version

BLS 1.1.40

- Fix to texture packer compressing the wrong texture

- Fix to editor showing LOD crossfade option twice in BiRP

- Fix: Update to Foliage Renderer 1.2

BLS 1.1.39

- Fix to puddle/wetness/rain global parameters to match MicroSplat

BLS 1.1.38

- LOD cross fade is not enabled on the material, allowing it to not be a multi-compile keyword (URP/BiRP)

BLS 1.1.37

- Initial support for URP/HDRP 2023.3a18

- Fix to Vertex Wind compile issue

BLS 1.1.36

- Yet another HDRP LTS 2022.3.13 fix

BLS 1.1.35

- Another breaking change in HDRP LTS on 2022.3.13, reverse engineered and fixed.

BLS 1.1.34

- NEW: Vertex Wind

- NEW: Terrain Aligned Details and tinting, for use with upcoming Foliage Rendering system (separate package)

- Fix: VSP instancing option re-added

- FIX: Dither Fade LOD is now an option on the material instead of automatic. This prevents needing a shader multi_compile which reduces the shader size in builds considerably. However, you need to manually enable it now.

BLS 1.1.33

- Unity decided the backport the breakage they did in 2022LTS HDRP to 2021LTS HDRP, so fixing that again.

BLS 1.1.32

- Added support for origin shifting

- Global Wetness parameters modified to match microsplat

BLS 1.1.31 - The latest HDRP release broke all shaders in LTS again, so working around that.

BLS 1.1.30 - Oh yes, another HDRP decal issue

BLS 1.1.29 - yet another HDRP 2022 decal fix

BLS 1.1.28

- Fix to decal error in HDRP 2022

BLS 1.1.27

- Fix to compile error when using a texture layer with triplanar texturing and barycentric blending

BLS 1.1.26

- Fix to HDRP2022 compile issue

BLS 1.1.25

- Fixing issue with bakery keywords being set wrong in editor.

BLS 1.1.24

- Fixing issue in bakery editor

BLS 1.1.23

- Fixing compile error in 2021.3LTS

BLS 1.1.22

- Reduce shader variant size

- VSP's Indirect Instancing removed (was doubling memory cost of the shader)

- Support for 2022.3LTS's LOD cross fade and write rendering buffer system

BLS 1.1.20

- Fix to tangent space for negatively scaled geometry

BLS 1.1.19

- Fix to tangent space flip in BiRP

BLS 1.1.18

- Fix to HDRP Virtual Texturing

- Removed _fragment from all #pragma shader_feature_local declarations. Unity broke the fragment keyword optimization in the latest versions of Unity, and it won't let you set keywords with the _fragment extension from code. Unfortunately this means creating a bunch of extra shader variants for platforms which support this optimization, but response from QA is non-existent or too slow to know if this is even going to be fixed.

BLS 1.1.17

- Option to put raindrops in worldspace UVs

- DOTS multicompile added to missing passes

BLS 1.1.16

- Fix to derivative issue in Stochastic mapping

BLS 1.1.15

- Fix to detail texture scales when in triplanar mode

- Fix to compile error when using detail triplanar projection

BLS 1.1.14

- Fix to regex that cause code generation to be wrong textures on the uppter texture layers

BLS 1.1.13

- Fix to URP shadow caster pass allowing light to pass through

BLS 1.1.12

- More HDRP14.x fixes (removed call in 2021.3)

- FIxed issue where triplanar texturing on texture layers 2+ threw errors

BLS 1.1.11

- Fixes to HDRP 14.x

BLS 1.1.0

- Added support for Unity 2022 under HDRP and URP 14.x

BLS 1.0.21

- Fix to baked lit shader in URP2021

BLS 1.0.20

- Fix but in sampler stripping prevention which would drive albedo into negative values

BLS 1.0.19

- Added dither fade options to opaque shaders, allowing for them to fade over distance or have constant alpha, and use the alpha channel of the diffuse channel as well.

- Fixed bug in matcapture that was causing stackable to have compile errors when used outside of BLS

BLS 1.0.18

- Added hue and saturation controls to all texture layers

BLS 1.0.17

- Added MatCap lighting system, with the ability to mat cap the whole shader, or mat cap each texture layer independently. Works in unlit (as expected) mode and lit mode; in lit mode, any unassigned matcap layer will fall through to using the Unity lighting model instead of a mat cap, allowing you to mix lighting models. When in unlit mode, normal maps are available when matcap is enabled, as they are used for matcap lighting.

- Added Emission Multiplier to all texture layers

- Added the ability to switch to an unlit shader from the drop down lighting model menu

- Added Tint mode options to TintMask module (multiply or multiply2x)

BLS 1.0.16

- Fix to LOD cross fade

BLS 1.0.15

- Fix to an issue where the shader throws errors under HDRP13.x when running in forward only mode

BLS 1.0.14

- Added approximate Sub Surface Scattering technique for all render pipelines. Unfortunately I cannot expose the HDRP one because Unity has marked the diffusion profiles scriptable object as internal, meaning you can't use it in custom shaders. This technique works in all render pipelines, but only from tha main directional light.

- Fixed issue where new installs wouldn't get USING_HDRP or USING_URP defines set correctly.

BLS 1.0.13

- Removing variant stripped. Since Unity now calls the stripper for every possible variant, instead of only the ones which your materials use, this could add up to more significant compile times than just compiling the variants that would get stripped.

BLS 1.0.12

- Fix to compile error in local space noise

BLS 1.0.11

- Added clear coat mask support in HDRP/URP

- Fix to depth normal pass in URP2021

- Fix to noise texture function

- Fix to obscure sampler stripping issue with HDRP scene selection pass

BLS 1.0.10

- Fix to bug unity left in URP2021 shaders with deferred shadow masks

- interface improvements

BLS 1.0.9

- Switched bakery's use of multi-compile statements to shader_features. URP uses so many multi-compile keywords already that adding any makes the new shader compiler take hours to process the variants. This should speed things up considerably.

BLS 1.0.8

- Fix to URP2021 template compile error

BLS 1.0.7

- Reenable normal strength slider

BLS 1.0.6

- Fix to HDRP 2021 template when using decal layers

- Fix to URP 2021 template when using dynamic baked GI

- Fix to vertex color mode

BLS 1.0.5

- Added rotation options to all texture layers

- Fix to alpha cut

- Fix to trax turning itself off on scene save