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.