MK Sprite Shader

🎨 The Idea🎨

Combine antialiased sprite rendering with physically based shading.

MK Sprite Shader is built to make sprites look stable: less shimmering, less crawling pixels, less flicker, jitter free — even when zooming, rotating, or viewing at steep angles.

It blends crisp Pixel-Art or Smooth Art with physically-inspired lighting (normal maps, smoothness/metallic, height, AO, light transmission), and offers three renderer modes — Default, Hybrid, and Pixel Art — so you can choose anything from clean smooth art to crisp antialiased pixel art.

One material, multiple use cases: Sprite Renderer, URP 2D Renderer, and 3D meshes (quads, billboards, even regular 3D geometrie) — no material swapping required.

📦The Package📦

• 3 stylized shaders for unlit, simple lighting, and physically based shading
• Bonus: Pixelated Skybox shader. Add a simple gradient based sky and mix a pixelated look to it.

Demo: WebGL

✨ Core Rendering

• 🧼 Antialiased sprite sampling to reduce shimmer & flicker at distance, zoom, and glancing angles
• 🟦 Default (standard shading)
• 🟪 Hybrid (adaptive AA smoothing — balances crisp + smooth)
• 🟥 Pixel Art (antialiased point sampling — keeps pixel definition, reduces crawl)

🧩 One shader for: SpriteRenderer ✅ Meshes/Quads/3D ✅ URP 2D Renderer ✅ URP 3D Renderer ✅ Built-in Renderer ✅

💡 Lighting & PBR Style

• 🌞 Lit sprite workflow with specular + smoothness controls
• 🧱 Normal map support for depth & directional highlights
• ✨ Specular / Metallic map support for stylized highlights and material response
• 🌑 Occlusion map support for enhanced depth and contact shading
• ⛰ Height map support for additional surface detail and depth variation
• 🌗 Rim lighting (Simple / Split) for stylized edge pop
• 🕯️ Indirect lighting fade support (per-object tuning)

🎨 Stylization Toolkit

• 🌈 Gradient (Mix / Add / Multiply)
• 🎚️ Color grading (pre- or post-composite): contrast, saturation, brightness, hue
• 🧊 Posterize with smoothness/fade/levels
• 🧬 Overlay Color/Texture (Mix / Add / Multiply) with blink controls
• 🖊️ Alpha Outline (Performance / Quality Modes) + noise + flow
• 🌾 Grain (procedural)
• 🌫️ Drop shadow custom sprite
• 🪩 Holographic layer + optional glitter (view-dependent, stylized foil look)

🌀 Animation & VFX Controls

• 🧻 Dissolve (pattern map + border ramp)
• 🧭 Scroll UV (direction + speed)
• 💡 Flicker (speed + offset)
• 💥 Vertex shake (speed/intensity + axis weights + stutter)
• 🌊 UV distortion (DuDv map + flow)

🧱 Production-Friendly

• 🚀 GPU Instancing ready
• 🪞 Double-sided rendering option
• ✂️ Alpha clipping toggle
• 📦 Works across 2D/3D scenes without changing materials