Shadero 3 - Visual Sprite Shader Editor

See the effect. Build the shader. Ship it.

Your hero dissolves into ash. Takes a hit and flashes white. Flickers as a hologram. Freezes under a frost overlay. A boss glitches with chromatic aberration as its health bar drains and an ability icon spins through its radial cooldown.

Every one of those is in Shadero 3 and you build them by dragging and connecting nodes, watching the result update live, then clicking Build Shader to export a real, optimized .shader file. No HLSL. No Shader Graph wrestling. Just the effect you pictured, on your sprite, in minutes.

Shadero 3 is the modern, 2D-native node-based shader editor for sprites and UI — rebuilt from the ground up on Unity's current UI Toolkit / GraphView. You never write a single line of code, but you get clean, optimized HLSL out the other end.

💡 Why Shadero 3

• Zero HLSL, real HLSL out. Assemble shaders visually; export readable, optimized .shader files you fully own.
• The effects every 2D game needs, on day one. Dissolve, hit flash, glitch, hologram, frost, chromatic aberration, health bars, radial cooldowns — already built.
• Built for 2D, not bolted on. Shader Graph is 3D/PBR-oriented and clunky for sprites; the older sprite-shader tools live on legacy Editor GUI. Shadero 3 is the only one rebuilt on Unity's modern UI Toolkit / GraphView.
• The complete toolkit. 256 nodes, 66 ready-to-use presets, 204 HLSL functions — the most complete sprite shader editor on the Asset Store.
• Works with your pipeline and your project. Built-in, URP and HDRP, auto-detected. Unity UI (Image) and SpriteRenderer alike.
• A mature, third-generation tool. The "3" isn't decoration — it's refined into the editor 2D devs actually wanted.

⚡ Features built for a real workflow

Live, instant feedback

• 🔴 Real-time Live Preview — the shader recompiles automatically on every change. Drag a slider, see it.
• 🎬 Scene Preview — a dedicated scene to view your shader on a real sprite as you work.
• 👁️ Hover Preview — live thumbnails when you hover a node in the menu, so you pick the right one first try (plus a ForcePreview node for custom preview textures).

Fast graph editing

• 🔍 Node search (just press Space) with port-type filtering (UV / RGBA / Source).
• 🖱️ Drag & drop nodes — and drag a .shader file back in to reopen its full graph.
• ↩️ Undo / Redo up to 100 steps, Copy / Paste / Duplicate (Ctrl+C/V/D), one-click Auto-Align left-to-right.

Export & ship

• 🏗️ Build Shader — one click exports a standard Unity .shader you can drop on any material.
• 🖼️ Generate Sprite — export the shader result straight to a PNG sprite from the editor.
• 🧱 Clean output — topological-sort code generation + a function registry, JSON graph serialization with autosave, and isolated editor assemblies that keep your build clean.

Localization & accessibility

• 🌍 10-language localized UI English, French, Spanish, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Portuguese, Russian (with an option to keep node names in English while the rest is translated).
• 🔠 3 text sizes Normal / Large / Very Large.

✨ Effects showcase the "wow" library

Pick from 256 nodes across 14 categories (98 Effects, 40 UV, 26 Color, 23 Math, 20 Sources, 17 Generators, and more). These aren't abstract nodes — they're the effects your game is missing right now:

• Sprite FX: Dissolve, Hit Flash, Glitch, Hologram, Ghost, Frost / Ice, Fire Overlay, Burn, Electric, Poison, Berserk, Chromatic Aberration, Dithering, Drop Shadow, Emboss, Blur (3 quality levels).
• UV distortion (40 nodes): Rotation, Distortion, Fish Eye, Kaleidoscope, Twist, Liquid, Pinch, Polar Coordinates, Sprite Sheet Animation.
• Color grading (26 nodes): Brightness, HSV, Grayscale, Tint, Gradient Map, Palette Swap, plus authentic retro palettes (C64, CGA, EGA, Game Boy).
• Generators (17 nodes): Perlin Noise, Voronoi, Circle, Spiral, Fire, Lightning, Starfield, Checker — even a 3D Planet, with no source texture at all.
• Vertex effects (3 nodes): Jelly, Squash & Stretch, Wave.

Behind these nodes sit 204 HLSL function files, so the generated shader is real, optimized code. Pro output without the pro learning curve.

🎛️ 66 ready-to-use presets drop in, tweak, ship

Not sure where to start? Load a preset, tweak two sliders, ship it. The library covers the effects you'd otherwise rebuild in every single project, across 7 categories:

• GUI Bars & HUD: health bars, radial cooldowns, directional fills, color pulse, shimmer.
• GUI Buttons: hover glow, shiny sweep.
• GUI Transitions: circle-mask reveal, fade, wipe, mask reveal, dithered fade.
• GUI HUD & Shapes: scanlines, vignette frames, hologram displays, VHS noise, inner glow, outline, drop shadow, rounded masks.
• Sprite FX & Custom: dissolve, hit flash, hologram, ghost, burn, ice, glitch, poison and more.

Works for both Unity UI (Image) and SpriteRenderer.

🔌 Pipelines & compatibility

• Unity 2021.3 LTS and newer.
• Built-in, URP, and HDRP — auto-detected, with manual override per shader when you need it.
• Works with Unity UI (Image) and SpriteRenderer alike.
• No HLSL required to use it — clean, optimized HLSL exported when you build.

No pipeline rewrites. No special setup. It detects where you are and builds the right shader.

👤 Who it's for

• 2D indie & mobile devs who need dissolve, hit-flash and glitch in nearly every project.
• UI / UX & GUI artists building health bars, cooldowns, hover glows and slick scene transitions — without an engineer.
• Technical & VFX artists who want the speed of nodes with a clean HLSL handoff.
• Hobbyists and teams who can't — or won't — write shader code, but still want pro results.

If you've ever stared at Shader Graph trying to make it behave for a 2D sprite, this was built for you.

🎮 Animate it at runtime

Static effects are nice. Driven effects sell the game. Drop the Shadero3Controller component on your object and push any shader parameter from script:

controller.SetFloat("_Dissolve", 0.5f); controller.SetColor("_TintColor", Color.red);

Trigger a dissolve on death, ramp a hit flash on damage, drain a health bar in real time — straight from your existing C# gameplay code.