Unity Master Shader or Multiple Shaders
polycounter lvl 7
Hey everyone,
I have been tasked with writing and optimizing shaders and wanted to get some outside opinions and links to resources while trying to track stuff down on my own. So far I have started a slimmed down (carrying only what we want) standard specular shader. We were getting way too many shader variants with the standard one. I am currently trying to figure out how to get GI to work with it.
We build for low end devices that only support shader model 2.0. Some (co-workers) want to do a material swap on build (so that they can set up x amount of materials per each tier of device) rather than sub shaders that target different devices in the same shader. I am not sure if it is true because i haven't been able to test but they say if a material has a normal that would get dropped by x device that the normal would still get carried in the build?
Is it better to have a master shader or just multiple shaders that get swapped at build (not like a material swap like above) or does it really matter. We already have an xml that does this depending on build.
Currently I am going with standard spec set up because it would be smarter when dropping down to say something similar to unity's mobile bump spec. I am also not using ao and just multiplying it over diffuse and using the alpha channel for spec. I figure this way at least when the artists switch to lower end shaders everything should carry over. So I'm not taking advantage of the ao input on standard, but I figure thats better than doubling the amount of textures and work we would have to do.
Below is what I have so far to see the shader working. Just some various materials I have done from tutorials or on my own.
thanks for any help or thoughts or suggestions!
I have been tasked with writing and optimizing shaders and wanted to get some outside opinions and links to resources while trying to track stuff down on my own. So far I have started a slimmed down (carrying only what we want) standard specular shader. We were getting way too many shader variants with the standard one. I am currently trying to figure out how to get GI to work with it.
We build for low end devices that only support shader model 2.0. Some (co-workers) want to do a material swap on build (so that they can set up x amount of materials per each tier of device) rather than sub shaders that target different devices in the same shader. I am not sure if it is true because i haven't been able to test but they say if a material has a normal that would get dropped by x device that the normal would still get carried in the build?
Is it better to have a master shader or just multiple shaders that get swapped at build (not like a material swap like above) or does it really matter. We already have an xml that does this depending on build.
Currently I am going with standard spec set up because it would be smarter when dropping down to say something similar to unity's mobile bump spec. I am also not using ao and just multiplying it over diffuse and using the alpha channel for spec. I figure this way at least when the artists switch to lower end shaders everything should carry over. So I'm not taking advantage of the ao input on standard, but I figure thats better than doubling the amount of textures and work we would have to do.
Below is what I have so far to see the shader working. Just some various materials I have done from tutorials or on my own.
thanks for any help or thoughts or suggestions!
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