New Shader Graph feature examples in 2022 LTS

The Shader Graph team is excited to announce the release of our newest set of samples, available to import now in 2022 LTS and with the upcoming Unity 6 Preview (2023.3). 

With this sample set, our goal is to provide examples of how to achieve a wide range of effects and techniques using Shader Graph. If there’s an effect you want to add to a shader, it’s often available online in the form of a math equation or code – both of which may be out of reach for some. We want to make it easier for you to achieve the effects you’re looking for.

Shader features such as parallax mapping, interior cube mapping, angle blending, flow mapping, and custom lighting are just five of the over 30 different feature examples available in this set. While these examples don’t provide complete shader solutions, they do show you how to create specific effects, and most are neatly encapsulated in subgraphs, so they’re easy to drag and drop into your own shaders.

Here’s a full list of the sample categories.

Blending Masks: This set of blending mask subgraphs includes altitude blending, angle blending, camera distance blending, and height blending.

Conditional Branching: Find two examples of how to branch your shader, depending on which render pipeline you’re using and the quality level you select.

Custom Interpolator: This offers an illustration of how to improve performance by moving operations to the vertex stage, including an illustration of some effects that don’t work very well when computed per-vertex.

Custom Lighting: Many of you have asked for a way to customize how lighting works in Shader Graph, either to make lighting cheaper to render or to achieve a unique artistic style for a project. These samples show how that can be done and include an example of PBR lighting, simple lighting, and a cel shader.

Detail Mapping: This set includes three different techniques for applying more detail to a material using detail mapping: color detail, normal detail, and full material detail.

Procedural Noise and Shapes: It’s often more cost effective to generate patterns procedurally rather than using texture maps. This category contains an example of how to generate a brick pattern procedurally, a subgraph for generating a hexagon grid, and a set of signed distance field shapes.

Shader Graph Feature Examples: Shader Graph has several features that can be tricky to master, such as subgraph dropdowns and branching based on input connection. This section contains examples of how you can use these features to improve subgraphs’ usefulness.

UV Projection: A large set of features are based on the manipulation of UV coordinates, including flipbook blending, flow mapping, interior cube mapping, latitude longitude projection, matcap or sphere projection, parallax mapping, and triplanar projection. This section includes all of these effects.

Vertex Animation: When most people think of Shader Graph, they think of pixel shaders, but Shader Graph can also animate vertices using the vertex stage.  These examples include a waving flag, a bend deformer, a camera-facing billboard effect, Gerstner waves, and a full-featured particle system built entirely in Shader Graph.

Install the new sample assets using the Package Manager.

1. In the Editor, open Package Manager.

2. In the Package Manager window, select the Shader Graph package.

3. Select the Samples tab.

4. Finally, click the Import button in the Feature Examples section to bring the new sample set into your project.

With these steps completed, the Feature Examples assets will show up in your project under Assets/Samples/Shader Graph/<your version>/Feature Examples.

After importing the samples, get started by opening the scene that corresponds to the render pipeline you’re using (High Definition Render Pipeline, or HDRP, Universal Render Pipeline, or URP, or the Built-in Render Pipeline) in the Scenes folder.

Once the scene is open, select the Shader Graph Feature Samples Showcase asset in the Hierarchy panel, then follow the guided tour in the Inspector.

You can use the Samples dropdown box to select a sample and jump to that location in the scene.

We’re continuing to add more samples to Shader Graph, and we have several more sample packs in the coming months. These will help you learn Shader Graph more quickly, understand how to set up specific functionality, and create new shaders faster with premade subgraphs and templates. We hope you’ll enjoy using them.

• Shader Graph basics
• Shader Graph documentation
• Unity Learn tutorials

This is a very deep and rich sample set. We hope you have fun exploring it and use it to speed up your own shader creation process. 

We’d love to hear your thoughts and impressions on these samples – tell us what you think in the Shader Graph forum.