Adding material to SpriteRenderer messes up sprite

Hi,
Im trying to create a shader for my player character but every time I assign a material it messes up my sprite

Default material:

Any other material:

on the images it looks pixelated and not so obvious but when playing its super noticeable

the top and bottom are not round, top left of eyemask is box shaped instead of round

 

Without information about the material/shader we're guessing in the dark.

First guess: this is a sampling thing. It's forces Point instead of Bilinear when you mean to use Bilinear sampling.

Second guess: this is an alpha thing. Your material isn't treating alpha the same as the Sprite Lit material. Perhaps - if this is shader graph - it's not connected correctly?

edit: what does it look like if the GameView zoom is a power-of-two (7.6x in pic)? That might be a surprising source of the compressed/artifact look it produces.

 

It was an alpha thing since it got fixed when I changed the Surface type of the material to transparent and enabled alpha clipping. I have no idea what those things mean but thank you a lot I was getting super frustrated because of this.

 

It sounds like this material is using a standard Universal RP material lit or unlit? What the alpha clipping does is pretend to be transparent, when really you're removing pixels if the alpha is below the clipping threshold.

If you need real transparency as is typical for sprites, you may instead want to create a material/shader that uses Sprite Lit or Sprite Unlit as its template in Shader Graph.

Here's what I mean: https://blog-api.unity.com/sites/default/files/2021/02/GraphInspector.mp4

Sprite Lit is the template for shaders that behave similarly to Sprite-Lit-Default, responding to Light2Ds.