Official Experimental 2D Lights and Shader Graph support in Universal RP (previously LWRP)

Absolutely! Happy to provide any examples you think might be helpful. Attached is a screenshot of a side by side comparison of what I'm looking to achieve. I am adding a link to a zipped version of this example as well.

Basically, I have my shaders on the left where they are using the stencil buffer to write the splatter effects only on the platform. I have not been able to duplicate these on shader graph and LWRP so I can't get the lighting to cooperate with them. HOWEVER... this had be thinking that the lights are already set up to only apply to certain sorting layers. I was wondering if it would be possible to have a decal system that uses the same system as the lights so sprites only show on certain layers? (kind of what I'm doing on the right side of the screenshot but with lights) If not, any help getting access to the stencil buffer in shader graph would be awesome.

Link to project: https://drive.google.com/open?id=17EqdTPgJT9NXCRwAIWqpReMvcH97d6rL

Thanks!

 

Hey, no problem.

Camera stacking seems to be the best option for this. I wasn't aware that you could just slot a different renderer onto a camera, that's really neat.

So that works - I have a 2D Renderer on one camera and a Forward Renderer on another, and the first draws sprites with sprite lights and the second one draws 3D objects with 3D lights.

The only big problem is that "don't clear" isn't supported for LWRP, so I have to have the 3D camera draw to a render texture that's on a RawImage. I know that some Unity staff has written that it was intentional that not clearing wasn't supported, but I can't for the life of me remember what the reason was.

 

This package is wonderful and has such great potential!

I'm having a small issue where I'm attempting to create depth in my 2D project based on their y positions. I have achieved this through a combination of adding the Sorting Group component on game objects and setting Project Settings > Graphics > Camera Settings > Transparency Sort Mode to Custom Axis with a Transparency Sort Axis of (0,1,0) (although I found out that those settings have been hidden now, probably because of the rendering pipeline asset). I can still see my added 2d lights through objects that are "in front" of them. Sorry if this has been brought up before.

 

What are the sorting layers of the objects you are trying to light? If the blue square is "foreground" and the red square "background" for example, you could change the settings on the light to only affect one or none of these layers and I think you would get the effect you are looking for. It's called the "Target Sorting Layers" option on your 2D light.

 

Right now all of their sorting layers are default. So say I got a bunch of the squares scattered around the world as obstacles, I would want the light affect or be affected (blocked) by the squares within that sorting layer.

 

First off, i have to say that i absolutely admire the Unity staff support in this forum. Absolutely wonderful you taking time to answer what seems to be every question.

Next, I am using ShaderGraph, and i cant seem to get alpha control to work on the SpriteLitMaster node using the Split->Combine trick. For details what i mean, with pictures, i posted this question already in ShaderGraph forum, as i assumed that the actual Split->Combine was a bad practice, but it seems the problem is with the SpriteLitMaster. It is also completely possible i forgot something basic, as my SG experience is minimal.

SG forum post here

What i do is take my Albedo (Color(4)), and before i input that into SpriteLitMaster's Color(4) input, i use the Split-Combine trick shown in the picture, to control Transparency "of all the pixels" that are input into SpriteLitMaster. However my Sprite stays completely opaque.

Any suggestions?

EDIT You can set alpha of the sprite via the Color dropdown inside your sprite renderer.

 

Hey! My FPS decreased by half (from 60 to 28) after I set this new LWRP Asset to project setting. Is it normal or how to fix this??! (Build for Android platform, Xiaomi A1 device)

 

Hi! I wish to leave some feedback!

First off, love this feature! Will definitely help enhancing our 2D visuals.

As for the feedback, not sure if anyone else asked for this, but it's definitely something that needs to be implemented for this new 2D lights.

As far as I explored the feature, there is no way to integrate the lights with the Custom Axis sorting mode for sprites.

This is a must have for 2D isometric games.

Here's a screenshot from our game. As you can see the blue highlighted light works perfectly, but moving the same light behind a wall will make the light visible through the wall. In the screenshot there are 2 Sorting Layers - Ground and Floor 0 and the project uses a Custom Axis sorting mode for Y axis (0, 1, 0), that's standard for isometric 2D games.

Would be AMAZING if there would be a way to have the full functionality of the SpriteRenderer sorting feature for 2D lights as well. That is Sorting Layer, Sort Order and Custom Axis sorting.



Thank you a lot and keep up the great work!

 

I have the same issue as well and addressed it in post #154. Glad to know it's not just me.

 

Do you have a rough outline for how you expect the shadows to work? What you want it to do, what you don't think it'll do, that sort of thing?

 

@Chris_Chu

Chance of atlasing support this year?

 

Awesome, @Chris_Chu!

Thanks for quick response and info.

Will definitely look forward to the shadow feature, since we're planning on adding shadows too. And if this might end up fixing this type of issue we have, that would be more than perfect!

 

Since the URP is open source, do the devs take pull requests from game devs if they implement a module? Because i feel that implementing a layering system that interacts with custom axis sorting would be an infinitely useful thing, and I might maybe be able to get something like that working!
If I make progress is it worth contacting a dev about implementation or is that not likely to occur?

 

Hi, Im trying to work right now with the new 2D lights added to unity in this last version with the LWRP RP package and the Shader Graph package, I've created the 2D pipe renderer and used it in the project graphics settings. I can use the Lights perfectly in the scene view but they are not working in the main camera preview or game screen, just like it's shown in the picture, I'm also working with the new 2D Shader graph, the material of the bigpinkball has a 2D Renderer Sprite Lit Graph Shader. What can I do to make the lights work in game?

 

Just fixed it, didn't noticed the Z value of the point lights, just changed it back to 0 and it works now

 

It's not just flipped sprites that are having problems with normal-map lighting. Rotated sprites in tilemaps are also doing this:



In the past, I've had to do some binormal hacking in my own shaders (using VFACE or SV_IsFrontFace) to avoid the inside-out normal map problem in back-facing sprites, but I wouldn't expect a sprite rotated around the Z axis to be back-facing.

 

Heh, yeah, I've been fighting with this for a while.

Here's a related post I made back in 2017:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/spr...-tangenttoworldandpackeddata-on-flips.503753/

I made a shader with the old pipeline where it's mostly working, as long as I use inverted scale for all flips. This is the same tile in the old pipeline, with my own shader:



I wish this new 2D lighting system had come along sooner! If it were more mature, it would have been great for this game. I'll have to find an excuse to use it in a later project.

 

Nice work, thanks Unity team! Native 2D lighting is a great feature for Unity! Keep working on it, it gives a lot more perfomant results than lighting that uses 3D render pipelines. Im looking forward to use shadows feature when it will be published!

 

I'm getting 1.6kb garbage per frame from (I assume) the 2D renderer. Is this intended, or is this "editor only" garbage? It seems like a lot.

 

Awesome! I hope that also goes for Light2D.LateUpdate(), I missed that one in my quick check. Thanks!

 

Thank you so much for the suggestion! I'll try it out this weekend and if all goes well I can share here if anyone is looking for the same effect.

 

Hiya. It would be awesome if the Shader Graph Master Nodes exposed a vertex color input. Or if they had an option to turn off the use of vertex color. The color of sprites is a very useful property, and it would be really nice to be able to use it with shader graph. Right now there aren't many chances to use it in a different way than the traditional way because we can't control what the Master Nodes do with that information. If there was a vertex color input we could at least pass it white to stop the Master Node from doing it's own thing, or we could pass it any other color. An option to turn off the default use of vertex color could solve this too, I don't know if it would have any real performance impact, but it would be less user friendly, because we would have to do our own implementation of the current way vertex color works if we want it.

Thank you for every thing. I hope you have a very nice day.

 

Thanks so much for your help! I was able to get them working and as promised, here are the completed shaders. Really appreciate the assist

I'm also attaching a quick screenshot that shows the splatters working correctly. If anyone is curious on how to use I believe they currently work without modification but you can manipulate the read and write mask to determine how splatters show on a surface. The platform in the screenshot has the "surface" shader applied and the colorful paint marks use the "splatter" shader. And all of them play nicely with the new lighting system now!

Thanks again!

 

2 quick questions:

Is it somehow possible in shadergrapgh (sprite lit) with 2D Renderer to have a node which adds pure white color on top of the sprite which is not affected by nearby 2D lights color for like a "getting hit" effect?

And second if there is no global 2d light in the scene, everything not hit by 2d lights is pure black, is there a way to toggle this like with normal lights in the editor by clicking the light bulb in the scene view?

 

How would one add renderer features to 2D renderer ? As in

for example.

Actually what I'd like to do is to alter the computed light texture and dither it. We are working on a pixel-art game and currently 2d lights are too "smooth" and we want to pixelize the lighting. Now I could go around and edit Light2D-Point.shader or Light2D-Shape.shader (and related c# scripts). But what I'm wondering is, is there a way to customize rendering without modifying the S.R.P. source code ?

 

I would also be interested in this

 

Pls i wonder to do this too.

 

I have 2 issues that are concerning me, hoping they get ironed out.

1st issue is a simple one that others I think have stated and that is the lack of setting the sorting axis in the editor when using the LWRP. The option disappears once you add the pipline. Its an easy work around to set it in code but is convenient to have in the editor.

2nd issue has to do with 360 degree point lights. They have a line at the bottom that shows up. @AndriiM had pointed it out a few months back here. They also stated it was fixed in the beta.

When I start the game all the lights look fine. Once I start moving the camera/player around the line at the bottom flickers on and off. When I stop moving the camera/player the lines may or may not be visible. There is a light attached to the camera/player and the line doesn't show up at all on that.

I tried to use the pixel perfect camera and it solves the problem with the stationary lights in the scene but it now shows up on the one attached to the camera/player.

I have tried 2019.2.0, 2019.2.2 and 2019.3.0.

 

Oh right, forgot all about that. We were also seeing the 360 degree lights having a single-pixel line. It's dependent on the light's screen position, but it's completely reproducible.

 

I also found that if the light isn't on a pixel position it can cause the 1 pixel line.

Another problem I've run into with 2019.3 is that the alpha blend on overlap causes the light to black out everything when lowering the intensity. Even with a global light source it appears as a black circle. Take off alpha blend and it works but isn't the effect I am looking for.

 

Workaround: I discovered, that this line disappears, if you rotate the transform of the light, so its != 0.

 

Rotating does not help for me

 

Hey guys! I don't know if this can be achieved at all without custom shaders, but how do I make unlit SpriteRenderers to fade into Camera's background color instead of pure black? You can see on the picture that I still can see those circles, where I would like them to blend with the environment.

 

@Chris_Chu is it normal that my 2d project in 2019.2.2 with 2d Renderer and frame pacing enabled runs extremely slow with Vulkan and gles3 on the top of the API list? I tied on a xiaomi redmi 5 and get only 18 fps, switching to gles2 on the top increases fps dramaticly.

 

It seems that unlike Post-Processing V2, integrated URP post-processing is not working for the experimental 2D renderer?

 

Hi !

Is any way to use 2D Renderer along with VFX Graph ? Because right now it seems blank. I know its possible to use Shuriken Particles with proper material, but is it possible to do it with VFX Graph?

 

Hi everyone,

2D lights features seems awesome, i’m starting experimenting with it at the moment.

I’m a 2D artist who’s working on a 2D game, with a cartoon lighting effect, with sharp shadows (currently the lighting effect is achieved via a custom shader in shadergraph, in unity 2018.3.9) :



Is there any chances that, in a near future, we could obtain a similar kind of render with the 2D lighting tools ?

 

This is full sprites renderers, with a custom shader that use normal maps for each sprites. The light is fully simulated in the shader and output in the albedo channel with the texture. This is limiting at some point, because it bypass the lighting ecosystem