Feedback Final color output node

I've run into several instances where I need to modify the final result of lighting operations, and it seems like it would be a more flexible architecture to, instead of having a handful of special, magical "master" nodes in which all the lighting takes place, have a final output color node that serves as the terminus of the shader. This would mean the lighting nodes such as PBR, Unlit, etc, would have an output that could either feed into this required terminus, or instead could feed into additional logic that processes their output before outputting the final color result.

Unless I am missing something, as it is, there is no way to add effects onto the result of the lighting. Your custom logic can only process/produce one or more *input* values to PBR, Unlit, etc, but not the output. This is very limiting.

EDIT: A good example of a common use case of needing to modify the final lighting output is custom fog effects.

 

THIS

 

We're having the same problem with transitioning from built-in to URP in a large project - without it there is no way for example to apply a grayscale filter at the last step.

 

Same problem!
Need something like finalcolor

 

I couldn't agree more. Being able to modify the color after lighting has been applied would be an extremely useful feature.

Furthermore, from what I know about ShaderGraph's internals, I doubt it'd be very hard to implement either. I imagine that the extra nodes that would come after the output node would just get compiled into the bottom of the fragment shader, after the output node calculations, but before the return statement. The only issue I can think of is that it would require an additional output node, which might confuse new users. But I personally feel that the increased flexibility makes it totally worth it.

 

Looking at the roadmap, it looks like we will get surface shaders for SRPs before this. Not saying SRP surface shaders will have this feature, but still amusing.

https://portal.productboard.com/8uf...ers?utm_medium=social&utm_source=portal_share

 

@ali_mohebali or any unity dev, can you shed some light on "Surface Shaders" feature?
How exactly it going to be implemented and what does it actually do?

 

I am not a Unity dev, but I think they are talking about it in this thread: https://forum.unity.com/threads/focusing-on-shaders.1171444/

 

Thank you, so far it sounds kind of abstract to me, well, I guess it's too early to talk about implementation details.

 

+1 need something like final color in the built in surface shaders