HDRP materials created by editor script do not reflect the settings set on them

I'm having trouble writing an editor tool for batch creating a bunch of HDRP materials.

Typically this code should work for creating a HDRP/Lit material:

Code (CSharp):

1. Material mat = new Material(Shader.Find("HDRP/Lit"));
2. mat.SetInt(HDMaterialProperties.kMaterialID, (int)Lit.MaterialFeatureFlags.LitSpecularColor);
3. mat.SetFloat(kSurfaceType, (float)SurfaceType.Transparent);
4. mat.SetFloat(kBlendMode, (float)BlendMode.Additive);
5. mat.SetFloat(kEnableBlendModePreserveSpecularLighting, 0);
6. mat.SetTexture("_BaseColorMap", baseTexture);
7. AssetDatabase.CreateAsset(mat, "Assets/Materials/Test.mat");

However while the values do get set and you "see" them in the editor, the material does not actually reflect the settings that are set. i.e. The editor says "Surface Type: Transparent" but the material isn't actually transparent until you manually change settings in the GUI for each material.

I understand this is because there are other internal configurations that get set when you change things in the GUI. But from what I can tell all the classes related to this like LitGUI are left as default private classes meaning none of the functions used to re-initialize these internal settings or set things can be called from editor scripts outside the package.

How do I ensure material settings are set correctly when I create them from scripts?

 

Got the same problem. Did you resolve your issue ?

 

Indeed I have looked to the HDRP shader directly and saw that I missed some keywords to enable which the Editor set automatically if there was a texture linked to it.
To use a NormalMap I needed to set the texture and enable both "_NORMALMAP" and "_NORMALMAP_TANGENT_SPACE" keywords.

 

Same problem here, we have HDRP materials made from scratch based on Scriptable Objects but the textures won't show until the inspector dropdown is clicked.

Enabling the propers keywords doesn't help either (Pillow on the left not yet "refreshed")

 

Is the issue sorted in any of the current or upcoming version of Unity ? Or is there any workaround for this ?

 

Hi! I'm also stumbling upon this thread trying to create HDRP/Lit materials through editor script. All I want to do is hook up Albedo / Normal / Mask textures. Is this feasible, or is that still WIP?

 

Yeah... need to do this too

You can setup parts of a brand new HDRP material as per https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-do-i-change-the-hdrp-lit-material-opacity-at-runtime.543046/ but some issues like colors being in linear space so can not get set to what you expect!

 

Well the easiest solution right now is to use a template material with the correct shader and create the new one with ->

new Material(_templateMaterial);

.

 

That is a starting point.
Then you have to learn the names of all the material parts to set things -
material.SetFloat( "_Metallic", metallic );
material.SetTexture( "_BaseColorMap", texture );

This was never documented and there were no new properties to make it easy and if you make a new Shader Graph it will not init with all the same exact named properties because you have to start from scratch... not good
Any new doc section on this?

 

why not create an empty material in the editor then use that one as starting point at runtime?