Question How to include correct shaders variants for a Post-Processing Custom Effect into a build? (Solved)

Hi,

I wrote a Post-Processing (PP) custom effect for a Built-in RP. Unity 2022.2
The effect has multiple shaders with multiple shader_feature in each - which are switching via shader keywords saved in PP volume params.
Everything works in the Editor.

but when I'm making a build - it doesnt include correct shader variants.
It only includes 1st shader with all shader_features disabled.
It was working in old versions of unity automatically. That the correct shader variants from PP were included in the build.
How can I tell unity which shader variants to include (shaders along with keywords)?
Or are there other things I can do to make keywords behave the same with shader_features in the build.

 

You can put it in always included shaders:



I'm sure there's a better way, but works well enough for ~20. If you have hundreds, you may want to do an editor feature for https://docs.unity3d.com/2023.1/Doc...Build.IPreprocessShaders.OnProcessShader.html

 

@burningmime thank you for the reply

adding all my shaders into Always Included Shaders didn't work unfortunately.
Unity starts to treat shader_feature as multi_compile and ends up adding all the shader variants, which are 40K in total in my case.

I'll check out IPreprocessShaders.OnProcessShader . Hopefully I can pull out all the keywords from the serialized PP Volume component and use it for specifying which shaders along with which keywords to include in the build.
It used to be done automatically by PP. Not sure if it was changed or has to be done differently now.

 

So I wrote my own

IPreprocessShaders

And I realised that

OnProcessShader()

doesn't receive any keywords from my shader. Altho the shader itself is included.

Code (CSharp):

1. Debug.Log("OnProcessShader shader:" + shader.name + " data count: " + data.Count);
2. for (int i = 0; i < data.Count; ++i) {
3.    ShaderKeyword[] sk = data[i].shaderKeywordSet.GetShaderKeywords();
4.    Debug.Log("data ["+i+"] shaderKeywordSet count " + sk.Length);
5. }
6.  
7. //output
8. //data count: 1
9. //shaderKeywordSet count: 0

My shader is a custom Post-Processing Shader for Built-in Render Pipeline, I'm using Unity 2022.2. And I'm using

shader_features

Code (CSharp):

1. Shader "Hidden/Custom_Shader"{
2. HLSLINCLUDE
3.    #include "Packages/com.unity.postprocessing/PostProcessing/Shaders/StdLib.hlsl"
4.    #pragma shader_feature _PALETTE
5. ...
6. }

Why

OnProcessShader

doesn't receive

shader_feature 

keywords???
Maybe they are stripped somewhere earlier?

 

@aleksandrk
I'm using

shader_feature

with materials indeed. I create Material based on my Shader in my post-processing vfx script in runtime.

>you only get one (default) variant.
how this default variant is defined?

I'm fine with using 1 variant of the shader in the build with correct keywords. The problem is that the variant is chosen with the wrong keywords. Is there a way to tell unity which keywords to use to choose this default variant?

 

@aleksandrk thank you for the info. That worked. I ended up just creating materials and keeping them in

Resources

folder. Then I modified their keywords in a script, and apparently the correct shader variants were included in the build.
Didn't even need to use

IPreprocessShaders

. Also didn't need to add those materials in the scene just FYI