Question Need help with a shader for an energy shield

Hi folks,

I have been learning a lot about Unity these last days and even though I am a coder and I feel very comfortable with c#, I had no idea about Shaders. I followed a tutorial to make an energy shield with a customer URP Shader using the Shader graph and got it mostly working, except for a few things.

I would love to get some help on this since I couldn't find much online, and all the videos I found were recorded like 2 years ago and I think some of this might have changed.

What I would like to achieve is a Shield that is invisible for the player until something hits the shield, then only the part where it was hit (and around it) should be visible for a few seconds.

I have an energy shield working following this

. In that tutorial the shield is always shown and when there is a hit, that part gets brigther. So my case its not the same but I think it should be similar. Could you give me some guidance on how to achieve this?

Also I think there is some kind of problem with the "Sphere mask" when I use it, I follow 2 different tuorials with that node and couldn't make it work in neither, when I compared my node with the ones in the tutorials, my sphere mask is returning only one value (Out 1) and in the tutorials it seems it outputs a Vector3, did this change? any guidance on how can I use it?

For example in this simple example I couldn't make the sphere mask work


As you can see there the preview of the material kind of changes when I set the values but I can't see any change in the sphere itself