Retro PC/anime shader for URP Shader Graph - Color palettes, custom lighting, normal editing...

Greetings. I have been on and off these forums since 2010 (under a previous account) using Unity for education and personal projects. In 2018, I began a project reimagining the first mission from Star Wars: Dark Forces to refamiliarize myself with the editor after a decent hiatus.

Some experiments with Shader Graph led to a side project in 2020 that had been a goal of mine since starting with Unity, which was to create the ultimate retro surface shader for all of my future demos and games. After 3 years of research, testing, and optimization, I am presenting my first asset on the Asset Store.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/retrograde-shader-225079

Retrograde Shader is a throwback to the height of late 90s PC software rendering, initially inspired by games like MDK and Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. It's also heavily inspired by my love for vintage illustration and retro anime.

Features include

• Texture palettization using gradient maps and LUTs
• Rare and historic color palettes indexed from 25 different retro PC games
• Custom lighting and shadows
• Half-lambert diffuse lighting, cel shading, point and spot light attenuation, and more
• Shadow tint, shadow attenuation, shadow gradient mapping, shadow dithering
• A unique way to anti-alias or blur shadow attenuation using offset dithering. Does not require percentage closer filtering (soft shadows) or normal biasing. Reduces shadow acne without a large amount of bias, resulting in less peter panning
• Object normal editing. To improve the look of cel shading
• Normal map posterization. Sharpens normal maps and shades them like pixel art
• Normal map emboss and occlusion effects. Static shading that can react to dynamic light
• Effect that improves the look of mip mapping for unfiltered textures. Includes a kind of mip bias adjustment for sharpening mipmaps without anisotropic filtering
• Specularity and metalness, palettized reflections, anisotropic reflections
• Glow, paint, and debris layers
• Radial and vertical fog
• Output palettization and screen dithering that is not post-processed

 

There's currently a 50% new release discount for the next 4 days. I plan to include several new features in future updates, including transparency and vertex colors. Always looking for ways to improve the shader, so feedback is welcome.