Question Reusing HDRP/Lit shader to make various effects

Hello everyone,

YouTube and the internet has no shortage of some cool effects and tutorials about shader graphs, I've been experimenting with it for a while now, and I have implemented various effects and was happy about it.

until you put things in a real scenario, things are not so simple anymore

suppose I have a character with quite few details used, base map, normals, mask map, emission map, and maybe some extra stuff, Unity's HDRP/Lit shader supports all of this and everything is ok

now I want this character to do the tiny effect I made, (blink on taking damage, or the famous dissolve effect, you name it) , all the textures and setups are not compatible with the shader I made!

how do people do this on a professional level ? I need Unity's shader but with a tiny adjustment, extend it one might say, remaking the entire shader just to add a little bit of glare is not a good idea

 

If you don't have deep expertise in shaders, nor resources to buy, contract to make one, you can make shaders with Shader Graph. It is a good starting point to get what you want, before you get invested into it.

 

Thank you taking the time to respond.

I'm not sure what your advice is though, I can use shader graph, I've created many stuff with it and my knowledge covers the small need I have right now.

the question is simply is, is there a way to extend Unity's shader and build on top of it
excuse me if I misunderstood your response

 

I have no answer to your question, I would like to know too actually...

From what i have seen it is not trivial, as someone said in other thread it would be great to have possibility to modify final output. There is no such thing, and as certain effects can be done with emission or other tricks, it is not flexible and very limited. Recently I made stylized Lit shader in URP and I needed to copy a lot of files, so I guess it is even more horrible in HDRP. In short shader graph is kind of limited and writing your own shader ("extending" Lit) in hlsl, but with some custom code is most likely the only good solution.

 

I mean, I try to get understanding what you require.
Do you mean like shader nodes?
Or custom shader nodes, written with shader language?
Botha are possible.
Or you mean something different?