Shader results, darker than built-in shaders.

Hi all,

I'm working through some material on creating my own shaders in Unity. It was written for Unity 4.0, and I am using 4.6 (not sure if that makes any difference).

I wish to know why my shader results appear much darker than the examples in the material and also the built in Unity shaders of the same type, for example Diffuse.

I've done some research and it appears that often the results need to be multiplied by 2 - I'm not sure of the motivation behind this however. Also, where do I draw the line? Do I double all the modifications or only some - for example if I have a two-pass shader which works out diffuse, specular, rim-lighting, ambient and takes into account multiple lights, which of these should be doubled and in which passes?

Thanks!

 

Why not just look into Unitys default diffuse shader and compare?

 

Because that doesn't answer my question.

 

Why doesn't that answer your question?

Study the normal diffuse and maybe you can begin to understand why it works the way it does.

Everything is multiplied by the power of 2 for a reasoning, one it's easier to work with, two, it's mathematically more stable and easier to calculate.

It would be like okay, I'm multiplied by the power of 1, I need to reach a power of 10 for full effect, well then that's 10 calculations instead of 5. Why not just calculate it on a power of 5 or 10, because not every number fits into them. What if you need a power of 8 instead of 5, 2 fits perfectly into it, and if you need something like 8.5, the 2 can just round it out to the nearest power.

You could easily do 1, but then it's more calculations, 2 is just overall easier to work with than 1 or more than 2.

 

Great that answers my question, thank you.

 

No problem lol....

I wondered the same thing at first, then I started studying all the shaders Unity did, and everything was *2, at least the parts I worried about, didn't really look at anything else lol.

Just started tweaking numbers and was like AHHH okay, makes sense lol.