Specular highlights on legacy shaders not round?

Hello.

Is any of the non-standard shaders able to generate a nice sharp and most importantly ROUND Phong highlight?

Anyone I try is basically highlighting the geometry. You can clearly see edges on spheres in the material editor.

It basically looks like a per-vertex highlight.

Standard shaders don't seem to have that problem.


Just in case it's not clear let me underscore I'm talking about the stock object which you can see at the bottom of the material editor. Plain albedo (no texture) and no bumpmap with about 90% shinines.

FWIW. quality: fantastic. 4 pixel lights. ver. 5.4.0f3. Win10.


If not can you point me to the exact bit of code that makes the difference in the standard shader?

 

I did notice that they don't seem to normalize the surface normals in the legacy shaders for some reason. You would need to create your own lighting model in a surface shader and do that, which isn't too hard. If you need help with that just ask.

 

Thank you for your reply.

I think I can handle that. Could you just point me to the bit of code in the standard shader that normalizes the surfaces normals? I could only find the bit where they normalize the bumpmap ones but that's obviously not what we're after.

Would appreciate some guidance.

 

For those who may also be annoyed be unity's implementation of LightingBlinnPhong () you need to normalize s.Normal SurfaceOutput s.

s.Normal = normalize(s.Normal);

I can understand why they chose not to pass it normalized already but the fact that their shaders' lighting functions don't normalize it is a bug IMO. and it's been there for years I presume.

Their custom LightingMobileBlinnPhong() in the .shader files also leave normals unnormalized....

 

It's an optimization. Normalize isn't free, so it's cheaper to only normalize the vector on each vertex, though obviously doesn't make for as nice looking highlights.

 

then if anything that should be a shader variant with normalization as an option. Otherwise practically anyone not using standard shaders needs to dive into shader development from the get go to be able to get any acceptable image quality.

Are you 100% sure it was a conscious decision and not an omission ?

Is it mentioned anywhere officially?

 

Not really.

And Unity has kind of been a "mobile first" platform for a long time, which means usually choosing optimization over accuracy. I think it's a bit of an omission to not have the normal be normalized for surface shaders in 5.0, but I suspect it was kept that way to keep the functionality identical to previous versions of Unity. This has been reported as a bug several times over the last few years and it's never been fixed so I can only assume it's intentional on their part.

 

OK. Thanks for the reply.

 

Also, another point to it being intentional ... I'm pretty sure the standard shader does the same thing, or used to, depending on the platform. Basically on any decent PC it's doing the normalization in the fragment, but on really old PCs or mobile it doesn't. If I remember correctly there was even a note with something like "Can we fit normalization into the shader model 2.0 instruction count?"

 

Well it's done at the very beginning of LightingStandard(Specular) and it's not #ifdef'd so it applies to everything.

Which figures. With the amount of code standard shaders have to get through one normalization is the least of their problems.

 

Look at the Simplified version of the standard shader, that's the one that runs on other platforms.

 

Gottcha!

Unfortunately I see no easy way to force it on to see it in action.