The Better Lit Shader : Replacement Lit Shader for URP/HDRP/Standard

The Better Lit Shader acts as a replacement for the Built in pipeline's Standard shader and URP/HDRP Lit shaders with the following features and improvements:

• Supports URP, HDRP, and the Built In rendering pipelines, tested on 2019.4LTS and 2020.3LTS
• HDRP style texture packing, or a custom tightly packed texture format for even faster shading
• Tessellation & Parallax Support
• Crack Free Tessellation mesh preprocessor
• Stochastic sampling of textures to remove tiling
• Tint Masking, allowing you to colorize 4 separate parts of the main texture layer independently.
• HDRP Style Detail Texturing
• Three additional independent Texture Layers, which can be used as a detail texturing, height blended, or alpha blended, with independent options for Triplanar and Stochastic on each layer. These can also be masked via vertex painting, noise functions, and procedural functions, allowing you to create many different effects.
• MicroShadows and Fuzzy Shading available on every layer
• Use UV, UV1, Triplanar, or world projections on each texture layer
• Flat Shading
• Single or Double Sided
• Wetness, automatically integrates with Enviro and Weather Maker
• Puddles, automatically integrates with Enviro and Weather Maker
• Automatic placement of puddles via noise functions and angle filters
• Snow system, automatically integrates with Enviro and Weather Maker
• Wind system, for particulate wind over surfaces
• Dissolve Effect, with optional gradient edge w/ optional emissive
• Trax integration allows you to leave trails on any material you create
• Vegetation Studio procedural indirect support
• Support for all VR rendering modes
• Generate normals directly in the shader to save sampling/memory on low end systems, or use the Surface Gradient framework for higher quality blending.
• Branch Sampling, to reduce the cost of stochastic and triplanar sampling
• Debuging mode to visualize actual sample count used by the shader
• LOD Dither fading
• Custom Material Interface
• Bakery Support

Online Documentation

The Better Lit Shader was built using Better Shaders and is tested on URP7.x, URP10.x, HDRP7.x, HDRP10.x, and the Built in Rendering pipeline. No special install is required, just a single shader that runs on all of these different rendering systems.
Full source code in Better Shaders format is included, and all features are done as stackables, making them easy to add to your own shaders, or customize for your own needs.

All features work together and are available via an custom material GUI. Unused features are conditionally compiled out of the shader, and many features are available to make the shader more efficient than the URP Lit or Built In Standard shader.

Working in URP and want HDRP style features? Or want a more efficient URP shader? Want to port between pipelines and have everything "just work"? Want to apply unique procedural damage across your entire level? Want the most advanced shader available, regardless of which rendering pipeline you use? This is the shader for you.

 

Such a very awesome asset. I had the pleasure of being in the beta and toy around. The ideas keep on spreading once you start using the asset. Can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with. By the way, most notably: This was HDRP, works the same in Standard and URP.

Here's eg the dragon on a road mesh:

This is one of the screenshots I took ingame:


So Trax working on mesh is super exciting.

You can also just simply overlay the texture with another to get e. g. Dirt on the Pavement. Top is original, bottom is with a stacked texture:



Or just add other textures with noise in world space to make every house unique, here's an example with weathering effect:

 

What's also exciting is that you can define the strength of the effects. I tried with my own Fader asset to interpolate the strength over time, worked perfectly:

Don't mind the missing obligatory splatter I just wanted to show the effect

The indoor puddles are exciting. Of course I had water first, but usually one thing leads to another and I wanted to toy around with a different category of game I've never done before

 

I just toyed around with the layer blending. It's really nice how easily you can change the look with it:

 

will it support SRP Batching ?
what is the minimum SM needed for it

 

Been toying around with snow. While doing so I thought why not abuse it to give desert bricks some sandy look at the sides and on the top:


I should add terrain blending as well with microsplat

 

Yes, though there is a Unity bug in SRP which prevents it with two variants of the shader - repro'd by Unity. Minimum is 3.0.

 

Been experimenting. I gave Irval a Tattoo


Works also as War Paint



If you do that, keep in mind to set the tattoo texture's own Wrap Mode to Clamp, so that it doesn't tile.

 

Does blending work with Better Lit Shader? Would love to see a test for this

 

What exactly do you mean? The fading video above is sliding through the blend strengths of the layers

 

We just started testing this out for a major upcoming project (Pigeon Simulator) and seems really awesome so far!

Curious about a couple of things:

1. Any plans to add Texture Array support?
2. We're using GPU Instancer extensively. Currently we're using some colors and float value arrays with it to vary the looks of things within a draw. Moreover, we're using a uint structured buffer ("Variation Values" in GPU Instancer) to reference which texture in a texture array gets used. This is all pretty niche stuff, but any chance we can do this with your product?

Thank you for your time, and for building this shader magic!

 

You'd need to modify the source and recompile it with Better Shaders. Shouldn't be harder than changing a surface shader to do the same thing.

 

Hi there!

Unity 2020.3.5f1 - Built-in render pipeline - Latest version of Better Lit Shader (1.07)

I get the following error message whenever I select or create a material using Better Lit Shader:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
UnityEditor.MaterialEditor.TexturePropertyWithHDRColor (UnityEngine.GUIContent label, UnityEditor.MaterialProperty textureProp, UnityEditor.MaterialProperty colorProperty, System.Boolean showAlpha) (at <411aa9fd83b6416fab626ca292954771>:0)
JBooth.BetterLit.LitBaseStub.OnLitGUI (UnityEditor.MaterialEditor materialEditor, UnityEditor.MaterialProperty[] props) (at Assets/BetterLitShader/Scripts/Editor/EditorStub.cs:1552)
JBooth.BetterLit.LitBaseMaterialEditor.OnGUI (UnityEditor.MaterialEditor materialEditor, UnityEditor.MaterialProperty[] props) (at Assets/BetterLitShader/Scripts/Editor/LitBaseMaterialEditor.cs:47)
UnityEditor.MaterialEditor.PropertiesGUI () (at <411aa9fd83b6416fab626ca292954771>:0)
UnityEditor.MaterialEditor.OnInspectorGUI () (at <411aa9fd83b6416fab626ca292954771>:0)
UnityEditor.UIElements.InspectorElement+<>c__DisplayClass59_0.<CreateIMGUIInspectorFromEditor>b__0 () (at <0fdaf67e8e744beea25e77915c19f81b>:0)
UnityEngine.GUIUtility: ProcessEvent(Int32, IntPtr, Boolean&)

Also, the Inspector is blank, so I can't use the shader at all.

I was able to reproduce this bug in a brand new project.

 

I pushed a patch to this last night- hopefully it'll appear on the store today. You can also PM me your invoice number if you need it sooner.

 

Hi!

1) Do micro shadows depend on the volume override and are used for the directional light only or is this your own implementation?

2) Do you have any plans to support Virtual Textures?

3) How often do you plan to update this asset? Will it be compatible with LTS only releases, or can we hope for other stable or even beta versions support?

4) Do you have any plans to integrate Bakery features into it?

Thanks!

 

It's based on naughty dog's technique, for the directional light only.

Not currently.

I will only officially support LTS releases, because doing anything else means you're effectively Unity's indentured servant, chasing after undocumented and unfinished changes on a constant basis with no help from Unity.

Yes.

 

Thanks for the reply! A couple more questions if you don't mind.

Because they are experimental or its hard to implement this feature anyway?

Do you think new versions will likely break your asset? From your experience. Have you tested it in the resent non LTS versions?

Any ETA on this?

Thanks!

 

Haven't really looked at it yet as it's quite new in Unity.

I can't control what Unity breaks. In the past, they've broken things in LTS versions and between point releases (7.18 to 7.21 in URP for instance), which isn't supposed to happen. In general, the SRPs are pretty unstable, though I'd say the trend is that they break things less these days than they used to. While many people run non-LTS versions, I don't even look at them, since Unity can't really be bothered to document their pipeline any change requires diffing tens of thousands of lines of code.

I don't give ETAs..

 

Too bad, though understandable. Your shader looks perfect, and I would gladly replace a lot of shaders in my project with it, except I can't, because they heavily depend on the Bakery SH + Specular feature. I've also planned to update them to use SVT, but haven't tried it yet as well.

 

I couldn't be bothered to convert 10 materials of a humanoid manually, so I took Unity's HDRP converter and made a BetterLitShader converter mod of it which at its current state converts selected or all project materials from HDRP/Lit to Better Lit/Lit.

Please note the Unity Companion License in case you want to use it:

https://github.com/Roland09/BetterLitShaderExtensions

 

After converting all HDRP/Lit to Better Lit/Lit I experimented around a bit. Quite interesting what you can achieve with just layering and fading materials:

 

OK, so just so I have this straight...

When using the "fastest" texture packing option...

create a texture by..

Bake textures in blender..
Open Photoshop create new 16bit RGB document
open bakes and copy and paste each image into these channels on the new doc:

Baked Norm Red - Alpha Packed
Baked Norm Green - Green Packed
Baked Smooth - Red Packed -- White is shiny black is matte
Baked AO - Blue Packed

Baked Color Red - Albedo Red
Baked Color Green - Albedo Green
Baked Color Blue - Albedo Blue
Baked Height - Albedo Alpha

EXPORT them in photoshop to TIFF 16bit

Import in Unity and uncheck sRGB


I feel like something is wrong in this process because when i uncheck sRGB my red green and blue channels get wiped (they are solids colors in the respective channel previews)

 

Well you don't need to do 16bpp files, Unity has limited support for 16 bit per channel data and squashes them down to 8bpc anyway. I'd just use a 32bit targa.

 

Oh i see thanks. I had heard somewhere that normal maps should be 16bit, heightmaps 32 or something like that..

 

Hmm, take a look at the Triplanar UVs in Local mode for the layer 0 texture. Lighting appears to be inverted or shifted by about 45 degrees. The world space triplanar UVs are fine though.

 

Interesting, I'll check that out - does it move with the object rotation?

 

Yep its does. As if a directional light were a child of the object.

 

Sorry to pile on the problems but it looks like the alpha mode is not working right as well. I have a gradient from black to white in the alpha channel of the albedo texture, set the shader to alpha mode and the whole model goes to about 50% opacity.

 

I added Standard an URP converters in addition to the HDRP converter:

https://github.com/Roland09/BetterLitShaderExtensions

In case you need to have finer granular conversion feel free to modify these classes and create pull requests.

* HDRP Converter
* URP Converter
* Standard Converter

 

Hi, which variants are not compatible? Or rather what settings/features cause those variants?

 

Hey Jason,

I'm looking to get the highest quality baked lightmap that can run on older machines (historical settings in schools ... shadowmask so almost everything is lightmapped, with a few dynamic objects in there using light probes + real time shadows). I'm looking at using this with Bakery to handle different weather types + grunge in an efficient way. However, I'm also curious about using Bakery's Spherical Harmonics, since they claim that's the best quality.

Is there any way this can work with that? They have a custom shader, but it would be fantastic if somehow that were able to be used in this as well. From their documentation: "RNM and SH can be only used with Bakery shader or require adjustments to your shaders".

Thanks!

 

We're working on a bakery integration right now, actually. Should be out soon.

 

Wow, thank you so much. That's awesome!

Also, just curious since this has to run on older hardware. If no extra stuff is turned on, is this actually more performant (or at least comparable) than the built in standard pbr shader? Are things like snow / wetness relatively cheap, or weathering? Basically, just making sure this wont be much more taxing than using the standard shader or using ASE to do a few minor effects myself.

Thanks again.

 

lol, i dont think anyone is capable of writing more efficient shaders than jbooth my dude...

 

Sorry for the questions.

Is it possible to achieve the shape/trails of snow in this using the snow layer, or does that only use noise and this would need to be done using texture layers? Is this something I should be using microsplat for (dynamic snow there)? Im assuming performance on this is a lot better.

Thank you.

[Edit -- after thinking about this, I suspect I should just use microsplat + my own terrain layer for snow, so I have more control, as well as to muddy things up where needed ... but still curious if this can be done with this.]

 

Generally more performant based on just the texture packing. A full PBR texted surface in the Lit/Standard shader is 4-5 textures, where it can be done in 2 or 3 in Better Lit, saving significant bandwidth.

There isn't any kind of "painted" layer for snow coverage. You could do snow using two texture layers though instead of using the dynamic system if you wanted to carefully paint coverage though.

 

I'm using microsplat + this for non terrain. Its working well so far.

 

Would it be possible to add a checkbox for disabling/enabling Unity Fog for the shader?

 

I think I read this shader is sm3…? Has anyone used it in webGL2. Is it compatible?

 

Hi, sorry for another question.

How do I use this with AssetBundles? When I load my ab, the material is pink. If I try to always include the shader in the build, it yells about shader variants. If I just use the standard material, everything comes in fine.

Not sure what I'm really doing here with this. Any ideas? The same goes for microsplat terrain ...

The following is the error I get when trying to build an AssetBundle with this added to the always include shader: "Better Lit/Lit has too many Shader variants(4827858800541171712).To resolve this, go to Project Settings > Graphics and remove this Shader from the Always Included Shaders list.For more explicit control over how Unity includes specific Shader variants in a build, use a ShaderVariantCollection.".

Is there an easy way to fix this, or am I not able to use this in the end because of this?

 

You need to include the shader in the bundle, or load it some other way (resources, etc). Usually you'd want the shader to be in it's own bundle which any bundles can have a dependency on, so that each asset doesn't load a separate copy of the shader.

 

Okay, I'll look into this. Thanks.

 

Hi. I use lots of decall in HDRP. Are they supported?

 

should be.

 

Hi.
Unity 2020.3.11f1
HDRP 10.5.0
Latest Bakery 1.9

I tried the Better Lit LightMap Mode SH
with Enable Lightmap specular
on a copy Bakery SG example with these settings.

Do you have an idea whats wrong here.
Marked Plane is the Better Lit.
Non marked Plane ist the BakerySH Shadergraph.


The Light Map Mode SH setting in the Better Lit UI seems not to work.

I compared the result with the Bakery Standard on BuiltInRP and it looks the same when i disable AllowSH Lightmaps there.

 

For any bakery questions you should ask Frank- he wrote the stackable used for integration.. (It ships with Better Shaders as well, the idea being that any asset using Better Shaders to author it's shaders gets an easy Bakery integration).

 

OK. I will do.
I leave this here to because of an compiler error in the shader.
Probably you have an idea.

Left
Bakery Standard BIRP, Unity 2019.3.11f

Right
BetterLit HDRP 10.5.0, Unity 2019.3.11f

Settings are all the same.
Set Albedo Color.
Set Normal Map.
Set Roughness 0,507
+
enable Lightmap Mode SH in your Better Lit






full list

 

Hmm, that’s from the bakery code but I’ll make it at least compile..

 

Step by step. Nice Job. This is a really powerful and transparent extension.
The Bakery integration on this level is also very helpful.

It s kind of a game changer for me for my mesh based driving tracks and cars.

 

i asked Mr.F here.
The compile error is gone but i cannot run the Bakery SH and Bakery Volume Demos with BetterLit.


Unity 2020.3.11f1, HDRP 10.5.0
latest Bakery updated (26.06)
latest BetterLit (26.06)

The first 3 Bakery BetterLit tests on Bakery Standard Demos went negative.

BetterLit SH Test , (example_mixed_directional_mode.scene and example_directional_SH.scene)
BetterLit Volume Shadowmask Test (example_volumes_simple_shadowmask.scene)

https://forum.unity.com/threads/bak...preview-released.536008/page-106#post-7273978