Upgrading project to 5.3 from 5.2, can we use normalized Phong from 5.2 as the BRDF?

Hi Folks,

We recently tried to finally upgrade to Unity 5.3.7 from 5.2.3 to make use of the major updates to VR and we noticed massive visual inconsistencies. As most of you will know, in Unity 5.3 GGX became the BRDF of choice removing the original blinn-phong.

Researching around the forums there are many reports of differing specular which is to be expected.

1. https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/5-3-standard-pbs-is-wrong-cannot-eliminate-remove-specular.375339/
   
   
2. https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/standard-terrain-shader-smoothness-solved.297691/
   
   
3. https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/absolutely-rough-non-smooth-material-with-standard-shader.294409/
   
   
4. https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/a...-upgrading-project-to-unity-5-3.373905/page-2
   

After speaking ever so briefly with a Unity Technologies individual, we were told that this was due to “a big push since 5.2 towards standardization and compatibility with existing authoring tools so that smoothness ramp is gone.”

Furthermore they mentioned that we should “Duplicate internal-deferredshading.shader and put it in the project folder. Replace the built-in version of it with your version in graphics settings in unity. Do diffs between unity 5.2 cginc files and whichever version of unity you want to upgrade to and bring in the relevant differences to the brdf/lighting.”

We have followed the advice but it had no effect on our 5.3 project.

What we would really like to know is if this is even possible before spending any more resources on it? There is next to no documentation that we can find and would appreciate some further guidance.

Just to note, this has been posted in unity answers.

Thanks,
Tim

 

Just thought I'd give this a bump?