#Hi Spazi. I'm not very clear on what you
woven wave
@worldly canopy If the goal is to give artists flexibility, and support creating specialized and optimized shaders, feature complete templates would do exactly that. I don't know if URP and HDRP Lit shaders are not meant to be everything-shaders, but they are certainly widely in use so it's very sensible to make these resources from them.
What the templates crucially help with is to allow modifying the Lit shaders piece by piece to specialize and optimize them, without having to recreate them from scratch by hand, or to even understand them inside out. A whole lot of devs don't have access to a graphics programmer's expertise, and they will be using Lit shaders and they do want to add or remove features without having to become graphics programmers.
I help a lot of devs who want to know how to use SG to do some super simple shader effects like animate vertices, animate colors, custom UV projection or procedural surface variation, then to know why the shader is now incompatible with their PBR assets. And if they implement the 10-20 properties back in to make them compatible there's still missing features, so they're more likely to change plans at that point or find a third party uber shader that's even less specific for their purpose.
The node Lit template empowers them to implement the desired features right in so effectively that's something that should be an out of the box option next to the plain Lit Graph in create asset menu.
Just as often I get asked about tweaking the light falloff and lambert, blending to a color after shading, replacing reflections with an authored cubemap, snapping light or shadow to steps or texels... Yet there's there's the same issue as before but more severe. The change they want is technically trivial, but it can't be done without refabricating the whole thing.
The templates don't have to be a perfect shader for everyone, but they could be a perfect starting point for everyone.
But maybe I'm thinking about it the wrong way.
Personally my issue is I'm using URP Lit materials and trying to make a shader that exposes light directional attenuation / lambert calculation for modification. That part's easy with the help of the custom Lit template, but the template has no example of how to access light probes (and there's no node for it) so I'm left wondering how would the shader get lit by APVs
I'm sure I'll figure it out sooner or later, but I asked about the SG samples specifically because I feel a lot of people's pain over the same issues so I'm hoping for a more universal solution
worldly canopy
Thanks for explaining that! So as far as templates go, are you looking for something that works similar to URP Lit (code version), but that doesn't use the URP Lit's custom GUI? I'm guessing that your problem with how it works now is that the custom GUI is very specific to the list of parameters and keywords that URP Lit uses and as soon as you try altering it, the GUI no longer works right. Did I guess that right?
woven wave
Thanks for explaining that! So as far as templates go, are you looking for somet...
No, GUI incompatibility is an inconvenience at worst.
worldly canopy
So - does the URP Lit shader in the Production Ready Shaders sample work for you as it is?
woven wave
Yes, and it should be even more quickly accessible so those who most need it can find it easily
worldly canopy
Cool! We're working on that.
(I'm not supposed to talk about future features - but the template system is something that we've been wanting to do for a long time)
woven wave
That sounds wonderful
worldly canopy
If you have a list of templates that you hope will be included, send them and I'll make sure they get on the list.
woven wave
The one I and those I work with would really benefit from are the custom Lit examples from Feature Examples
But as I mentioned those are tragically only nearly complete
worldly canopy
Yes - it's a good point. I made them as examples of what you could do instead of intending them to get used as they are. I'll work on that. I appreciate the feedback.