any way to take the default lit shader and make it act like unlit?

[lone citrus]

i want to have a shader that acts like unlit but wont break if i swap the shader on a material back and forth, only way i can think to do that is just take the normal shader and any code that makes it affected by lighting but the default shaders are very confusing to read to me so im pretty lost

[raven flame]

What are you trying to achieve with this?

I think even with perfect black, lit materials still reflect some light

You can try using emission+black object perhaps

[lone citrus]

im wanting to swap every render's material's shader back and forth between unlit and lit while maintaining it looking decent-ish and not breaking, like height maps and stuff im not sure if thats tied to lighting but if so im fine with that being gone

[lone citrus]

i would be fine with it still reflecting light, although i feel like if i changed the code to remove lighting it would also remove reflected lighting

[lone citrus]

i did try this and just couldnt get it to work

[raven flame]

Right I was thinking in terms of changing exposed material properties for a regular lit shader/shadergraph

You could try copying through the shader stuff in the second half of https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/basics/building-a-graph/

https://discussions.unity.com/t/how-to-write-unlit-surface-shader/45001 this could also be of help

[lone citrus]

yeah i have no problem making an unlit shader, it just doesnt have the keywords and properties that the default shader has, so when copied back and forth it loses infomation

im realizing i probably do just have to change the entire default shader code

[acoustic gyro]

Why do this?
Why would it "break"
What is it supposed to look like

What kind of "copying" are you referring to

[lone citrus]

im doing it just cause i want to
my understanding of it breaking is its losing infomation when changing the shader because the shader im changing to doesnt have those variables
i just want it to have support for alpha color and texture, and tiling and offset, if it loses everything that adds depth then thats fine to me

[lone citrus]

my understanding is when you change shaders on a material it copies the properties onto the new shader

[acoustic gyro]

I assume you mean changing shaders in editor only, not at runtime

[lone citrus]

it is at runtime yes

well, changing the shader a material uses at runtime

[acoustic gyro]

I think the simplest option likely is to use a Lit material made to look like Unlit
You can achieve that with a mask map that has 1 on the red channel and 0 on all other channels, plus pure black base map/color
Emission map/color is then your "unlit" color

But I may misunderstand

[lone citrus]

same

[acoustic gyro]

Maybe you mean you want the base map/color or some other map to become the unlit/emission color instead? That's what I'm getting at with "why"

[lone citrus]

i mean literally like in editor when you just change it from lit to unlit, but still trying to keep properties so i dont need to store a big list of them in memory

the why is literally just because i want to do it, having a button that just changes the entire world from cartoon kinda graphics to realistic graphics is neat to me

[acoustic gyro]

What properties specifically?

[lone citrus]

shader keywords is the one im having the biggest problem with

[acoustic gyro]

Which keywords specifically?

[lone citrus]

it seems to remove them from the list if the shader doesnt have them

[acoustic gyro]

"Cartoon kinda graphics" sounds a bit different than just unlit

[lone citrus]

flat graphics reminds of cartoon 🤷‍♂️

[acoustic gyro]

Which I'd guess means using the base map as emission map

[lone citrus]

i would like to have height and stuff if possible, its just ive only gotten test shaders to work with a base map

[acoustic gyro]

The best path might be to get the node template of the HDRP Lit shader which has all the same properties and keywords, then just change what they do
Swap base color with emission, or anything else

[lone citrus]

yeah that would be perfect if that exists, though that link doesnt seem to contain it

[acoustic gyro]

It's a sample you can get from the package manager from Shader Graph's samples tab

"Production ready shaders"

[lone citrus]

you mean this?

[acoustic gyro]

No
Package manager

[lone citrus]

ohhhh, amazing ty

[acoustic gyro]

After that I'd use the Custom Pass framework which specifically does shader overrides like this

Maybe can do the override from scripts too but that sounds tedious and then you may have to take care of material validation

[lone citrus]

ohh yeah instead of changing the materials shader just slap that on the object rendering it?

[acoustic gyro]

More precisely you target your Camera with a Volume that has this Custom Pass which renders your objects per layer using its override

Custom Pass articles in the docs although important are pretty dense, so this video may be helpful showing it in practice
https://youtu.be/vBqSSXjQvCo
It is old though, so some things may have changed
That's why shader override is missing from the video

[lone citrus]

ohh that works perfectly i believe

[acoustic gyro]

I've only done what you're now doing in URP so I don't know all the details
In URP the override renders objects anew so you had to take care to cull the objects from the camera first to not render them multiple times
May be different in HDRP

[lone citrus]

yeah i think i see what you mean, just constant z fighting

[acoustic gyro]

It may also be totally invisible, as they can be written over each other at different stages of rendering
The video points to this at least with the outline example, and shows the frame debugger which can be used to verify this

HDRP's render passes are pretty complex though, so it's not always easy to parse

[lone citrus]

so i have to cull everything to prevent it doing so? i didnt realize thats something you can just do

ohh you meant using the depth to do so right?

[acoustic gyro]

I meant that I don't know if Custom Pass when overriding a renderer changes how it's rendered, or renders it again
My experience with RenderObjects that's URP's equivalent feature to Custom Pass suggests it may be a command to render it again, after it's been rendered once unnecessarily behind it
But that may not apply here, something for you to test / look up