Duplicate sprite in shader to give it depth | Official Unity Discord | Page 1

boreal grotto Sep 17, 2025, 5:03 PM

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I'm trying to duplicate a sprite in its SpriteRender's shader to make it look like it has some depth in 3D. I can achieve this by duplicating the GameObject and offsetting the Z position, but since I have hundreds of objects, I thought it would be more optimized if was made in a shader.
I'm using Built in pipeline with Amplify Shader.

deft nexus Sep 17, 2025, 5:15 PM

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What exactly does duplicating achieve here? Is this shadow related?

boreal grotto Sep 17, 2025, 5:18 PM

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deft nexus What exactly does duplicating achieve here? Is this shadow related?

It's to make the sprite look more 3D

deft nexus Sep 17, 2025, 5:19 PM

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If you want more geometry I'd just make a custom 3D mesh in that case

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but I'd try out the duplication idea before digging too much in optimization as the dynamic batcher does pretty well considering

boreal grotto Sep 17, 2025, 5:20 PM

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Here in an example

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The left grid is multiple sprite duplicated, the right one is one sprite

deft nexus Sep 17, 2025, 5:21 PM

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The left could just be a texture

boreal grotto Sep 17, 2025, 5:22 PM

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You mean painting the texture as it's 3D?

deft nexus Sep 17, 2025, 5:22 PM

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Yeah that's an idea, otherwise you can always throw in 3D models into your game even if it is 2D

boreal grotto Sep 17, 2025, 5:23 PM

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If you paint the shadows in the texture it's gonna look wrong when the camera moves

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3D models works but it's more complicated, the idea is to give a bit of depth without having to make models for everything

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It's like extruding the mesh and adding a little offset

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I think

deft nexus Sep 17, 2025, 5:26 PM

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You've got parallax mapping and other types of texturing maps but not entirely sure how large of a workflow that would become

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Basically you can do a lot of magic with normal maps

boreal grotto Sep 17, 2025, 5:27 PM

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I dont think it's gonna look as good honestly

digital quartz Sep 17, 2025, 6:39 PM

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boreal grotto I'm trying to duplicate a sprite in its SpriteRender's shader to make it look li...

You should be using a mesh and duplicate the geometry within the mesh

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The geometry doesn't matter for performance as much as the number of meshes and draw calls, more precisely

digital quartz Sep 17, 2025, 7:06 PM

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If you have to use 2D components, maybe having them on a tilemap renderer and duplicating that wins some performance as they're both rendered in one batch, but it might not be worth it to use sprites at all

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I'm not sure what all the BiRP relevant technical details are but sprites don't tend to play nice with 3D lighting and probably not batching either

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Two triangles per surface is a minimal cost to worry about

#Duplicate sprite in shader to give it depth