Each week the Unity Asset Store features a single publisher on the homepage and I’m proud to announce that this week, I’m their chosen publisher! From May 7th - 14th, you can get a free copy of Toon Shaders Pro for Unity URP if you visit the page, and every single other asset of mine is 50% off for the whole week.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently updating each of my asset packs for compatibility with all major Unity 6 updates and adding some new features. If you like what you see with Toon Shaders Pro, then don’t miss your chance to grab my other assets for an absolute steal.
I thought I would take this opportunity to explore a few updates I’ve made to each pack recently!
Toon Shaders Pro
Your FREE asset pack for this week only!
This one is free for this week only. With it, you get a comprehensive toon shader and multi-featured outline effect, the perfect combination for making stylized cel-shaded games.
Recently, Unity introduced something they call a Renderer Shader User Value, or RSUV for short. It’s a small amount of data - just a uint, an unsigned 32-bit integer - that you can attach to each renderer in your scene with MeshRenderer.SetShaderUserValue. Although it’s not much, it does allow us to customize how each object appears without needing to create multiple materials in some cases, and it’s totally compatible with the SRP Batcher.
I’ve added a mode to the outline effect’s mask settings that lets you use the RSUV as a mask index. That way, if you manually set multiple objects to use the same uint, they will be grouped together by the outline algorithm and act as one object, or you can give every mesh a unique uint and they will all be outlined individually. This is only available since Unity 6.3, so in versions prior to that, this mode will do nothing.
Retro Shaders Pro
This asset pack comes with pretty much any setting you’d ever want for creating a PSX-style game: affine texture warping, low-precision vertex snapping, dithering, reflective cubemaps, flat or per-texel shading, and a CRT effect with dozens of settings itself.
It wasn’t until the following console generation that we saw normal mapping become possible after the Dreamcast introduced programmable graphics to the console scene. Even the PS2 lacked native support for them - you needed to use alternative approaches instead. However, our memories of the past can be imperfect, and besides, this pack isn’t just for PSX shaders, so I’ve decided to add optional normal map support to the Retro Lit shader.
I also added a toggle for stochastic texture sampling with the Retro Terrain Lit shader which helps to reduce texture tiling. Just make sure to use a texture which isn’t meant to tile!
Hologram Shaders Pro
It does what it says on the tin: if you want holograms with vertex glitching, scanlines, dot matrix patterns, Fresnel lighting, and random noise, then this asset has you covered.
Occasionally I think there’s nothing more that can really be added to this asset pack, but then I get an idea. In the latest update, you can separate the color channels of the base texture so that red, green, and blue parts of the image are offset slightly. Sadly I wasn’t able to offset the appearance of the entire object, which would necessitate drawing it three times in different positions, but I still think this looks cool.
Shader Toolbox
This collection of Shader Graph-based effects comes with lots of tools for extending the including shaders and making your own from scratch more easily, including a growing library of powerful subgraphs for getting light information, better Voronoi, sampling textures with antialiasing or gradients, random hashing from and to 1-4D vectors, fog, portal cards, and full lighting models such as a stochastic-sampled PBR stack.
The latest subgraph performs Silhouette Parallax Occlusion Mapping (SPOM), which is all the rage right now. It’s similar to standard POM, but with clipping to eliminate pixels at the edges of a mesh. It improves the shape of the object’s silhouette at the back, hence the name. There’s a full graph preset already set up to use SPOM for sampling the standard PBR texture stack.
Snapshot Shaders 2
This pack is a total overhaul of the original Snapshot Shaders Pro, built from the ground up with URP and Unity 6 in mind. Most of the effects from the original are back (blur, outline, painting, height fog, pixelate, silhouette, retro, and more), but the biggest new feature is the ability to mask each effect per-layer and apply them to only specific objects on-screen, with lots of control over how the mask texture gets filled.
The latest update for this pack was a little while ago, but it brought back the outline effect, plus a new afterimage filter for a laggy feeling, color channel separation effect, and a set of colorblind filters which let you simulate what your game looks like to people who have mutliple kinds of colorblindness. The image above shows a rainbow gradient through a protanopia filter.
Snapshot Shaders Pro
Although I’m not planning on supporting this pack past Unity 6.4, it’s still a great collection of post processing filters which work on all render pipelines. Just drop a volume into your scene, attach a profile containing some effects from the pack, and you’re good to go!
Blur Shaders Pro
I wrote a whole separate post about why and how I made this free and open-source under the MIT licence. Check it out!
Blur Shaders 2
I also have a version of the blur shaders which do support Unity 6.4 onward, and every other major Unity 6 version, for URP! This mini-pack is a subset of Snapshot Shaders 2, and comes with the Gaussian, Box, and Radial blur effects from the original Blur Shaders Pro, plus a Light Streaks effect which helps you do your best impression of a Hollywood director with a penchant for massive anamorphic lens flares.
