Overview
What the asset is made of, and how it differs from the other All In 1 shaders. Two minutes here will save you looking for things that do not exist.
It is a node library, not a shader
Section titled “It is a node library, not a shader”The other All In 1 assets give you a finished uber shader with a custom Material Inspector. This one gives you the effects as building blocks for your own shader.
That means there is:
- No shader to assign. You build the shader, in Shader Graph or Amplify Shader Editor.
- No custom Material Inspector. Your material shows the properties you chose to expose, see Animating and Scripting.
- No component to add to a GameObject, and nothing running at runtime.
- No keywords to manage, and no shader variant budget to run out of.
What you get instead is full control over the order effects are applied in, what feeds what, and what ends up in the final shader. Nothing you don’t wire is compiled.
What ships
Section titled “What ships”| Folder | What is in it |
|---|---|
Shaders/ | The HLSL library, where the effects actually live. Both editors call into the same functions |
Editor/Nodes/SG/ | 75 Shader Graph subgraphs, sorted into the categories you see in the search menu |
Editor/Nodes/ASE/ | The Amplify Shader Editor nodes. They compile only when Amplify is in the project |
ASE Compatibility Packages/ | Two packages, Built-In and URP, holding the ASE templates and the Amplify demo |
Demo/ | Two scenes and 32 graphs, see Demo Scenes and Graphs |
DefaultTextures/ | The default noise texture the distortion effects fall back to |
Editor/Scripts/ | The Asset Window and its texture tools |
Plus Documentation.pdf and Readme and Licenses.txt in the asset root.
The same effects, in both editors
Section titled “The same effects, in both editors”The library is shipped twice, once as Shader Graph subgraphs and once as Amplify nodes, over one shared set of HLSL functions. They are close to identical, and the few places they differ (a node named differently, three nodes that exist on only one side) are listed per node in the Effects Breakdown.
You only need one of the two. Shader Graph is included with Unity. Amplify Shader Editor is a separate asset, and the All In 1 nodes for it appear automatically once it is installed.
The effects are the ones you already know
Section titled “The effects are the ones you already know”The catalogue is the same one the All In 1 Sprite Shader, 3D Shader and VFX Toolkit ship inside their uber shaders: the dissolves, the rim, the hologram, the matcaps, the UV distortions, the vertex effects. If you have used any of those assets you already know what most of these nodes do, and the difference is that here you decide where in the chain they sit.
The HLSL is yours to read
Section titled “The HLSL is yours to read”The effects are plain .hlsl files, not a compiled blob. If you want to know exactly what
a node does, open the file. If you want to change one, you can, and every graph using that
node picks the change up. Keep a copy of the original if you do, because reimporting the
asset restores it.
Before you start
Section titled “Before you start”- Know your way around Shader Graph or Amplify at a basic level. The Start Here page links Unity’s own tutorial.
- Check Setup and Render Pipelines if you are on HDRP or you plan to switch pipelines, since that is the one place where the two editors are not equally supported.
- Open a demo graph before building your first shader. It is a faster read than any page here.