Hooking Into the Standard Shader

Abstract

When you create a surface or Unlit shader, it doesn't automatically take advantage of all the features of the Unity rendering system. You could reimplement them, but that would take a lot of work. Fortunately, it's possible to obtain that functionality by hacking your BRDF implementation into the Standard shader infrastructure. You can write your shader so it automatically uses Unity's Standard shader functionality. That's what we're going to do in this chapter, but keep in mind that there are no guarantees that the way to hook into these subsystems will stay the same in new versions of Unity.