Uber Shader

The Uber shader is a general purpose object shader provided with ProPixelizer that can be used for a wide variety of visual styles. The shader itself is authored in ShaderGraph using the ProPixelizer SubTarget, located at ProPixelizer/ShaderGraph/ProPixelizerUberShader.shadergraph. Don't forget that you can copy and modify this shadergraph to tweak the shader to your own requirements!

Note: Previous versions of ProPixelizer featured the PixelizedWithOutline shader. The Uber shader is a drop-in replacement shader, which has all the features of the old shader while adding many more, eg. Forward+ support, Hybrid renderer support, GPU Instancing. It is recommended to upgrade your PixelizedWithOutline materials to the Uber shader.

ProPixelizer Properties 

These properties are present for all ProPixelizer SubTarget materials, and control aspects of the cel shading and pixelisation.

Appearance:

• Use Color Grading: when enabled, the material applies the given Palette look-up-table, which allows you to apply color palettes and dithering to your object. The Palette texture property is a texture look-up table (LUT) used for the color grading. A number of LUTs to emulate well-known devices (eg NES, PAL, GameBoy) are shipped with ProPixelizer, and ProPixelizer provides tools to create your own. The LUT can also include color dither patterns as demonstrated here.
• Use Dithering: toggles whether partial alpha (in the range 0 to 1) should be ignored or drawn as dithered transparency.

Lighting:

• Lighting Ramp: a texture ramp used for cell shading, which helps give a pixel-art aesthetic. When rendering the object, the value of the lit HSV color is used as a coordinate to sample the lighting ramp.
• Lighting Ramp Range: controls the scaling of the lighting ramp bands against your scene illumination. The default value of 1 is good for most cases. If your scene is very dark, you may wish to use a lower number here to focus the cel shading bands on a smaller range of lighting values. Likewise, if your scene lighting saturates the cel shading quickly, you can use a higher number.
• Shadow Tint: Tints the shadow color. By default the tint is off (alpha=0); to enable it, use a color with non-zero alpha.
• Ambient Light: fine control over ambient lighting conditions. The Constant Weight slider can be used to adjust between only using scene ambient light (0), which uses spherical harmonics, and only using the Constant Color (1). Some hand-drawn pixel art styles implicitly assume a fixed constant ambient light, so this option provides an ability to fine tune between those styles and 3D pixel art where ambient light can be included in the object shading.

Pixelization

• Pixel size: Controls the size of one 'macropixel' when Use Pixel Expansion is enabled (see more information here).

Outline

• ID: A unique integer in the range (0, 255). Outlines are drawn when pixels have an ID different to those around them. If two objects should have outlines when they meet, give them different IDs (eg, two enemies). If they should not have outlines (eg, a character and their equipment), give them the same ID.

Surface Inputs 

These closely match similar properties from the URP Lit shader.

• Albedo texture and Color: define the base color of the model before lighting calculations, and default to white if unassigned. The alpha channel of the Albedo texture is used for alpha clipping.

• Normal Map: an optional normal map to add shading detail to the model. In general, I find that cel shading in pixel art tends to work best without normal maps and using smooth shading on models, but there are some situations (eg. scenery) where normal maps can be useful.

• Emission texture and Emission Color: provide unlit colors for your material. Think laser beams, red eyes on skeletons, etc - anything you want to be bright even when in darkness. The color is an HDR property to support bloom post processing.

• DiffuseVertexColorWeight and EmissiveVertexColorWeight: these sliders control whether any vertex colors in the mesh should be used to additionally tint the lit and unlit colors of the mesh. Unity's shuriken particle system uses vertex color for 'per particle' coloring. Some Synty models have black vertex colors on some mesh areas.

• Alpha Clip Threshold: the minimum alpha value of the Albedo and Color required to draw parts of the mesh.

• Highlights / Specular Color and Specular Map: these determine how specular highlights are calculated when using the Specular workflow.

• Highlights / Metallic Map and Metallic: these determine how highlights are calculated when using the Metallic workflow.

• Smoothness: Controls highlight size and intensity in both workflows. Smoother materials have brighter, sharper highlights. Depending on the workflow, this value is further multiplied by either the Metallic Map or the Specular Map alpha channels to localise highlights.

Note: if you want a hand-drawn pixel art look, I recommend using specular workflow, black specular color, and smoothness=0.

Lines, for more information on available outline types see the outline section.

• Outline Color: the color to use for the silhouette outline, with outline strength controlled by the alpha the alpha value; alpha values of 0 can be used for invisible outlines, 1.0 can be used for block color, and fractions to blend with the unoutlined color.
• Edge Highlight Color: lightens or darken edges detected by inspection of scene normals. Requires that 'Use Normals For Edge Detection' is enabled on the Render Feature. Color values less than 0.5 will darken edges, color values above 0.5 will lighten edges, and values of 0.5 will make no difference.
• Edge Bevel Weight: Controls the strength of edge bevelling, which changes the mesh normals along detected edges to enable light-reactive edges.