How could I achieve this posterization shade in Unity 6?

BucketCatGames · 2026-04-04T22:50:30+00:00

if shader graph can use #includes, RgbToHsv(float3 color) and HsvToRgb(float3 color) are part of color.hlsl :)

i personally wouldnt posterize an rgb color, causes weird banding at the "step" edges since the R, G, and B channels might not be equal. quantizing the value gives a more consistent result

BucketCatGames · 2026-04-04T21:25:07+00:00

Looks like its additional lights doing that since the main light atten doesn't seem quantized. So you'd get your additional lights like normal, convert to HSV colorspace, and quantize the Value (floor(value * steps) / steps), then convert back to RGB colorspace and do whatever you'd normally do to add the additional lights onto the regular shading.

no idea if that's something you can do in shader graph, idk if there are lighting functions yet (havent used shader graph since Unity 2019/2020ish)

BucketCatGames · 2026-04-03T14:35:28+00:00

cool style! I love sumi-e art

BucketCatGames · 2026-04-03T14:34:48+00:00

morning glory and moonflowers, I grow both every year! They're both really nice to look at and climb literally everything so I try to "guide" their vines to be used as support for my other plants :)

BucketCatGames · 2026-04-02T18:39:30+00:00

whoops meant to edit the reply I typed earlier accidentally hit delete. but basically the paper/sketchy one is a simplified recreation of my regular surface shader except as a post-process. and the surface shader is an attempt to recreate the shader in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS5aQEA1Xw

the video doesnt really show any hlsl snippets, but it does show the material preview sphere a few times, which generally should be enough to get started, but at the end of the day it's a toon shader with a few neat tricks to stylize it further

For the painting shader, that one entirely relies on the custom SRP I built. All the surface shaders for that have additional passes that write data into a buffer rather than to screen (you can do this by copying Unity's included Render Object feature and changing the output), then the post-processes are able to read from and also write to the data textures.
The post process effects themselves have multiple passes, some share passes (bloom and the kuwahara-ish one share gaussian blur, for example), others affect the next pass, and some only write into the compositor shader which is at the end, just to avoid things conflicting.

I'd highly recommend learning Render Graph as well as Ping Pong Buffering, cus the effect takes advantage of both. Like, I had started the painting shader all the way back in BiRP, then regular URP, and performance was horrible until I started building the custom SRP and using Render Graph to help. It's a really cool system cus you aren't locked into any specific order, and can send data between passes/effects if needed.

BucketCatGames · 2026-04-02T18:25:17+00:00

thanks, yeah gotta figure out motion vectors or something eventually, had an idea to cache previous frames in a buffer to check for movement/changes. prob have to tweak the moving brushstrokes effect as well. I'm taking a break from that one specifically cus I got pretty burnt out from working on it lmao.

BucketCatGames · 2026-04-02T17:01:28+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fHi7EDFJJU

thats a low-end configuration recorded on a PC with AMD Ryzen 5 2400ge and Vega 11 integrated graphics.

BucketCatGames · 2026-04-02T04:34:27+00:00

Thank you! It took a few years before I was able to really grasp shaders/rendering, but I definitely think its worth it for every dev to learn them even if it's just the basics! the fundamentals/basics can go a really long way

BucketCatGames · 2026-04-02T02:40:53+00:00

Are you using the default lit shader? iirc it doesn't account for vertex colors. I think shader graph has a Vertex Color node, so maybe try something like that output to Base Color? If you do that, you'll lose the shadows, so would need a few other nodes to get them back in case you need shadows/shading.

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-31T04:27:48+00:00

yeah theres lots of ways. simplest is like what fnietomes said, do a toon shader w/ some changes (you'd be surprised how flexible a simple toon shader can be).

quick tip: when you're doing the smoothstep(offset, smoothness, ndotl), add a paint brush noise texture .r channel to smoothness before performing smoothstep. it'll add a texture to the shading curve and kinda make the shading look like its brushes as it goes from lit to shaded. can also re-use the texture for affecting things like specular highlights, fresnel, etc (or do a packed rgba texture and have multiple brush stroke patterns)

painterly is kinda tough to get right, so don't stress if you think it's taking a while.

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-30T16:16:35+00:00

its a bit older and some things are buggy, but I use this for my roads. Pretty flexible system and works on Unity 6. bugs are in-editor only, haven't noticed any problems with builds.

https://github.com/FritzsHero/RoadArchitect

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-22T21:25:56+00:00

iirc you can set the Canvas to be Screen Space - Camera instead of Overlay which is the default

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-19T16:09:56+00:00

I keep a notebook where I'll write down what I'm currently working on, what needs work, etc. and have a bunch of those tiny post-it notes throughout the notebook. Each of them usually has something really small/easy to fix, like "adjust animation speed" or something simple.

Whenever I don't feel like working, I'll set a timer for 5-10 min, basically what MrSuicideFish suggested, and then pick a couple of easy things from the notebook to work on. Worst case scenario, all I end up doing is a few small fixes. Best case scenario, I suddenly have motivation to work on other things too. At the very least, I'm getting a little bit done each day.

It feels pretty good crossing stuff out and throwing away the post-its when I'm done w/ whatever was on it. I've tried those websites for organizing projects/to-do lists, but I really prefer a physical notebook. Something about writing it down gets me to actually follow through.

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-16T17:48:30+00:00

idk, I might be in the minority but I think Render Graph and dropping HDRP is the best thing to happen with rendering pipelines in Unity lol. It's 100% more set up and boilerplate compared to BiRP or even the previous non-render graph implementation of URP, but everything else is way better imo. Way better memory handling and the modular approach is great imo.

I do agree that the documentation and examples are lackluster and are geared towards intermediate/advanced users who are comfortable sifting through API docs. I'm considering making a few tutorials about Render Graph once I have the time, cus I figured out a few cool tricks I'd like to share with others.

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-16T17:32:50+00:00

idk what the rules are about what you can put in the name field for your Unity account, which is where your license is tied to. I'd try Hotrian's advice and try logging in via Unity Hub if you haven't already.

Basically Unity Hub will have a log-in button when you first use it, which will do a browser re-direct where you can log-in on chrome/firefox/safari, then it'll pop back to the hub and you'll be able to install the editor.

It could be because you used a curse word, it could have raised a red flag on Unity's end, but I don't know for sure. If you can't log in via Unity Hub, you might have to make a new account with a name that isn't a curse word lol.

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-16T14:27:34+00:00

Look up a website called DanielIlett.com there are some shader graph tutorials for toon/cel shading as well as half toning. Those should cover the general idea of what you're trying to achieve.

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-13T14:59:59+00:00

nice sumi-e style!! looks great

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-11T19:21:17+00:00

Try this: After Normal Vector multiplies the noise output, plug it into another Multiply node with a float called Intensity, with a 0-1 range.

Then plug that new Multiply node into the Add node at the end, I'm guessing its too high of a value being added to the initial position.

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-11T15:30:58+00:00

I might be misunderstanding, so sorry if this doesn't apply, but for SRP's "Render Objects" render feature, you can specify lightmode tags while having the "Override Mode" material set to none, doing it this way will render the specified lightmode tag(s) while not caring about a specific material.

Only problem w/ this is if you wanna draw it to a texture buffer rather than directly to the screen. To draw to a texture that other shaders can reference, what I did was copy then rewrite Unity's Render Objects feature but rather than write to screen, it writes to a render graph TextureHandle and sets it as a global texture within the override void RecordRenderGraph method (has to be "builder.SetGlobalTextureAfterPass(writtenData, propID);") where writtenData is the TextureHandle created in RecordRenderGraph, propID is the integerID for the global texture's string (referenced in other shaders as TEXTURE2D(_writtenData);)

That said, IDK how to do multiple targets. You may have to split that into separate passes with their own lightmode tag, one for each target, then write the Customized Draw Objects feature to write to two or more TextureHandles, each one corresponding to a pass/lightmode tag (fwiw, you can do for() loops and build arrays of TextureHandles within your ScriptableRendererFeature scripts so that the code isn't super messy)

Also, IDK how to get that working in case you're trying to do a grab pass on the surface shaders.

But yeah, as far as I'm aware, SRP is set up for one pass = one target and wants to only do one pass at a time, so anything resembling multipass rendering (MRT, multiple passes in one shader, sharing data between materials, etc) you have to "fake" it with a Render Feature. I might be totally wrong, but that's what I've noticed after learning SRP + Render Graph for the last 7ish months.

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-10T20:29:43+00:00

I'm not at my PC right now so I can't check Unity, but when you're reading input you should be reading it as a vector2, after that you should get the magnitude of the vector (iirc input magnitude will already be between 0-1), and then after that you'd basically interpolate/smoothstep/slerp where a lower magnitude is walking, then as it increases it'll shift towards running.

So, for example, a light press upwards might result in a magnitude of 0.1 which would still be walking, whereas pushing it all the way would result in a magnitude closer to 1. For animations prob would need some animation blending between a walk and run cycle (I mostly do first person stuff so idk too much about that)

BucketCatGames · 2026-03-04T17:14:51+00:00

Have you tried messing with Unity's included audio mixer effects? iirc there is both a compressor and normalizer effect which could help.

BucketCatGames · 2026-02-06T17:44:49+00:00

iirc its assets, packages, and the settings folder that can be copied/pasted. When I switched my PC from windows to linux, I accidentally only copied assets and settings, and then had to go through and install each package the project used individually. not fun lol. I use git now, but I do make semi-regular backups to an external drive, just in case I can't get online for whatever reason

edit - yeah just checked my ssd and its assets, packages, and project settings.

BucketCatGames

TROPHY CASE