Unity shaders and effects
Builds Unity shaders and effects from clear material, texture and rendering assumptions. Diagnoses depth, transparency and performance problems while preserving the effect's gameplay purpose.
unity-shader-vfx
Agents using this skill
When is it useful?
Use it when shaders, transparency or particles render incorrectly or consume more resources than their visual role justifies.
What does it help you do?
- Defines texture channels, coordinate spaces and color semantics.
- Checks transparency, depth, sorting and supported pipeline passes.
- Bounds shader variants and measures actual effect and batching costs.
Try asking this
Create a Unity shield effect that remains readable around overlapping characters. Define texture channels and coordinate spaces, then test depth, sorting and supported passes in the active pipeline. Compare the same combat scene on the target device; reduce costly transparency without hiding attack warnings behind arbitrary render-order changes.
Detailed documentation
Read the skill’s original instructions, examples and checks in their authored language.
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Shaders, Materials and VFX
Compatibility first
Identify Unity and package versions, active render pipeline/renderer, graphics API and target GPU capabilities. Check the relevant feature support in the installed documentation. Shader Graph node availability and VFX Graph support are version/pipeline/platform dependent; do not assume compute support or compatibility with a 2D renderer.
Material and shader contracts
- Specify texture channels, sRGB versus data import, normal-map interpretation, UV/coordinate spaces, precision and time units. Transform positions, directions and normals with the correct semantics.
- Choose opaque, clipped or transparent rendering intentionally. Check depth write/test, sorting, culling, shadows, lighting and post-processing interactions. Avoid solving a sorting issue through unexplained queue offsets.
- Use supported pipeline includes/passes for HLSL. Keep custom graph functions compatible with their declared precision and target; check actual shader compilation rather than inventing graph node IDs or editing graph serialization blindly.
- Keep keywords and variants bounded. Verify instancing/SRP Batcher behavior with the actual material setup; fewer materials or use of a property block is not by itself proof of better batching.
Effects and budgets
Define spawn/lifetime, world versus local simulation, bounds, culling, pooling/reset and events. An effect that disappears at a camera angle may have incorrect bounds rather than incorrect emission. Check particle count, fill rate/overdraw, texture sampling, lighting and compute cost. Offer a deliberate lower-cost quality tier where needed.
Use representative lighting, animation, camera distance and overlapping effects. Verify compilation, visual output and a target-player capture/profiling trace when available. Report missing platform evidence precisely.
References: installed Shader Graph, VFX Graph and the project's pipeline documentation. Use Catlike Coding and Ben Cloward to understand rendering fundamentals, adapting older examples to the current project.
Included files 1
SKILL.md