(Another) Serious Sprite Renderer issue with animators in Unity 6

[dean-cgs]

There is a serious issue with Sprite Renderers in Unity 6 where having an animator that contains an animation clip that modifies material properties breaks the Sprite Renderer. It causes the Sprite Renderer to show incorrect shapes depending on the camera angle/position.

I have reported this as a bug via the Editor as IN-92681

See this Github project for more information, it’s easily reproducible:

GitHub - DeanIsseyegh/unity-6-sprite-render-anim-issue: Very basic project showcase a bug in Unity where...

Note that the Animator simply needs to contain an animation clip that modifies material properties, it doesn’t even need to be actively playing it.

Destroying the Animator on the Sprite Renderer game object “fixes” the problem.

A couple months ago I previously reported this bug which was fixed in version 6000.0.32: Serious issue with Sprite Renderer and animations that update material properties on them

Yesterday, I reported this bug related to Mesh Renderers, which feels similar to this bug:

Mesh Renderers become invisible when animating material properties

If you attach any sprite-based shader material to a Mesh Renderer, e.g. A material that uses the “Sprite-Lit-Default” shader, and then try to animate any material property on it, the whole Mesh Renderer suddenly goes invisible. The shader will work as expected when there is no animator on the Mesh Renderer Game Object and be visible, but just suddenly go invisible as soon as an animation clip that touches any shader properties is used. I created a project here to show the problem: unity-6-mesh…

Let me know if there are any workarounds or an ETA for this fix in the meantime, or if I can do any other debugging to help understand the problem. This is unfortunately blocking us from upgrading to Unity 6, and last time the fix for this similar issue linked above took 2 months to fix and be released in the next LTS version.

[Venkify]

Thanks for the bug report. I believe this has already been fixed as part of bugfix of a similar issue. Please note the related issue here:

https://unity3d.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/2/IN-92208

Did a quick test with the fix:

Will post an update when its publicly available.

[dean-cgs]

Thanks for the update Venkify, and for validating the test on the example project I posted!

If there is any rough ETA on when the fix will be released please let me know e.g. Are we talking weeks, or months?

[Venkify]

The fix will be available in the following versions:

6000.1 => 6000.1.0b3
6000.0 => 6000.0.36f1

Thanks.