Autodesk Interactive Shader in 2018

Unity Engine
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I have just upgraded to a 2018.3.0f2 and all the Standard Metallic Roughness have changed to “Autodesk Interactive”.

This give me major concerns about where Unity is going:

  • Autodesk has a notorious history of buying up all 3D modelling systems to try to push everyone to Max and somewhat Maya. Which will be a high impact on Blender usage.
  • Why change the standard shaders to become a specific external company shader? This has a high impact on my pipeline which relies on the replaced shader (All of my materials are based on specific properties and execution of that shader system).
  • There seems to be no value proposition why this has occurred, which now worries me about committing further projects to Unity. I have a number of defence projects using Unity and this sort move cannot be supported due to defence procurement requirements. You are effectively adding Autodesk to our company sign-off list which complicates things highly.

I’ll be using some suggestions from the post below to revert back to the original shaders so we can continue proper support.

But I think Unity needs to explain this major change - if it were an fx shader, it would not be such an issue, but these are standard shaders and will have a high impact on everyone.

The new release stated this change was support fort FBX, however my obj and other file types are also being turned into Autodesk Interactive materials. This is the type of update that will push us to drop support for the use of Unity.

Could Unity please explain this changeover in better detail, because the move feels move like another Autodesk domination move than a good reason to replace core standard materials.

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Well from what I have heard, my understanding is that Unity and Autodesk have been working together a little bit to make it so that you can go back and forth between the two software. So when you make a change in Max, it will automatically update in unity and vice versa. Which is actually pretty sweet and useful for world building.

Basically Unity and Autodesk are just adding some cool new tools for that pipeline and has nothing to do with Autodesk trying to buy up other companies

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First of all, this is not really any major change. This mainly happens to certain types of materials, (specular) not all the materials. Some materials are actually better being imported as Autodesk Materials. It doesn’t affect anything in a negative way. Well, except the triggering of certain people if that counts.

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It seems like “Metal/Rough” is replaced by just “Standard” and Spec/Gloss is now “Standard(Specular Setup)” and Autodesk Interactive is new and didnt actually replace anything