Debugging shaders with Visual Studio from Unity Editor

[goo876]

I have followed the steps outlined in the Unity docs:

Unity - Manual: Debugging shaders using Visual Studio

As well as had a look on the tutorial from this forum:

Debugging shaders in Visual Studio

I noticed this page in the docs: This would be the first time ever that you can step through a Unity shader but it went largely under the radar. No announcement, no blog, no nothing. Does anyone have experience with this?

However, these techniques don’t seem to work directly from the Unity Editor. When I capture a frame from inside Visual Studio, it’s actually the GUI that is captured, with the current rendered scene blitted on.

Thus, from the “Pixel History” pane, I cannot replay one of my shaders, because only the shaders that copy the rendered scene onto the GUI are visible. My original shaders are visible in the “Event List” pane (Camera.Render->Drawing->Render.OpaqueGeometry->RenderForwardOpaque.Render->RenderForward.RenderLoopJob), but I cannot ‘debug’ them like the shaders inside the pixel history pane.

Is there a way of capturing the actual rendered scene, and not the resulting texture blitted onto the GUI?

[goo876]

I was literally one click away from the solution: you need to click on the object under Camera.Render…

A screenshot:

With that draw call selected, you will see the actual rendering in the render target pane, and can debug the shaders in the pixel history pane.

[sim_o]

In the documentation they say “In the Command field, replace $(TargetPath) with the path to the Unity Editor or Windows Standalone (for example, C:\MyApp\MyApp.exe)”. (Unity - Manual: Debugging shaders using Visual Studio)
Unfortunately i don’t get which path exactly is necessary here to debug within my Unity scene, since I don’t want to build my scene every time I want to debug the shader. Can someone help me here?