I can't really understand diffrent shaders and materials and their use cases. any suggestions on how to learn about them?

Questions & Answers
1

hi I’m not even sure if it’s the right place for this question. but didn’t know where else to look for an answer. can someone help me understand

  • how shaders and materials work?
  • why some shaders don’t work with urp and hdrp?
  • what is the shader graph and do I really need it?(we create the 3d stuff in 3d’s max)
  • when creating the 3d stuff in blender or 3d’s max do we need to do anything for unity shaders to support them?
2

this is a low level explanation, just for you to understand. I will use 3d max and vray as an example: a shader could be equivalent to what we call material in 3dmax, Materials - V-Ray for 3ds Max - Chaos Help so we have the “shader” VRayMtl and the “shader” VRayGLSLMtl (they are not shaders its just for the explanation). You dont need to understand how this materials work, just know they have different settings to get different results. When we drag and drop to the material editor the VrayMtl and we create an instance of the VRayMtl we can change the settings of the material that we will use in the 3d model, that instance of the VRatMtl is what we call in unity material, is the instance of the shader, that we can change its settings to for example, change colors.

Similar to how Unity doesnt support Vray materials, urp and hdrp dont support all the shaders.

Shader graph is a tool that lets you create complex shaders without programming. depending on your skill level experience and expected result, you will be able to use unity default shaders, or find tutorials to achieve your desired result in youtube (both coping the shader code or using shader graph)

no, you dont be able to do anything special to your models to work in unity

3

[187513-screenshot-450.png|187513]

[187514-screenshot-449.png|187514]

one more question: you said we don’t need to do anything on our models to work in unity.

I downloaded this character from mixamo.com and starangely some parts of the character become
see-through sometimes. (for example the shoulder armor in the second picture)
do you have any idea what’s causing the problem and how it can be fixed?